A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [63]
“I brought this along this time,” he says proudly. “I thought it would be an improvement. For you.”
“Thanks – you’re very thoughtful.” I try to make my tone like his, bantering, but mine emerges too serious.
“That’s me,” he says. “Gallant to a fault. Well, I thought – you know – it’s okay for me, but I assume you would just as soon not have a flank full of thistles.”
I want to yield to his laughter, to have everything happening on his terms, lightly, not as though it were the beginning of the world. But I can’t. I don’t know how to make it unimportant enough.
“Nick –”
“Mm? That’s right, darling, right here beside me. That’s comfortable. Want a cigarette?”
“Yes, please.”
“Here you are. You’re getting a tan after all, Rachel, on your arms.”
“What do you mean, after all?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I never thought you were out enough in the sun, to change colour. Your skin’s very pale. I thought probably the sun didn’t affect you well, and that you couldn’t take too much of it, or something.”
“I used to be like that, I guess. I don’t actually get burnt, but I suppose I still expect to. When I was a kid, my mother was always after me to wear a sun hat because fair-haired people always burned, she said. I had fair hair then. It’s darkened.”
“I can’t imagine you as a blonde, Rachel.”
“No – I suppose not.”
“Well, don’t sound discouraged. I meant it as a compliment, as a matter of fact.”
His voice sounds vaguely irritated. I’ve misinterpreted something again. Now I can only try to get away, if that’s possible.
“You tan quickly, Nick. In only a few weeks you’ve –”
“That’s right, I do,” he says, peeling off his shirt. “Look – how about that for a tan? I’ve got it in the past week, mainly, working with my shirt off. I say working, but what I actually mean is I have to get the hell out of the house so I mooch around after Jago, getting in his way, until finally he gets fed up and says to me, ‘Nick, how come you are so useless around here? Don’t you remember nothing from when you was a kid?’ And I say – you know, taking some low kind of pleasure from the double negative – ‘That’s right, Jago, I don’t remember nothing.’ And then my mom comes out and yells Lunch, and that’s half a day gone, praise God.”
“You hardly ever talk about her.”
“My mother? Well, it isn’t necessary, I guess.”
“You’re fond of her?”
“Unfashionable as it may be,” he says, slightly sourly, “yes, I am. She’s – oh, you know – solid. Physically and spiritually. She’s not eccentric like my old man. Or if she is, she never lets on. And yet in some ways she is eccentric, I suppose. Or – not so much that, just completely inner-directed. You’d never think it to look at her.”
“How do you mean?”
He’s lying beside me now, and I touch the skin of his shoulder. My fingers explore a little the thicket on his chest; and his nipples which seem to me so strange on a man – what evolutionary freak or chance left them there? He is talking. He wants to talk, right now. For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love. But it’s a man who is supposed to say that.
“She believes in omens,” he is saying, “which she interprets in any way that happens to suit her. She’s got this marvellous belief in her own intuition. Not towards everything – only where her kids are concerned. Something magical, she thinks, given by heaven to mothers like her, the devout, those who are really bound up with their kids. She wouldn’t give you fifty cents for these women who park their kids and go out to work. A spit in the face of God, she thinks. For herself, she knows. She knows what is going on without being told.”
“Is she ever right?”
“Quite often,” he says. “Of course, like any other oracle, the times she goofs on the predictions are forgotten in the wonder of the times she happens to be right. ‘Julie’s husband is no good,’ she says to me. This was years ago. ‘What makes you say that?’ I asked her. ‘I feel it,’ she says. Naturally I laughed. She