The Length of a Marriage

Four days after her wedding, I found Maerin on the landing-stage at Carrowmere, disputing a freight charge. The railway had delivered her husband’s lathe to the opposite shore, and the ferryman proposed to charge for its passage as though it were a steam carriage. I offered the observation that a lathe possessed no means of boarding a ferry under its own power, which earned me her thanks and an invitation to keep out of the negotiation. She obtained a better price than I should have done. Afterwards we walked along the lake road while the machinery crossed behind us, looking precarious and expensive. Maerin was three hundred and forty; Edmund thirty-four. I had known her for twenty-six years and him for eleven months, a disparity which I evidently considered sufficient qualification to advise them both.

I asked whether she had properly considered what his old age would require of her. She stopped to remove a stone from her boot before answering, and I had time to dislike the word “properly” without yet possessing the generosity to withdraw it. Yes, she said, she had considered illness, infirmity and the possibility that he might eventually need assistance with the most private necessities. Had I supposed that Elves reached her age without seeing anyone die? I replied that acquaintance with death scarcely amounted to preparation for a husband’s decline. “Certainly,” she said. “What preparation do you recommend?” This was an inconveniently exact question. I could recommend arrangements, money and sensible medical supervision, though none would confer the experience in advance. I conceded as much, then asked the question I had actually brought from Tarnis: why undertake a marriage whose brevity she could foresee with such unusual confidence?

“Brevity by whose reckoning?” she asked. I objected that forty years occupied a very different proportion of our probable remaining lives. “You have expressed it as a fraction,” she said. “I shall still have to live the forty years.” I thought this insufficient and told her so. Proportion must affect expectation. She could reasonably anticipate centuries after Edmund’s death, during which their household would belong to her past; he could reasonably expect her to remain beside him throughout his remaining life. Whatever affection they shared, they had entered different bargains. Maerin grew quiet at that, and I feared for a moment that I had injured her. Then she said that I was approaching a useful question by a remarkably tiresome road. They had discussed those centuries. Edmund had wanted to know whether she expected to marry again. She had answered that she might. He had found the answer painful, asked for a day to think, and returned with questions about the house.

I confess that the house seemed a descent from the subject. Maerin corrected me with some heat. Edmund proposed to spend much of his working life improving it, and Maerin might occupy it for another two hundred years after his tools had gone to his sister’s daughter. A comfortable declaration of everlasting affection would have left several very practical injuries waiting in the deed. They had therefore engaged a solicitor and endured an afternoon which, she said, had tested their affection more severely than any discussion of mortality. I asked whether Edmund had been free to insist upon an arrangement inconvenient to her. She said that he had, and described one. I had assumed that the person with centuries available would necessarily govern the terms. She had surrendered the lake frontage he wanted preserved for his niece, although she had intended to build there. This did not prove their marriage equitable in every respect. It disposed of my particular suspicion, and I said so.

Beyond the toll-house we sat on a wall while a steam launch worried its way against the wind. I returned to the future widow. There would be habits established so thoroughly that her own hands would continue them after their occasion had vanished: a second cup set out, a remark saved during a journey. I had watched her outlive friends, and I knew how sharply she remembered particulars which the rest of us had never troubled to observe. Was she willing to enlarge that store deliberately? “I dislike your implication that I have failed to understand the cost because I have agreed to pay it,” she said. I withdrew the implication. She then admitted that she was frightened, especially of his becoming ashamed of needing her. Edmund was vain about his competence. She had already caught herself promising that she would always find him handsome, when he had asked whether she would still listen to him if he grew slow. “He noticed,” she said. “We had to begin that conversation again.”

Here I ventured something more useful. They would need to revisit their arrangements while Edmund could still contradict her vigorously. A promise made by a healthy man of thirty-four could become a poor guide to the wishes of that same man at seventy. She must beware of treating an earlier agreement as permission to cease asking. Maerin accepted this, then observed that my advice applied tolerably well to spouses of equal age. It did. Their difference made certain difficulties more probable and their eventual separation overwhelmingly likely; it gave neither of us knowledge of the people they would become. I had been speaking as though his decline were the principal event of a marriage which had scarcely begun.

When we returned, Edmund was on the landing-stage explaining to the ferryman how the lathe ought to be unloaded. His explanation was technically excellent and socially disastrous. I went down to assist, having acquired some recent experience of unwanted advice. Maerin remained above us, laughing until a rope slipped, when she came down very quickly. Later, on the evening train, I found that I still disliked the prospect of her long widowhood. Friendship supplies no obligation to find every foreseeable sorrow acceptable. But I had asked her to justify choosing the years with Edmund by accounting for all the years after him, and had allowed scarcely any weight to the life presently available to them. She had been right to object. I shall write to say so, with sufficient precision to prevent her extending the admission to our other disagreements.