A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [60]
“Hello, Jacob,” Calla says. Then, to me, in a quiet aside, as though the bird might hear and take offence, “So-named because he climbs the ladder all the time. He won’t sing. No ear for music. All he does is march up and down that blasted ladder.”
“I wonder why?” I have to say something.
“Search me,” she shrugs. “Maybe the angel at the top can’t be seen by me.”
She whistles and beckons the bird. It remains sitting on the lowest rung, full of disdain or simply not noticing her.
“Dead loss,” Calla says. “I’d have done better with a budgie, like I had before.”
“Why keep it, then?”
“Well, it can’t help moving about from time to time, phlegmatic though it is, and then I can hear it. I’ve got kind of used to it, stupidly enough.”
I want to get away. I don’t want to stay here any longer. Calla listening in the early morning or in the darkness for some sound.
“Calla – Mother’s expecting me home – I must go.”
“Sure,” she says. “Okay, then. Drop in again, eh? When you’ve got the time.”
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
She smiles at me, lightly, politely, as though trying not to notice that I’ve no intention of coming again until some stereotyped conscience forces me to it.
Our tub is a very elderly one, exceptionally deep and long, mounted on claw feet taloned and grasping like a griffin’s, and pebbled on the outside with years of Mother’s enamelling. Despite its size, it is only just long enough for me to stretch out full length.
Once we discussed new plumbing. Mother kept saying she was sick to death of painting this dilapidated old tub and trying to make it look halfway decent, and as for the toilet, it was a disgrace because who had a wooden seat any more? We got as far as deciding on colour – she favoured apricot – and then she decided it wouldn’t be practical because the new tubs in the range we could afford were all short and would have been fine for her but wouldn’t have done for me. I said I didn’t mind paying more for a longer one, but she said no, she was certain even those wouldn’t do, and we might have to have one custom-built. That’s what she said. She was annoyed at me that evening over something else, I suppose. When I said she was exaggerating, she said, “I don’t see any cause to be rude to me, just because I was trying to be practical, dear.” All such words cling to the mind like burrs to hair, and I can never seem to brush them away, as I know I should do.
Yet I remember, too, the words I’ve picked and flung like nettles – “How can we go to the movies this week? You know what Doctor Raven advised. You don’t want to have another attack, do you?” And she looked at me with eyes as wide and shadowed with troublement as though she’d been a child told to fetch something from an unlighted cellar. Only last night I said that, when she whined a little with boredom. It wouldn’t have hurt her to go out, or even if it had, better than waiting within the walls, probably. I wouldn’t go out because I thought he might phone.
Listen, Nick –
I talk to him, when he is not here, and tell him everything I can think of, everything that has ever happened, and how I feel and for a while it seems to me that I am completely known to him, and then I remember I’ve only talked to him like that when I’m alone. He hasn’t heard and doesn’t know.
– The house is not large, but that is all right. They do not need a large house, both of them working and she not able to spend much time in housework. The house is not in a city – very far from that sharpness and coldness. Galloping Mountain, perhaps, with the spruce trees fantastically high and closely set but when you look at night you can see through the black branches a sky warmly black and a white profusion of stars. He loves this place. He half apologizes for loving it – “Crazy, but I’ve always wanted – and maybe it’s a better investment, here, if the