FIONA lived in her parents’ house,
in the town where she and Grant
went to university. It was a big,
bay-windowed house that seemed to
Grant both luxurious and disorderly,
with rugs crooked on the floors and
cup rings bitten into the table varnish.
Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful
woman with a froth of white hair and
indignant far-left politics. The father
was an important cardiologist, revered
around the hospital but happily subservient
at home, where he would listen to
his wife’s strange tirades with an absentminded
smile. Fiona had her own little
car and a pile of cashmere sweaters,
but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her
mother’s political activity was probably
the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities
were a joke to her, and so was politics—
though she liked to play “The Four
Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph,
and sometimes also the “Internationale,”
very loud, if there was a guest she thought
she could make nervous. A curly-haired
gloomy-looking foreigner was courting
her—she said he was a Visigoth—and
so were two or three quite respectable
and uneasy young interns. She made fun
of them all and of Grant as well. She
would drolly repeat some of his smalltown
phrases. He thought maybe she
was joking when she proposed to him,
on a cold bright day on the beach at Port
Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces
and the waves delivered crashing loads
of gravel at their feet.
“Do you think it would be fun—”
Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would
be fun if we got married?”
He took her up on it, he shouted yes.
He wanted never to be away from her.
She had the spark of life.

JUST before they left their house Fiona
noticed a mark on the kitchen floor.
It came from the cheap black house
shoes she had been wearing earlier in
the day.

“I thought they’d quit doing that,”
she said in a tone of ordinary annoyance
and perplexity, rubbing at the gray
smear that looked as if it had been
made by a greasy crayon.
She remarked that she’d never have
to do this again, since she wasn’t taking
those shoes with her.
“I guess I’ll be dressed up all the
time,” she said. “Or semi-dressed up.
It’ll be sort of like in a hotel.”
She rinsed out the rag she’d been
using and hung it on the rack inside the
door under the sink. Then she put on
her golden-brown, fur-collared ski jacket,
over a white turtleneck sweater and tailored
fawn slacks. She was a tall, narrowshouldered
woman, seventy years old but
still upright and trim, with long legs and
long feet, delicate wrists and ankles, and
tiny, almost comical-looking ears. Her
hair that was as light as milkweed fluff
had gone from pale blond to white
somehow without Grant’s noticing exactly
when, and she still wore it down to
her shoulders, as her mother had done.
(That was the thing that had alarmed
Grant’s own mother, a small-town widow
who worked as a doctor’s receptionist.
The long white hair on Fiona’s mother,
even more than the state of the house,
had told her all she needed to know
about attitudes and politics.) But otherwise
Fiona, with her fine bones and
small sapphire eyes, was nothing like her
mother. She had a slightly crooked
mouth, which she emphasized now with
red lipstick—usually the last thing she
did before she left the house.
She looked just like herself on this
day—direct and vague as in fact she
was, sweet and ironic.

OVER a year ago, Grant had started noticing
so many little yellow notes
stuck up all over the house. That was not
entirely new. Fiona had always written
things down—the title of a book she’d
heard mentioned on the radio or the jobs

