Anyway, Mary found Neanderthal saddle-seats uncomfortable and, because most Neanderthals had shorter lower legs than upper legs, bench-type Barast chairs were a bit too low to the ground for her tastes. So she’d asked Lurt’s carpenter friend to make her a new chair: a frame of knotty pine with generous cushions lashed to its back and seat.
Bandra had gotten home before Mary did that day, and was off in her bedroom. But she emerged just after Mary came in the front door. “Hi, Mare,” she said. “I thought I smelled you.”
Mary smiled wanly. She was getting used to it all; really she was.
“Look!” declared Bandra, pointing. “Your chair has arrived! You must try it out.”
Mary did so, lowering herself onto its cushioned seat.
“Well? Well?”
“It’s wonderful!” said Mary, after shifting around in it. “Really. Very comfortable.”
“Just what the doctor ordered!” declared Bandra, and then she astonished Mary by making a thumbs-up sign.
Mary laughed. “Exactly.”
“Right on the money! The perfect thing!”
“All of that, yes,” said Mary.
“Yes!” repeated Bandra, who was enjoying herself immensely. “Bingo! Exactamundo!” Bandra beamed at Mary, and Mary smiled warmly back.
Later that evening, Mary gave her new chair a longer test, curling up in it with one of the books she’d bought at the Laurentian University bookstore.
For her part, Bandra had been working on a new bird painting, but evidently decided it was time to take a break. She crossed the room and stood behind Mary. “What are you reading?”
Mary instinctively showed Bandra the book’s cover before she realized Bandra couldn’t possibly read the title—although with her delight in English, she doubted it would be long before Bandra tackled learning to read it. “It’s called The Man of Property,” said Mary, “by a writer named John Galsworthy. He won my world’s top writing award, the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Colm had been recommending Galsworthy for years, but Mary had only finally decided to read him after her sister Christine had raved about the new BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, of which The Man of Property was the first volume.
“What’s it about?” asked Bandra.
“A rich lawyer married to a beautiful woman. He hires an architect to build a country house for them, but the woman is having an affair with the architect.”
Bandra said, “Ah,” and Mary looked up at her and smiled. She tried again: “It’s about the complexities of interpersonal relationships among Gliksins.”
“Would you read some of it to me?” asked Bandra.
Mary was surprised but pleased by the request. “Sure.” Bandra straddled a saddle-seat facing Mary, arms folded in her lap. Mary softly spoke the words on the page, and let Christine translate them into the Neanderthal tongue.
Most people would consider such a marriage as that of Soames and Irene quite fairly successful; he had money, she had beauty; it was a case for compromise. There was no reason why they should not jog along, even if they hated each other. It would not matter if they went their own ways a little so long as the decencies were observed—the sanctity of the marriage tie, of the common home, respected. Half the marriages of the upper classes were conducted on these lines: Do not offend the susceptibilities of Society; do not offend the susceptibilities of the Church. To avoid offending these is worth the sacrifice of any private feelings. The advantages of the stable home are visible, tangible, so many pieces of property; there is no risk in the status quo. To break up a home is at the best a dangerous experiment, and selfish into the bargain.
This was the case for the defence, and young Jolyon sighed.
“The core of it all,” he thought, “is property, but there are many people who would not like it put that way. To them it is ‘the sanctity of the marriage tie’; but the sanctity of the marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property. And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never owned anything. It is curious!”
And again young Jolyon sighed…
“Interesting,” said Bandra, when Mary eventually paused.
Mary laughed. “I’m sure you’re just being polite. It must be gibberish to you.”
“No,” said Bandra. “No, I think I understand. This man—Soames, right?—he lives with this woman, this…”
“Irene,” supplied Mary.
“Yes. But there is no warmth in their relationship. He wants much more intimacy than she does.”
Mary nodded, impressed. “Exactly.”
“I suspect such concerns are universal,” said Bandra.
“I guess they are,” said Mary. “I actually identify with Irene. She married Soames not knowing what she really wanted. Just like me with Colm.”
“But you know what you want now?”
“I know I want Ponter.”
“But he does not come in isolation,” said Bandra. “He has Adikor and his daughters.”
Mary folded down her page and closed the book. “I know,” she said softly.
Bandra perhaps felt she had upset Mary. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m going to have something to drink. Would you like anything?”
Mary would have killed for some wine, but the Neanderthals didn’t have such things. Still, she’d brought a kilo tin of instant coffee with her from the other side. She normally didn’t drink coffee in the evening, but Neanderthal room temperature was sixteen degrees—their scale and hers were the same; the gap between the melting point and boiling point of water divided into a hundred parts. Mary preferred twenty or twenty-one degrees; a nice drinking bowl of coffee would warm her up. “Let me help,” said Mary, and the two of them headed over to the food-preparation area.
Back on her version of Earth, Mary kept a liter of chocolate milk on hand to mix into her coffee. She couldn’t get that here, but she’d brought along canisters of coffee whitener and hot-chocolate mix; combining them into her Maxwell House gave a reasonable enough approximation of her favorite potion.
They returned to the living room, crossing over the moss-covered floor. Bandra sat down on one of the gently curving couches that was built into the wall of the room. Mary was about to return to her own chair, but realized that she wouldn’t have any place to set down her drinking bowl there. She fetched her paperback—Colm would have hated the way she’d creased the book’s spine and dog-eared its pages—and took a seat at the other end of the couch, setting the drinking bowl on the pine table in front of it.
“You lived alone in your world,” said Bandra. It wasn’t a question; she already knew that.
“Yes,” said Mary. “I have what we call a condominium apartment—a private suite of rooms in a large building that I jointly own with a couple of hundred other people.”
“A couple of hundred!” said Bandra. “How big is this building?”
“It’s twenty-two stories high; twenty-two levels. I’m on the seventeenth floor.”
“The view must be magnificent!”
“It is indeed.” But that was a reflex response, Mary knew. Her view had been of concrete and glass, of buildings and highways. It had seemed wonderful when she’d lived there, but her tastes were changing.
“What is the status of that place?” asked Bandra.