Free The Marriage Bed by Constance Beresford-Howe

globes and poured down his cheeks, and I put my arms around him protectively.
    “Now Ross, will you listen to me, love. Get this straight, once and for all. There’s no need to go on about marriage and all that. If you want to – and you may not – if so, okay – we can just go on living together. In any case, I can work at the lab right up to the time and again after. You can be involved as much or as little as you like; but understand me, you are
not
trapped.”
    “Of course I bloody am,” he sobbed indignantly.
    “Not by any ring or licence you’re not.”
    I felt his muscles relax a little. He turned away to blow his nose.
    “Of course I want us to keep living together,” he said. “First thing to do, I guess, is to tell your parents and, oh Christ, my mother, and in general share round the misery, see what they have to say. Better get it over with as soon as we can.”
    “All right. Only let the poor things see us graduate first. It’s only a week to convocation.”
    “Yes, yes,” he broke in. I knew he was grateful for any excuse to put off these encounters, as who wouldn’t be. I also knew he still hoped I would change my mind and extricate us both from thewhole situation. Perhaps I myself hoped somehow I could, but with no real confidence.
    T he kids and I ate scrambled eggs out of a communal bowl. I spooned bites into their mouths in a game called Not For You that Hugh enjoyed so much he forgot his dislike of eggs. By the time I got them into their warm, footed sleepers, it was getting late, but instead of putting them to bed, I let them play with their stuffed animals by the sitting-room fire. This indulgence was more for me than for them. While I washed up, I needed to hear their voices, because after dark was the worst part of the day for me. The house developed oppressive creaks and sighs. The empty bed upstairs yawned. Loneliness sneaked up to me, as dangerous as a tangible intruder.
    It was hard to believe now how often gregarious flocks of people used to swoop into and out of this deserted house. Natural for them to stay away now, of course. People feel uneasy in disaster areas. Even Bonnie, my best friend since college days, seldom came here now. As I dried Martha’s bitten, battered silver mug, I thought yearningly of Bonnie, my onetime roommate. She had come to her god-daughter’s christening in a tight skirt slit so high that the entire length of her gorgeous legs could be enjoyed or deplored by the other guests, depending on age or gender. Edwina’s face was a study in repressed offence. Billie looked openly and keenly annoyed. Her skirt was slit too, but not that high.
    Who else was there that day? Bonnie’s current man, a quiet little Chinese dentist who, she once told me, specialized in delicate oriental love-pinches of quite amazing potency. Tim and Randy, soon to be Ross’s partners, and their wives, one glacially blonde, one shy, pale, and pregnant. Max was in Japan at the time, but a cousin looking like a poor Xerox copy stood deputy godfather for him.
    The christening service itself, with its strange, heathen elements of exorcism, was something I was surprised and pleased to find intact in a modern Toronto church presided over by a breezy young curate who smoked cigars. Billie, of course, had no religion at all, but it had suited her to send me to church and Sunday school all through my childhood, with the result that I was an unbeliever with a sound Christian education. This, oddly enough, was from time to time a sort of comfort to me. The teachings of Christ, while they had no noticeable influence on my behaviour, were at least a point of departure. And churches were friendly, familiar places, their austerities always comfortably similar.
    Bonnie, on the other hand, had belonged in her small-town youth to a fundamentalist sect of some kind that worshipped by shouting “Yeah Lord,” and drinking grape juice out of tiny paper cups. I don’t think she’d ever actually been