she wanted to make sure she got done
that day. Even her morning schedule
was written down. He found it mystifying
and touching in its precision: “7 A.M.
yoga. 7:30–7:45 teeth face hair. 7:45–
8:15 walk. 8:15 Grant and breakfast.”
The new notes were different. Stuck
onto the kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dishtowels,
Knives. Couldn’t she just open
the drawers and see what was inside?
Worse things were coming. She went
to town and phoned Grant from a booth
to ask him how to drive home. She went
for her usual walk across the field into
the woods and came home by the fence
line—a very long way round. She said
that she’d counted on fences always taking
you somewhere.
It was hard to figure out. She’d said
that about fences as if it were a joke,
and she had remembered the phone
number without any trouble.
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry
about,” she said. “I expect I’m just losing
my mind.”
He asked if she had been taking sleeping
pills.
“If I am I don’t remember,” she said.
Then she said she was sorry to sound so
flippant. “I’m sure I haven’t been taking
anything. Maybe I should be. Maybe
vitamins.”
Vitamins didn’t help. She would
stand in doorways trying to figure out
where she was going. She forgot to turn
on the burner under the vegetables or
put water in the coffeemaker. She asked
Grant when they’d moved to this house.
“Was it last year or the year before?”
“It was twelve years ago,” he said.
“That’s shocking.”
“She’s always been a bit like this,”
Grant said to the doctor. He tried without
success to explain how Fiona’s surprise
and apologies now seemed somehow
like routine courtesy, not quite
concealing a private amusement. As if
she’d stumbled on some unexpected adventure.
Or begun playing a game that
she hoped he would catch on to.
“Yes, well,” the doctor said. “It might
be selective at first. We don’t know, do
we? Till we see the pattern of the deterioration,
we really can’t say.”
In a while it hardly mattered what
label was put on it. Fiona, who no longer
went shopping alone, disappeared from
the supermarket while Grant had his
back turned. A policeman picked her up
as she was walking down the middle of
the road, blocks away.He asked her name
and she answered readily. Then he asked
her the name of the Prime Minister.
“If you don’t know that, young man,
you really shouldn’t be in such a responsible
job.”
He laughed. But then she made the
mistake of asking if he’d seen Boris
and Natasha. These were the now dead
Russian wolfhounds she had adopted
many years ago, as a favor to a friend,
then devoted herself to for the rest
of their lives. Her taking them over
might have coincided with the discovery
that she was not likely to have children.
Something about her tubes being
blocked, or twisted—Grant could not
remember now. He had always avoided
thinking about all that female apparatus.
Or it might have been after her
mother died. The dogs’ long legs and
silky hair, their narrow, gentle, intransigent
faces made a fine match for her
when she took them out for walks.
And Grant himself, in those days, landing
his first job at the university (his
father-in-law’s money welcome there
in spite of the political taint), might
have seemed to some people to have
been picked up on another of Fiona’s eccentric
whims, and groomed and tended
and favored—though, fortunately, he
didn’t understand this until much later.
THERE was a rule that nobody could
be admitted to Meadowlake during
the month of December. The holiday
season had so many emotional pitfalls.
So they made the twenty-minute
drive in January. Before they reached
the highway the country road dipped
through a swampy hollow now completely
frozen over.
Fiona said, “Oh, remember.”
Grant said, “I was thinking about
that, too.”
“Only it was in the moonlight,” she
said.
She was talking about the time that
they had gone out skiing at night un-

der the full moon and over the blackstriped
snow, in this place that you
could get into only in the depths of
winter. They had heard the branches
cracking in the cold.
If she could remember that, so
vividly and correctly, could there really
be so much the matter with her? It was
all he could do not to turn around and
drive home.
There was another rule that the supervisor
explained to him.New residents
were not to be visited during the first
thirty days. Most people needed that
time to get settled in. Before the rule
had been put in place, there had been
pleas and tears and tantrums, even from
those who had come in willingly. Around
the third or fourth day they would start
lamenting and begging to be taken home.
And some relatives could be susceptible
to that, so you would have people being
carted home who would not get on there
any better than they had before. Six
months or sometimes only a few weeks
later, the whole upsetting hassle would
have to be gone through again.
“Whereas we find,” the supervisor
said, “we find that if they’re left on their
own the first month they usually end up
happy as clams.”
THEY had in fact gone over to Meadowlake
a few times several years
ago to visit Mr. Farquhar, the
old bachelor farmer who had
been their neighbor. He had
lived by himself in a drafty
brick house unaltered since
the early years of the century,
except for the addition of a
refrigerator and a television
set. Now, just as Mr. Farquhar’s
house was gone, replaced
by a gimcrack sort of
castle that was the weekend
home of some people from
Toronto, the old Meadowlake
was gone, though it had
dated only from the fifties.
The new building was a spacious,
vaulted place, whose air
was faintly, pleasantly pinescented.
Profuse and genuine
greenery sprouted out of
giant crocks in the hallways.
Nevertheless, it was the
old Meadowlake that Grant
found himself picturing Fiona
in, during the long month

