apart and come down here for the winter and all I ask in return is a normal Christmas that includes my son. You won’t come to us—we have to come to you and it’s not fair. You know it’s not. This whole thing is getting to be too much!”
“Is that a problem for you? Having too much?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, but is it a problem for you? Because if it is I can arrange for less. I could certainly do with less myself. Less hysteria, less shouting, less drama…”
Jadine, unable to think of anything to do or say, watched tomato seeds slide into the salad dressing, and set about applying the principles of a survey course in psychology. During the two months she’d been there, Valerian and Margaret frequently baited one another and each had a dictionary of complaints against the other, entries in which, from time to time, they showed her. Just a May and December marriage, she thought, at its crucial stage. He’s seventy; she’s knocking fifty. He is waning, shutting up, closing in. She’s blazing with the fire of a soon to be setting sun. Naturally they bickered and taunted one another. Naturally. Normally, even. For they were decent people. Over and above their personal generosity to her and their solicitude for her uncle and aunt, they seemed decent. Decent like Sydney and Nanadine were decent, and this house full of decent folk situated in the pure sea air was exactly where she wanted to be right now. This vacation with light but salaried work was what she needed to pull herself together. Listening to Margaret and Valerian fight was a welcome distraction, just as playing daughter to Sydney and Nanadine was.
But recently (a few days ago, last night, and again tonight) flecks of menace lay in these quarrels. They no longer seemed merely the tiffs of long-married people who alone knew the physics of their relationship. Who like two old cats clawed each other, used each other to display a quarrelsomeness neither took seriously, quarreling because they thought it was expected of them, quarreling simply to exchange roles now and then for their own private amusement: the heavy would appear abused in public, the aggressive and selfish one would appear the eye and heart of restraint before an audience. And most of the time, like now, the plain of their battle was a child, and the weapons public identification of human frailty. Still, this was a little darker than what she had come to expect from them. Bits of blood, tufts of hair seemed to stick on those worn claws. Maybe she had misread their rules. Or maybe (most likely) she wasn’t an audience anymore. Maybe she was family now—or nobody. No, she thought, it must be this place. The island exaggerated everything. Too much light. Too much shadow. Too much rain. Too much foliage and much too much sleep. She’d never slept so deeply in her life. Such tranquillity in sleep made for wildness during the waking hours. That’s what it was: the wilderness creeping into Valerian and Margaret’s seasoned and regulated arguments, subverting the rules so that they looked at each other under the tender light of a seventy-year-old chandelier, bought by Valerian’s father in celebration of his wife’s first pregnancy, lifted their lips and bared their teeth.
“…she never liked me,” Margaret was saying. “From the very beginning she hated me.”
“How could she hate you from the beginning? She didn’t even know you.” Valerian lowered his voice in an effort to calm her.
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
“She was perfectly polite and gracious to you in the beginning.”
“She was awful to me, Valerian. Awful!”
“That was later when you wouldn’t let Michael visit her.”
“Wouldn’t let? I couldn’t make him go. He hated her; he’d shrink at the very—”
“Margaret, stick to the facts, Michael was two or three. He couldn’t have hated anybody, let alone his aunt.”
“He did, and if you had any feelings you would have hated her too.”
“My own sister?”
“Or at least told her off.”
“For what, for God’s sake. For having a private wedding instead of a circus? You never invite them down here and she’s probably upset about it, that’s all. And this is her way of—”
“Dear God. You have screamed at me for years for having too many people. Now you want me to invite Cissy and Frank. I don’t believe—”
“I didn’t
“What do you mean
“Stacey’s idea.”
“Do you think if Michael got married I would invite Stacey and not her parents?”
“Margaret, I don’t give one goddamn—”
“She’s always treated me that way. You know what she did to me the first day I met her.”
“I suppose I should but I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Sorry.”
“What she said to me that first day?”
“It’s been some time.”
“About my cross?”
“Your what?”
“My cross. The cross I wore. My first communion present. She said for me to take it off. That only whores wore crosses.”
