After a moment or two Patrick said, “Well. If you don’t love me you don’t love me. I’m not forcing you to.” His voice sounded strained and spiteful, against the reasonableness of what he was saying. “I just wonder,” he said, “if you know what you do want. I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have any idea what you want. You’re just in a state.”
“I don’t have to know what I want to know what I don’t want!” Rose said, turning over. This released her. “I never loved you.”
“Shh. You’ll wake them. We have to stop.”
“I never loved you. I never wanted to. It was a mistake.”
“All right. All right. You made your point.”
“Why am I supposed to love you? Why do you act as if there was something wrong with me if I didn’t? You despise me. You despise my family and my background and you think you are doing me a
“I fell in love with you,” Patrick said. “I don’t despise you. Oh, Rose. I worship you.”
“You’re a sissy,” Rose said. “You’re a prude.” She jumped off the bed with great pleasure as she said this. She felt full of energy. More was coming. Terrible things were coming.
“You don’t even know how to make love right. I always wanted to get out of this from the very first. I felt sorry for you. You won’t look where you’re going, you’re always knocking things over, just because you can’t be bothered, you can’t be bothered noticing anything, you’re wrapped up in yourself, and you’re always bragging, it’s so stupid, you don’t even know how to brag right, if you really want to impress people you’ll never do it, the way you do it all they do is laugh at you!”
Patrick sat on the bed and looked up at her, his face open to whatever she would say. She wanted to beat and beat him, to say worse and worse, uglier and crueller, things. She took a breath, drew in air, to stop the things she felt rising in her from getting out.
“I don’t want to see you, ever!” she said viciously. But at the door she turned and said in a normal and regretful voice, “Goodbye.”
PATRICK WROTE HER a note:
Rose had forgotten all about giving him back his ring. When she came out of his apartment building that morning she was still wearing it. She couldn’t go back, and it seemed too valuable to send through the mail. She continued to wear it, mostly because she did not want to have to tell Dr. Henshawe what had happened. She was relieved to get Patrick’s note. She thought that she could give him back the ring then.
She thought about what Patrick had said about Dr. Henshawe. No doubt there was some truth in that, else why should she be so reluctant to tell Dr. Henshawe she had broken her engagement, so unwilling to face her sensible approval, her restrained, relieved congratulations?
She told Dr. Henshawe that she was not seeing Patrick while she studied for her exams. Rose could see that even that pleased her.
She told no one that her situation had changed. It was not just Dr. Henshawe she didn’t want knowing. She didn’t like giving up being envied; the experience was so new to her.
She tried to think what to do next. She could not stay on at Dr. Henshawe’s. It seemed clear that if she escaped from Patrick, she must escape from Dr. Henshawe too. And she did not want to stay on at the college, with people knowing about her broken engagement, with the girls who now congratulated her saying they had known all along it was a fluke, her getting Patrick. She would have to get a job.
The Head Librarian had offered her a job for the summer but that was perhaps at Dr. Henshawe’s suggestion. Once she moved out, the offer might not hold. She knew that instead of studying for her exams she ought to be downtown, applying for work as a filing clerk at the insurance offices, applying at Bell Telephone, at the department stores. The idea frightened her. She kept on studying. That was the one thing she really knew how to do. She was a scholarship student after all.
On Saturday afternoon, when she was working at the library, she saw Patrick. She did not see him by accident. She went down to the bottom floor, trying not to make noise on the spiralling metal staircase. There was a place in the stacks where she could stand, almost in darkness, and see into his carrel. She did that. She couldn’t see his face. She saw his long pink neck and the old plaid shirt he wore on Saturdays. His long neck. His bony shoulders. She was no longer irritated by him, no longer frightened by him; she was free. She could look at him as she would look at anybody. She could appreciate him. He had behaved well. He had not tried to rouse her pity, he had not bullied her, he had not molested her with pitiful telephone calls and letters. He had not come and sat on Dr. Henshawe’s doorstep. He was an honorable person, and he would never know how she acknowledged that, how she was grateful for it. The things she had said to him made her ashamed now. And they were not even true. Not all of them. He did know how to make love. She was so moved, made so gentle and wistful, by the sight of him, that she wanted to give him something, some surprising bounty, she wished to undo his unhappiness.
Then she had a compelling picture of herself. She was running softly into Patrick’s carrel, she was throwing her arms around him from behind, she was giving everything back to him. Would he take it from her, would he still want it? She saw them laughing and crying, explaining, forgiving.
It was not resistible, after all. She did it.
WHEN ROSE AFTERWARD reviewed and talked about this moment in her life — for she went through a period, like most people nowadays, of talking freely about her most private decisions, to friends and lovers and party acquaintances whom she might never see again, while they did the same — she said that comradely compassion had overcome her, she was not proof against the sight of a bare bent neck. Then she went further into it, and said greed, greed. She said she had run to him and clung to him and overcome his suspicions and kissed and cried and reinstated herself simply because she did not know how to do with out his love and his promise to look after her; she was frightened of the world and she had not been able to think up any other plan for herself. When she was seeing life in economic terms, or was with people who did, she said that only middle- class people had choices anyway, that if she had had the price of a train ticket to Toronto her life would have been different.
Nonsense, she might say later, never mind that, it was really vanity, it was vanity pure and simple, to resurrect him, to bring him back his happiness. To see if she could do that. She could not resist such a test of power. She explained then that she had paid for it. She said that she and Patrick had been married ten years, and that during that time the scenes of the first breakup and reconciliation had been periodically repeated, with her saying again all the things she had said the first time, and the things she had held back, and many other things which occurred to her. She hopes she did not tell people (but thinks she did) that she used to beat her head against the bedpost, that she smashed a gravy boat through a dining-room window; that she was so frightened, so sickened by what she had done that she lay in bed, shivering, and begged and begged for his forgiveness. Which he granted. Sometimes she flew at him; sometimes he beat her. The next morning they would get up early and make a special breakfast; they would sit eating bacon and eggs and drinking filtered coffee, worn out, bewildered, treating each other with shamefaced kindness.
What do you think triggers the reaction? they would say.
Do you think we ought to take a holiday? A holiday together? Holidays alone?
A waste, a sham, those efforts, as it turned out. But they worked for the moment. Calmed down, they would say that most people probably went through the same things like this, in a marriage, and indeed they seemed to know mostly people who did. They could not separate until enough damage had been done, until nearly mortal damage had been done, to keep them apart. And until Rose could get a job and make her own money, so perhaps there was a very ordinary reason after all.
What she never said to anybody, never confided, was that she sometimes thought it had not been pity or greed or cowardice or vanity but something quite different, like a vision of happiness. In view of everything else she had told she could hardly tell that. It seems very odd; she can’t justify it. She doesn’t mean that they had
