* * *
ELAINE STOOD SMOKING by the sink in the kitchen with the window open. Like playing the radio, smoking was forbidden, but Euan had managed to make her so angry this afternoon she didn’t care, or only cared enough to try to fan the smoke through the window with her hand. Marian listened to her with little groans of sympathy and outrage, calculating anxiously whether Elaine was actually offended enough this time to go, and leave her with the dreadful choice between finding a replacement housekeeper or persuading Euan to go into a home. Before Elaine there had been a quick succession of three perfectly pleasant and competent women who had not been able to put up with Euan’s temper and his manner.
Euan had called Elaine a servant again. He had corrected her speech when it was ungrammatical. Also, he objected to her perfume, he said it gave him headaches, although she denied she ever wore any when she came to work. And he insisted on going through all the receipts with her whenever she came back from shopping, even though he had no idea what things cost. Marian thought treacherously of the two hundred pounds. Was it possible Elaine thought herself justified, taking it to make up for all these offenses to her pride? Her face heated apologetically for having dreamed of it.
— Sometimes he comes in here after me, when we’ve been having words about something, Elaine said. I walk out and he follows me; he can’t leave it alone, he comes staggering across the hall without his stick, bellowing at me. “Elaine, Elaine, you’ve been touching my papers again! How many times do I have to tell you they are nothing to do with you? My work must not be sacrificed to this mania for tidiness!”
She imitated Euan rather well, in a surprising deep voice, trembling with outrage, his and her outrage at the same time.
— As if I would ever dare touch his precious papers.
That was Marian’s mother’s phrase exactly: “his precious papers”: contempt and awe, at once, and jealousy. Marian thought of women married into some priestly caste, expressing their resentment against augury.
— As if he hates me, really hates me, Elaine said.
Elaine was in her late forties, petite and blond with plump golden skin whose wrinkles didn’t look like weaknesses but like decisive folds. She had a characteristic settling gesture, where she drew her head back into a double chin while she tapped the ash off her cigarette; she ran the butt under the tap when she had finished and buried it in the bin. She was the kind of woman who would think less of you for washing your whites with your coloreds or letting the inside of your kettle get furred up when there was a perfectly good device to prevent it: Euan’s kitchen was suddenly full of such sensible devices, a splashguard and a meat thermometer, matching oven mitts and apron, a mug tree. The microwave — which had proved invaluable — had been Elaine’s idea.
Marian liked Elaine but rather feared her; she found herself preserving defensively her dignity as a teacher in case Elaine penetrated behind it and caught her out in some careless absentmindedness. Elaine’s son, Mark, was in Marian’s lower sixth A-level history group: that was not a coincidence, it was through Mark that Marian had arranged eighteen months ago for Elaine to work for Euan.
— What was she shouting about? Euan asked later. She’s got an uncontrollable temper.
It should have been funny, the way each of them imagined the other subject to incontinent rages and was so sure of his or her own calm reasonableness. Marian could never be certain what actually went on when the two of them were alone here, what raw indecorous scenes erupted within the walls of this flat laid out for the deep quiet rhythms of the contemplative life. She knew — at least, she had had reported to her — that once Elaine had slapped Euan, not across the face but across the legs, when he stood over her explaining something while she on her hands and knees washed the kitchen floor, and that once when she reached up to tuck in his muffler under his coat collar he had pushed her away so hard she fell and bruised herself against a piece of furniture.
Their conflict was not the whole story. There were plenty of passages of calm between them. He loved her cooking and mopped up her cream sauces and wine gravies greedily, even though he complained they were too rich; neither his wife nor his daughter had ever cooked decently. And she was very ready to adopt that posture of baffled superstitious mistrust toward the mysteries of his work that suited him better in women than interest or adulation. Days and weeks would pass after one of these big blowups where both were abashed and cautious and there was never a squeak out of them.
— Elaine, I’m so sorry, said Marian. Of course if you really want to go, I can’t stop you, I’d even understand, although personally I’ll be devastated; I know I’ll never find anyone else so able to manage him.… I know that although he can be insufferable at least you understand where the frustrations come from.
She was sure that behind her expression of sorely tried forbearance Elaine was not actually thinking over the tragic plight of the brilliant old man but the convenience of the job, the decent pay, her relative independence. Marian would have thought the same in her place.
— You’ll have to tell him, Marian. I won’t be talked to like that, though I may not have your education or your lifestyle. (Where had Marian’s education come into it, she wondered?) But he is very good to Mark. I’d be sorry for the boy to lose out on his visits here.
The mention of Mark was a kind of capitulation.
Mark often came to the flat after school, if Elaine was working late. He was an only child; neither he nor Elaine ever mentioned a father. He used to do his homework on the kitchen table. Then Euan began to take an interest in him, interrogating him, impressed by his intelligence, appalled by his ignorance, taking it upon himself — grumbling but visibly delighted — to fill up the deficiency. Mark was the cleverest pupil Marian had ever taught. Although her school was an inner city comprehensive school and didn’t send many pupils into higher education of any sort, she was encouraging Mark to apply to do history at Cambridge.
When Marian opened the door to the study, the old man was balancing a vinyl record delicately on his thick finger ends with his head on one side, looking across the surface for flaws, blowing off the dust. (He didn’t approve of the cold sound of compact disc.) As a child Marian had loved the intimate felty smell inside the gramophone cabinet she had never been allowed to touch, and her father’s gesture reminded her of that old excitement. The boy smiled around at her from where he sat as he sat in her classes, attentive, obedient, absorbed. Euan was holding forth.
— You know what Dostoevski says? “What is given on earth is not final.” Do you believe that? Of course not. But he says it. “What is given on earth is not final.” Who are we to disagree? And so …
He waved irritatedly with his free hand at Marian to leave him alone.
She listened outside the door. Lucia Popp singing Strauss’s “Last Songs.”
* * *
BEFORE SHE MARRIED, Marian had been writing a PhD thesis on women in the mob in the French Revolution. She had been in Paris in 1968; George Rudé, who was on sabbatical leave from Montreal researching a new book, had agreed to meet her and discuss her ideas. She had sat in the window of a cheap hotel near Saint-Sulpice writing up her notes from the interview with Rudé and listening to the sounds of rioting in the streets that reached her like a kind of mournful weather carried on the air. It was weirdly like eavesdropping on the groans and protests and outrages of lovemaking. (She had had unwillingly to do this through the plasterboard partitions of her room in residence in her last undergraduate year.)