"Couldn’t you get together and pool your information?"
"My God", said Marc in amazement. "What do you think we do all the time?"
At a table on the edge of the dance floor opposite the orchestra, Erica was building a house out of matches and once again listening to John on the subject of Miriam. He was feeling discouraged and was sitting with his heavy shoulders against the frail back of the chair, drawing a series of squares and rectangles on the white cloth with the pointed handle of a fork.
"What odds would you give on our ever getting married?"
"Five to one", said Erica.
"The last time I asked you that you said five to one against".
"I know, but you’ve improved a lot. If you could manage to be as bright about Miriam as you are about most things now, I’d even give you ten to one".
"Why?"
"Because Miriam’s on the rebound. Max walked out on her for good this morning and went to England on a bomber".
"But she didn’t really care about him, Eric…".
"Didn’t she? Why not?"
"Eliot wasn’t her type".
He seemed so sure of that anyhow that Erica asked, "And what is Miriam’s type?"
"Well, whatever it is, it’s not something straight out of Esquire!" he said impatiently.
"Well, maybe not", said Erica, "but even if he wasn’t her type, Miriam is now getting good and drunk out in the bar".
"Miriam doesn’t get drunk". He frowned at her, looking less certain, and finally asked, "Are you serious, Eric?"
"Mm", said Erica, carefully placing another match.
"We’d better go and get her then".
"Marc will look after her", said Erica without moving. Her eyes had been following one line, from the pile of matches on the table before her to the door which led to the bar, from the door back to the matches, the matches back to the door again for what already seemed like several hours, but although every minute without Marc dragged interminably, what mattered most to her at the moment was not Marc and herself, but Marc and Miriam. She wanted them to have a chance to get to know each other.
It did not even occur to her that while Marc and her sister were getting to know each other, Marc might also be getting to know a good deal about her parents as well. He asked no direct questions; he was simply letting Miriam talk. In telling him her attitude toward the whole situation, she was giving him a fairly clear idea of the situation itself, without being aware of what she was doing. She never realized that in part of one evening, Marc had found out more from her than he had been able to find out from Erica in two months. By the time he left the bar and returned with Miriam, his former guesswork and suspicion had turned into actual knowledge. He was not yet ready to admit that he was beaten; it was simply that the future had become that much darker and he was no longer able to see clearly beyond the next few weeks. The rest was obscurity. His point of view had not changed, it had merely shortened and covered only the period between the present and the day on which he would leave for overseas.
John was still looking unsettled, and Erica said, "Besides, Miriam never gets drunk enough for it to be noticeable".
"That was rather unnecessary, wasn’t it?"
"What was?"
"I wasn’t worrying whether it would be ’noticeable’ or not".
"Oh, hell", said Erica as her house of matches collapsed. "I meant that since there’s no danger of her making an ass of herself, it’ll probably do her good. And for heaven’s sake, Johnny, don’t be stuffy".
"Sorry, Eric. You’ve had an awful lot to put up with, haven’t you? I don’t know why you didn’t tell me to damn well pack up my troubles and take them somewhere else long ago. Do you think Miriam’s really upset about that fellow?" he asked incredulously.
"More upset than I’ve ever seen her before, anyhow".
"Why on earth did she come out with us then?"
"Haven’t you ever tried to postpone thinking about something until you’ve had a chance to get used to the idea a little at a time?"
His handsome face stiffened, only instead of looking years older as Marc always did, unhappiness made him much younger, as young as he had been when Erica had first known him, eight years before.
At that time, all his thoughts had been orderly, catalogued and arranged under the proper headings. He had just graduated from McGill and started work in the family bond house. Until he had been sent back from England after two years overseas, because there was such a shortage of bilingual officers, Erica could not remember ever having heard John say anything which had not been said before. He had been quite unoriginal; his life had been unoriginal, conforming completely to the given pattern for his age, class and country, so that looking first at John Gardiner and then at his father and his father’s friends, you could see quite clearly the direction he was taking and where he would undoubtedly end up.
Erica could remember the way he had thought, if you could call it thinking. At university he had done the required reading and no more. In a bond house, no reading is required, so at the age of twenty-one, and apart from the sports and finance sections of the morning and evening papers, a few magazines and still fewer bestsellers, John had found himself relieved of the necessity for doing any reading at all. He played a very good game of bridge, golf and tennis; he was an officer in the Reserve Army of peacetime, he had no interest whatever in any of the arts or in ideas, as such; he was unshakably decent, honest, hard-working, and unimaginative. He was a typical Canadian. From 1930 until far too late, he had assumed that the depression would right itself; he had hung on to the illusion that the depression would right itself long after Charles Drake had abandoned it, and had resigned his reserve commission because his regiment showed no signs of being mobilized, for the time being at any rate, in order to enlist for Active Service in September, 1939, because, as he had said at dinner, his sort always does.
He was, however, one of the few men Erica knew whom the war had turned right-side up, instead of temporarily upside down. When you’ve been in the Army for three years, as John had pointed out himself, sooner or later you’re bound to start wondering why you’re there.
His face stiffer, younger and more uncomprehending than ever, he said, "Did Miriam think she was going to marry him, Eric?"
"No", said Erica.
"Then what’s it all about?"
Erica regarded him helplessly for a moment and then said, "Don’t you think you’d better ask Miriam instead of me?"
"Did she want to marry him?"
"She may have", said Erica vaguely.
"Why?"
Having finally found an answer which she thought would do, she said, "Well, you know they say that when divorced people remarry, they usually go to the opposite extreme".
"Really", said John. "I’ve never heard that before".
Neither had Erica, but it was as good an explanation of Max Eliot’s attraction for Miriam as any Erica could think of-as well as a partial explanation of Miriam’s continuing inability to fall in love with John, she realized a moment later. In one respect, John and Peter Kingsley, Miriam’s ex-husband, were too much alike, or at least Miriam thought they were, and it was impossible to talk her out of it. The worst mistake John had made was when he had told Miriam in London, just when she had been on the point of falling in love with him at last, that he had never looked at anyone else since he had met her, adding, rather embarrassed, that of course that meant that he had never looked at anyone else at all. If he had not been embarrassed, Miriam might not have known what he was talking about, or rather that what he was saying was to be taken literally; as it was, she did know, even before he went on still more embarrassed, to add something about having kept himself for her.