he had to get through without seeing
her.He phoned every day and hoped to
get the nurse whose name was Kristy.
She seemed a little amused at his constancy,
but she would give him a fuller
report than any other nurse he got stuck
with.
Fiona had caught a cold the first
week, she said, but that was not unusual
for newcomers. “Like when your kids
start school,” Kristy said. “There’s a
whole bunch of new germs they’re exposed
to and for a while they just catch
everything.”
Then the cold got better. She was
off the antibiotics and she didn’t seem
as confused as she had been when she
came in. (This was the first Grant had
heard about either the antibiotics or the
confusion.) Her appetite was pretty
good and she seemed to enjoy sitting in
the sunroom. And she was making
some friends, Kristy said.
If anybody phoned, he let the machine
pick up. The people they saw
socially, occasionally, were not close
neighbors but people who lived around
the country, who were retired, as they
were, and who often went away without
notice. They would imagine that
he and Fiona were away on some such
trip at present.
Grant skied for exercise. He skied
around and around in the field behind
the house as the sun went down and left
the sky pink over a countryside that
seemed to be bound by waves of blueedged
ice. Then he came back to the
darkening house, turning the television
news on while he made his supper.
They had usually prepared supper
together. One of them made the drinks
and the other the fire, and they talked
about his work (he was writing a study
of legendary Norse wolves and particularly
of the great wolf Fenrir, which
swallows up Odin at the end of the
world) and about whatever Fiona was
reading and what they had been thinking
during their close but separate day.
This was their time of liveliest intimacy,
though there was also, of course,
the five or ten minutes of physical
sweetness just after they got into bed—
something that did not often end in sex
but reassured them that sex was not
over yet.
IN a dream he showed a letter to one
of his colleagues. The letter was
from the roommate of a girl he had not
thought of for a while and was sanctimonious
and hostile, threatening in
a whining way. The girl herself was
someone he had parted from decently
and it seemed unlikely that she would
want to make a fuss, let alone try to kill
herself, which was what the letter was

elaborately trying to tell him she had
done.
He had thought of the colleague as
a friend. He was one of those husbands
who had been among the first
to throw away their neckties and leave
home to spend every night on a floor
mattress with a bewitching young mistress—
coming to their offices, their
classes, bedraggled and smelling of
dope and incense. But now he took a
dim view.
“I wouldn’t laugh,” he said to Grant—
who did not think he had been laughing.
“And if I were you I’d try to prepare
Fiona.”
So Grant went off to find Fiona in
Meadowlake—the old Meadowlake—
and got into a lecture hall instead. Everybody
was waiting there for him to
teach his class. And sitting in the last,
highest row was a flock of cold-eyed
young women all in black robes, all in
mourning, who never took their bitter
stares off him, and pointedly did not
write down, or care about, anything he
was saying.
Fiona was in the first row, untroubled.
“Oh phooey,” she said. “Girls that
age are always going around talking
about how they’ll kill themselves.”
He hauled himself out of the dream,
took pills, and set about separating what
was real from what was not.
There had been a letter, and the
word “rat” had appeared in black paint
on his office door, and Fiona, on being
told that a girl had suffered from
a bad crush on him, had said pretty
much what she said in the dream.
The colleague hadn’t come into it,
and nobody had committed suicide.
Grant hadn’t been disgraced. In fact,
he had got off easy when you thought
of what might have happened just a
couple of years later. But word got
around. Cold shoulders became conspicuous.
They had few Christmas
invitations and spent New Year’s Eve
alone. Grant got drunk, and without its
being required of him—also, thank
God, without making the error of a
confession—he promised Fiona a new
life.
Nowhere had there been any acknowledgment
that the life of a philanderer
(if that was what Grant had to
call himself—he who had not had half
as many conquests as the man who had
reproached him in his dream) involved

