Earth and High Heaven (8 page)

“I see,” said Erica. “With a program as revolutionary as that, you'll probably be a sensation.”

Some time later, when she was halfway through her lobster, which had turned out to be excellent, she said suddenly, “You're on your way up now, aren't you, René?”

He shrugged and said, “With luck.”

“You've always had luck.”

“What's that?” he demanded, turning to the waiter.

“The salad dressing, monsieur.”

“No, no, no!” said René, closing his eyes. “I told you I wanted to mix the dressing myself. You haven't put any on the salad, have you?”

“Oh no, monsieur.” The waiter scrutinized the dressing, remarking at last, “Owing to the war, there is no olive oil. That is what makes it look like that.”

“It isn't the way it looks, it's the way it tastes. Bring me some oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and mustard.”

“You forgot the sugar,” said Erica.

“Oh, yes, and some sugar. What was I saying when we were interrupted by the outrage?” he asked Erica. “Luck ... that was it.” He paused, his eyes running over her and said, smiling faintly, “Who knows? My luck may be running out.”

“You've always got everything you've ever wanted.”

“Perhaps I've been careful never to want anything I couldn't have — that is, up till now.”

“If, now, you've decided that you want to be Premier of Canada, then you'll be Premier of Canada,” said Erica.

René's French dressing was even better than usual, and she had two helpings of salad.

“You are now about to be able to choose your dessert,” said René, signaling the waiter.

“I'm sorry I was nasty about the lobster. It was very good.”

He bowed to her across the table, and as she looked undecidedly at the tray of French pastries which the waiter was holding for her inspection, he said without thinking, “Take the one with the strawberries,” and then said apologetically, “I didn't mean it, petite. Take whatever you like, the one with the strawberries is probably uneatable.”

The waiter looked offended and said, “Pardon, monsieur, but
everything
at Charcot's is eatable.”

“Everything but your French dressing.”

“Look,” said Erica, falling back in her chair and addressing the waiter, “there's really no reason why I should choose my own dessert either. Which pastry would you like me to eat?”

“The one with the strawberries, madame,” said the waiter.

“
Mille-feuilles
,” said René when the tray came round to his side of the table. “And bring the coffee right away, please. How is your pastry?”

“It's all right so far. If I should wake up with violent pains in the middle of the night, I'll telephone you and you can sue the waiter. How's Madeleine, by the way?”

“I don't know, I haven't been home yet. Haven't you seen her lately?”

“Not since I had dinner with her on Monday night,” said Erica, shoving her chair back a little so that she could cross her legs. “Why? Do you think anything's likely to go wrong?”

“I don't know. I only wish Tony were here.” He pushed his plate away from him and said unhappily, as she had heard him say so often during the past six months, “I'll be glad when it's all over.”

“You haven't told Madeleine what you think about Tony, have you?”

“Of course not,” he said almost angrily. “What do you take me for?”

“I'm sorry.”

“She knows just as well as I do that the R.C.A.F. wanted him to stay here and instruct, that he was pretty old for a pilot anyhow, and that if he hadn't kicked up such a fuss he wouldn't have been sent overseas just when she was starting to have a baby. It's all in your point of view, Eric,” he said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. “I'm not so enthusiastic about women doctors and lawyers and politicians as Tony is, but I wouldn't desert my wife when she was having her first child if I could help it.”

Erica said nothing. The old loyalty to Tony refused to die; she could not discuss him even with her father.

“It isn't just Madeleine,” said René. “It's his whole outlook on life. The war seems to have knocked him right off his base.”

No, thought Erica, there never was a base, even before the war. Anthony had spent his whole life, not just those five years at Drake's, as her father had said, waiting for something exciting to happen. He was clever, and very good-looking, and he had got by all right; you had to know him very well to realize that he had never found himself, and that he had never done anything but mark time.

Erica had no idea why he had fallen so violently in love with Madeleine de Sevigny; as Charles Drake still observed moodily to his wife and daughter on an average of once a week, Anthony and Madeleine didn't seem to have much in common. As for Erica, she had finally lost contact with her brother sometime toward the end of 1940. Until the war broke out they had been unusually close, partly because there were only two years between them, while the other war had created a gap of almost five between Miriam and herself.

She said mildly, in order to get René off the subject, “You never object to your charwoman or your stenographer earning her own living. You only object to women doing jobs you might like to do yourself.”

“Of course,” said René. “Trying to stop other people from doing something they like and you don't is a characteristic of Protestants, not Catholics. Who ever heard of a Catholic W.C.T.U.?”

Several of the tables in the little room were already empty, and there were only two people left at the bar, a sailor sitting with his chin in his hands staring fixedly at a bottle of Cointreau and an Air Force officer lounging with his hands in his pockets, apparently waiting for someone. Erica glanced at her watch. It was twenty past two, which gave her another half hour before she would have to leave to meet Miriam at the station. She wanted to talk to René about Marc, but she did not know how René was going to react; he had an implacable streak, and leaving Marc out of it altogether, he himself had been put in a thoroughly awkward position since it was he who had brought Marc to the house and had attempted to introduce him to her father. Erica did not know how to start; she would have preferred to have René bring up the subject first, but they had been sitting here for almost an hour and he had not once referred to either Marc or the cocktail party, even indirectly.

“May I have a cigarette, please?” she asked absently, with her eyes on the familiar small placard reminding readers, “Acheter des certificats d'epargne de guerre,” which was hanging among the whisky, wine, and brandy advertisements at the back of the bar. Rather an odd place for it, she thought, and then glanced at René to see if he had heard her.

