A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [62]
“Mostly other things,” he says reluctantly. “Complexities all around. Goddamn spider webs. Am I the spider or the fly? Philosophical question. Never mind. Look – wild raspberries. Shall we get some?”
The road is banked with bushes on either side, green stinging walls, and when we get out of the car, the smell of oil and engine fades in a moment, leaving the dusty smell of the gravel and the green dusty smell of the leaves.
“The best ones are always hidden. You have to look for them.” He scratches himself on the raspberry thorns. “Bloody hell. My right hand seems to have forgotten its cunning.”
“Nick – he’ll never ask you in so many words to stay, but –”
“How could I?” His voice is aggressive, and I see I’ve picked the wrong time, but I have to go on.
“Well, you might teach here, I suppose.”
My voice, which was intended to be so unstudiedly casual – how has it sounded to him? He smiles, a token smile only.
“Not possible, darling,” he says. “Let’s go, eh?”
The hoarse metallic roar of the car provides some sound to overcome the lack of voices. I cannot say anything, and he will not. What possessed me, to suggest a thing like that? So openly. Haven’t I any pride?
No, I have no pride. None left, not now. This realization renders me all at once calm, inexplicably, and almost free. Have I finished with façades? Whatever happens, let it happen. I won’t deny it.
“It isn’t so much his wanting me to stay,” Nick says suddenly. “It’s the way he goes about it.”
“How do you mean?”
“This apparently accidental way he’s developed. It’s what he calls me that bugs me to some extent.”
“I don’t see –”
“Three times in the last week,” Nick says, “he’s called me Steve.”
“Oh Nick –”
“Yeh, well, you don’t need to sound all that sorrowful on his account,” Nick says angrily. “It’s not some sad slip of the tongue or mind, with him. It’s this fantastic way he has, of creating the world in his own image. He knows perfectly well what’s what. He’s not senile, for God’s sake. It’s this crazy kind of guile he has. He hasn’t thought all this out. He’s never thought out anything in his life, I don’t suppose. It’s just some instinct, maybe, that suggests to him if he can’t persuade me in an indirect way, without demeaning himself to ask openly, then he may be able to shame me into doing what he wants. I’m buggered if I’ll be manipulated like that. Anyway, I’m no actor, and even if I were, that rôle wouldn’t suit me. I’m not going to be taken over by a –”
He breaks off, and when he goes on again his voice has become deliberately callous.
“– a dead man. That’s what he is, let’s face it. After all this time. Not my brother, not anybody’s anything. A dead man.”
“Hasn’t your father ever accepted –?”
“Maybe not,” Nick says. “But he’ll have to, or else – well, that’s up to him. I can’t make it all better. I couldn’t then and I can’t now. I’ve got other things to do. The hell with it. No use in talking. I’m fed up with the whole issue. C’mon, Rachel – here’s the summer house.”
The summer house. The green edge of a brown river, the broken branches that clutter the shallow water, the high grass loosely webbed – a screen anyone could look through, and the road close enough for us or anyone to walk down here, no distance at all, and up from our place, within eye-shot, the sweeping half circle of fields, the barbed wire, and the grain beginning to turn the pale colour of ripeness with the autumn coming on. If only it weren’t so exposed. He claims it isn’t, but it seems so to me. If only we could be inside a house again, a proper house. It was better, there. I was better. Everything was all right, and it was good, and he said God darling that was marvellous, you are really –
A lie. He said I like you, Rachel, and once he said That’s better, darling, you’re getting used to me. I don’t know how it is that I can want him, want him specifically, and yet can’t lose sight of myself and still worry whether I’m doing well, and so don’t. I am fine only in dreams.
On the tall couchgrass, Nick spreads a