acts of generosity, and even sacrifice.
Many times he had catered to a woman’s
pride, to her fragility, by offering
more affection—or a rougher passion—
than anything he really felt. All so that
he could now find himself accused
of wounding and exploiting and destroying
self-esteem. And of deceiving
Fiona—as, of course, he had. But would
it have been better if he had done as
others had done with their wives, and
left her? He had never thought of such
a thing. He had never stopped making
love to Fiona. He had not stayed
away from her for a single night. No
making up elaborate stories in order to
spend a weekend in San Francisco or in
a tent on Manitoulin Island. He had
gone easy on the dope and the drink,
and he had continued to publish papers,
serve on committees, make progress
in his career. He had never had any
intention of throwing over work and
marriage and taking to the country to
practice carpentry or keep bees.
But something like that had happened,
after all. He had taken early
retirement with a reduced pension.
Fiona’s father had died, after some bewildered
and stoical time alone in the
big house, and Fiona had inherited both
that property and the farmhouse where
her father had grown up, in the country
near Georgian Bay.
It was a new life. He and Fiona
worked on the house. They got crosscountry
skis. They were not very sociable
but they gradually made some
friends. There were no more hectic
flirtations. No bare female toes creeping
up under a man’s pants leg at a dinner
party. No more loose wives.

Just in time,Grant was able to think,
when the sense of injustice had worn
down. The feminists and perhaps the
sad silly girl herself and his cowardly
so-called friends had pushed him out
just in time. Out of a life that was in
fact getting to be more trouble than it
was worth. And that might eventually
have cost him Fiona.
ON the morning of the day when he
was to go back to Meadowlake,
for the first visit, Grant woke early. He
was full of a solemn tingling, as in the
old days on the morning of his first
planned meeting with a new woman.
The feeling was not precisely sexual.
(Later, when the meetings had become
routine, that was all it was.) There was
an expectation of discovery, almost a
spiritual expansion. Also timidity, humility,
alarm.
There had been a thaw. Plenty of
snow was left, but the dazzling hard
landscape of earlier winter had crumbled.
These pocked heaps under a gray
sky looked like refuse in the fields.
In the town near Meadowlake he found
a florist’s shop and bought a large bouquet.
He had never presented flowers
to Fiona before. Or to anyone else.
He entered the building feeling like a
hopeless lover or a guilty husband in
a cartoon.
“Wow. Narcissus this early,” Kristy
said. “You must’ve spent a fortune.” She
went along the hall ahead of him and
snapped on the light in a sort of pantry,
where she searched for a vase. She was a
heavy young woman who looked as if
she had given up on her looks in every
department except her hair. That was
blond and voluminous. All the puffedup
luxury of a cocktail waitress’s style, or
a stripper’s, on top of such a workaday
face and body.
“There now,” she said, and nodded
him down the hall. “Name’s right on
the door.”
So it was, on a nameplate decorated
with bluebirds. He wondered whether
to knock, and did, then opened the door
and called her name.
She wasn’t there. The closet door
was closed, the bed smoothed. Nothing
on the bedside table, except a box of
Kleenex and a glass of water. Not a single
photograph or picture of any kind,
not a book or a magazine. Perhaps you
had to keep those in a cupboard.
He went back to the nurses’ station.
Kristy said, “No?” with a surprise that
he thought perfunctory. He hesitated,
holding the flowers. She said, “O.K.,
O.K.—let’s set the bouquet down here.”
Sighing, as if he were a backward child
on his first day at school, she led him
down the hall toward a large central
space with skylights which seemed to
be a general meeting area. Some people
were sitting along the walls, in easy
chairs, others at tables in the middle of
the carpeted floor.None of them looked
too bad. Old—some of them incapacitated
enough to need wheelchairs—but
decent. There had been some unnerving
sights when he and Fiona visited Mr.
Farquhar. Whiskers on old women’s
chins, somebody with a bulged-out eye
like a rotted plum.Dribblers, head wagglers,
mad chatterers. Now it looked as
if there’d been some weeding out of the
worst cases.
“See?” said Kristy in a softer voice.
“You just go up and say hello and try
not to startle her. Just go ahead.”
He saw Fiona in profile, sitting close
up to one of the card tables, but not
playing. She looked a little puffy in the
face, the flab on one cheek hiding the
corner of her mouth, in a way it hadn’t
done before. She was watching the play
of the man she sat closest to. He held
his cards tilted so that she could see
them. When Grant got near the table
she looked up. They all looked up—all
the players at the table looked up, with
displeasure. Then they immediately
looked down at their cards, as if to ward
off any intrusion.
But Fiona smiled her lopsided,
abashed, sly, and charming smile and
pushed back her chair and came round
to him, putting her fingers to her mouth.
“Bridge,” she whispered. “Deadly
serious. They’re quite rabid about it.”
She drew him toward the coffee table,
chatting. “I can remember being like
that for a while at college. My friends
and I would cut class and sit in the
common room and smoke and play like
cutthroats. Can I get you anything? A
cup of tea? I’m afraid the coffee isn’t up
to much here.”
Grant never drank tea.
He could not throw his arms around
her. Something about her voice and
smile, familiar as they were, something
about the way she seemed to be guarding
the players from him—as well as