He was looking at her with such an intensity of feeling in his dark eyes that she forgot all about Marc and everything else in the one overwhelming realization that René was in love with her and that his desire was an agony to him, partly because he could not have her and partly because he knew that if by some chance he did, having her would bring so much unhappiness to both of them.

The look in his eyes began to die away and after a while he remarked flippantly, “For once in my life I wish I were an English Canadian ...”

“Why?”

“Then I could take you up Mount Royal in a cariole and kiss you for an hour and feel better, instead of infinitely worse.”

“René ...”

“Don't say anything, petite.”

She relaxed against the back of her chair, feeling rather weak, and remarked at last, “You seem to have a peculiar impression of English Canadians. Also, you're one of the most race-conscious individuals I've ever met ...”

“That's what Marc says,” he interrupted without thinking. He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her, lit one for himself, sighed, and said resignedly, “Well, there's your opening, Eric. You've been looking for one, haven't you?”

“How did you know?”

He beckoned to the waiter, said, “Bring some more coffee, please,” and then asked Erica, “Do you want a brandy?”

“No, thanks.”

“Just one brandy, then.”

“What did you mean this morning when you said you thought I'd better leave Marc alone?” Erica asked him when the waiter had gone.

He shoved his chair around so that he could sit with his legs crossed and still lean with one elbow on the table, and said, “Marc has enough trouble without your adding to it.”

“Why would I add to it?”

“Ask your father.” Looking away from her toward the wall he said unwillingly, “Marc liked you just as much as you liked him, I realized that as soon as I saw you together. If he hasn't called you, it's quite deliberate, Eric.”

With her eyes following the line of his slightly aquiline profile she asked with difficulty, “René, did he say anything about Charles?”

He turned sharply and asked with a sudden edge on his voice, “You don't really imagine he would, do you?”

“I don't know.” She looked down at her hands and said wretchedly, “I suppose it depends on how well you know each other.”

There was a pause. He said at last, “The whole thing was my fault,” with a curious bitterness in his voice.

“Why?”

“Because I let Marc in for it.” His expression changed slightly but he went on looking at the wall. “I'm not usually so naïve as that.”

“What's being naïve got to do with it?”

“Isn't it rather naïve to imagine that a man with your father's background and tradition really means what he says?”

“Please look at me! I can't go on talking to the side of your face.”

He turned his chair back again and with one hand drumming on the table with a fork, he said, “I've known your father for more than a year, Eric. I know what he thinks about the war, what a violent anti-Nazi he is, how revolted he is by the way the Germans are treating the Jews and the Poles and the Czechs as ‘inferior' races either to be exterminated or intellectually sterilized and reduced to the mental and psychological level of robots. I know what a good democrat he is, and that unlike a lot of his friends, he does not imagine that he can have his cake and eat it — or win the war and hang on to his profits and his taxes.”

“But he really means it.”

“Of course he means it.”

“Well?” she asked, after waiting for him to go on.

He looked at her speculatively and said, “I took him a little too literally, that's all. And that was where I was naïve.”

“René, don't talk like that!”

He said acidly, “Sorry, I'm just a French Canadian. I don't quite grasp these subtle distinctions. You English Canadians are always preaching at us, but it never seems to occur to you that if you'd once make an effort to practice what you preach, your preaching might have a little more effect.”

He took the brandy from the waiter's tray, swallowed it all in one movement, put the empty glass back on the tray and said, “The cheque, please.”

“It's there, monsieur.”

Having glanced at the total René pulled some bills from his pocket and waved the water away with, “Non, non, c'est correct. More coffee, Eric?”

“Yes, please.”

As he was pouring it he said expressionlessly, “So there we were, two representatives of minority groups being entertained by the democratic majority. Don't worry, I know what your father thinks of French Canadians and the Catholic Church.”

“I doubt if he thinks as badly of you as you do of us,” said Erica wearily. She had realized soon after she had met him that arguing abstract problems with René was useless and that she would never be able to alter his prejudices or change his opinions. He never gave her a fair hearing, because although he probably had more respect for her as a rational being than for most of the women he knew, he was incapable of regarding any woman as primarily rational. They were first and foremost simply women, with reason a long way in the rear.

He dropped two lumps of sugar into her cup and she said, “I only wanted one.”

“Don't stir it then.” He raised his eyes to her face and said almost incredulously, “Even people like you don't see how it looks to us.”

“It,” she thought, “it” is the war, English Canadian domination, English Canada's attitude toward Great Britain and the Empire, English Canada's outlook on the world, English Canada's superiority, hypocrisy, and ineffable Protestant self-righteousness.

“If you want to convince us that you really mean what you say about Nazism, and your ‘democratic' ideals, you've got to start at home by smashing the Orange Lodge in Toronto; you've got to stop exploiting French-Canadian labor and let us control our own economic life instead of having you control it for us. And just to make it really impressive, you might take down a few of your ‘Gentiles Only' signs.”

“As a French Canadian you're hardly in a position to criticize us for being anti-Semitic.”

René shrugged. “At least we don't say one thing and do another.”

Erica said nothing. She gathered up her gloves and her purse and her handkerchief, which had fallen on the floor, and getting up, René said, “I'm afraid I just smell another racket. Did you ever read about the last war, Eric, and how we were going to see that every nation got the raw materials it needed, how we were going to continue wartime co-operation after the war, and make a better world? You should. It's very instructive.”

“I don't want to be instructed that way. You're a Catholic, you ought to know that nothing can be accomplished without faith.”

She got up and started toward the door, tired and discouraged for no reason at all, because René was only one person and everyone else she knew had, if not faith, at least a certain amount of hope.

On the pavement outside René put his hand on her arm and asked, “Where are you going?”