She said suddenly a moment later, "These children of ours would be brought up as both anyhow".
"Why?"
"Because, darling", she said patiently, "whether we like it or not, we’re both".
"Oh", said Marc. He grinned, remarking, "I guess that stops me".
"Temporarily", said Erica, carefully putting out her cigarette.
He glanced at her but she said nothing more. At the end of another silence he asked, "What did you mean when you said that you and your father were never going to get back to where you were before?"
"The whole basis of our relationship has gone. When I think of the way Charles and I used to be, it seems to me we were like those characters in cartoon comedies who run of! a cliff and keep on running until they happen to look down and discover that the cliff isn’t there any more, and then start to fall".
With her eyes on a sumac flaming against the dark green of two young pines on the other side of the clearing, she said, "Well, we had a good run for our money, Charles and I. It took us longer than most people to find out that there wasn’t anything underneath us".
He was staring straight ahead of him with the rather bleak look which she had seen in his face at odd times ever since she had known him, only lately it had become much more frequent. It made him older, not younger like his smile.
"My God, Eric, what a mess I’ve made of your life! I’ve taken you away from your family-I’ve even taken you away from your job".
"Oh, damn my job", said Erica. "I was sick to death of it anyway".
"What are you going to do?"
"Join the Army, just like you".
"Oh", said Marc again. She knew that he still disliked the idea of women in uniform, and that he must dislike the idea of Erica in uniform still more, but all he said was, "Are you sure you want to?"
She nodded. He was silent a moment and then he said, "They’ll cut your hair, darling".
"I know", she said, amused, because she had been so certain that Marc’s first comment would be something about her hair.
"Is there any chance of your getting overseas?"
"I’m late for that. They take you in the order of enlistment…".
"When are you going to enlist?"
He was due to leave for Halifax at seven-thirty on Wednesday night and she said, "Thursday morning".
"Is Miriam joining up too?"
"No, Sylvia is. Miriam’s too busy trying to talk John into believing that she really cares about him".
"I hope she succeeds", said Marc. "Your father has always liked John, hasn’t he?"
A flock of crows flew by, down toward the ragged autumn fields below, and they listened to the cawing as it grew steadily fainter in the distance, looking out over the valley and the mountains which were slowly changing color in the afternoon light.
She knew that Marc was still thinking about her mother and father, although all she had told him so far was that there had been a row, and he still had no idea how bad things actually were.
"Eric, if I thought…"
"If you thought what?" she asked after waiting for him to go on.
"If I thought there was going to be someone else-someone like John, someone who’d mean as much to you as I do…" He stopped again, his face very strained, and then made himself finish the sentence. "…I guess I’d call quits for good and never see you again. Life isn’t a bed of roses anyhow, without adding a lot of extra complications that you can so easily avoid…".
"…by not marrying you", said Erica.
"Yes", he said hopelessly. "Just by not marrying me".
She was beginning to realize that nothing she could say would make any real difference now, but for the sake of that one chance, that miracle which might still happen sometime between now and tomorrow night, she answered, "Maybe there will be someone else, I don’t know. All I do know is that it will be different, and I won’t feel like this again. When I’m with you, I feel-I feel safe. I feel safe all the way through. I know that whatever you do, you’ll never hurt me, and all the little things that are so deep down and so vulnerable-they’re safe too".
She smiled at him, although her throat and eyes were too dry and it was hard to talk. "I know lots of people who are comfortably married, with nothing much to worry about, no really serious problems of their own, but they sit on opposite sides of the living-room at night and they might just as well be sitting on opposite sides of the Atlantic, because they’re not two halves of a whole, they’re two separate wholes, two separate individuals who give you the feeling that they got married by accident and might just as well have married-someone else", she said, looking at him. "They’re not fundamentally interested in each other-they’re interested in other things, in their children, their house, their friends, and what keeps them together comes from outside, rather than from any inner necessity".
She broke off and then said with difficulty, "That’s something I’ve always been afraid of. What matters most to me is not being lonely, and what scares me most is not being poor, or ending up on the wrong side of the local prejudices or even the local conventions, but ending up…"
"…on the wrong side of the living-room".
She said, her eyes searching his face, "I wish you’d believe me".
"I do believe you, darling".
"No", said Erica, "not quite".
After that there was another silence, and at last he said, "I keep thinking of all the people who’ve started feeling the way you do now, and then realized when it was too late, that one person couldn’t make up for so many disadvantages-no matter how hard that person tried, no matter how hard they both tried-particularly when it was only that one person who stood in the way".
She said again, "It depends on what matters most to you", wondering how often, just how many times she had said that before, first to her father and then to Marc. Ultimately every argument involving the ability of any individual to make a valid choice comes down to that one question of relative values. And your relative values depend on your experience of living, which in turn forms the basis for your outlook on life as a whole.
She herself belonged to the generation born during the last war, who were still too young to be greatly influenced either by the disillusionment of the immediate post-war years or by the blind optimism of the late twenties. She had come to full consciousness when political security had begun to go and economic security had already gone. Change was to Erica the only permanent condition of life; she had no idea what tomorrow would be like, except that it would be different from yesterday and today. The more you could learn to do without, the safer you were; security consisted in traveling light and staking your happiness on a few fundamentals of a non-material nature which could not, or at least were unlikely to be taken away from you.
Looking back now, she realized that long before Marc, this point of view had shaped her existence; among other things, it had prevented her from marrying any one of several different men who had been in love with her in the past. She had recognized the fact that any individual looks quite different when he is viewed in terms of a specific and familiar social and economic structure from when he is viewed as an isolated human being, solely in terms of his own inherent qualities. You might be reasonably happy living with someone in Montreal and with that social and economic structure to absorb the inevitable stresses and strains, only to find that life on a desert island with that same person was quite unendurable.
For Erica, the desert island was always more or less imminent, or if not imminent, it was at least a possibility which loomed too large to be ignored. Marc was the only man she had known with whom she was willing to risk it, and so far as her own values were concerned, what she would be giving up in marrying him was a handful of social, and if the worst came to the worst, economic non-essentials which were not important to her and in whose continued existence she did not put much faith in any case. She had been born in 1914, so that the first twenty-eight years of her life had begun with one world war and ended with another; she had earned her living on a newspaper for the past six years, and she knew beyond doubt that what mattered most to Erica Drake was Marc Reiser.