him from their displeasure—made that
impossible.
“I brought you some flowers,” he
said. “I thought they’d do to brighten
up your room. I went to your room but
you weren’t there.”
“Well, no,” she said. “I’m here.” She
glanced back at the table.
Grant said, “You’ve made a new
friend.” He nodded toward the man
she’d been sitting next to. At this moment
that man looked up at Fiona
and she turned, either because of what
Grant had said or because she felt the
look at her back.
“It’s just Aubrey,” she said. “The
funny thing is I knew him years and
years ago. He worked in the store. The
hardware store where my grandpa used
to shop. He and I were always kidding
around and he couldn’t get up the nerve
to ask me out. Till the very last weekend
and he took me to a ballgame. But
when it was over my grandpa showed
up to drive me home. I was up visiting
for the summer. Visiting my grandparents—
they lived on a farm.”
“Fiona. I know where your grandparents
lived. It’s where we live. Lived.”
“Really?” she said, not paying her full
attention because the cardplayer was
sending her his look, which was one not
of supplication but of command. He
was a man of about Grant’s age, or a
little older. Thick coarse white hair fell
over his forehead and his skin was
leathery but pale, yellowish-white like
an old wrinkled-up kid glove. His long
face was dignified and melancholy and
he had something of the beauty of a
powerful, discouraged, elderly horse.
But where Fiona was concerned he was
not discouraged.
“I better go back,” Fiona said, a blush
spotting her newly fattened face. “He
thinks he can’t play without me sitting
there. It’s silly, I hardly know the
game anymore. If I leave you now,
you can entertain yourself ? It must all
seem strange to you but you’ll be surprised
how soon you get used to it.
You’ll get to know who everybody is.
Except that some of them are pretty
well off in the clouds, you know—you
can’t expect them all to get to know
who you are.”
She slipped back into her chair and
said something into Aubrey’s ear. She
tapped her fingers across the back of his
hand.
Grant went in search of Kristy and
met her in the hall. She was pushing a
cart with pitchers of apple juice and
grape juice.
“Well?” she said.
Grant said, “Does she even know who
I am?” He could not decide. She could
have been playing a joke. It would not
be unlike her. She had given herself away
by that little pretense at the end, talking
to him as if she thought perhaps he was
a new resident. If it was a pretense.
Kristy said, “You just caught her at
sort of a bad moment. Involved in the
game.”
“She’s not even playing,” he said.
“Well, but her friend’s playing.Aubrey.”
“So who is Aubrey?”
“That’s who he is.Aubrey.Her friend.
Would you like a juice?”
Grant shook his head.
“Oh look,” said Kristy. “They get
these attachments. That takes over for
a while. Best buddy sort of thing. It’s
kind of a phase.”
“You mean she really might not know
who I am?”
“She might not. Not today. Then
tomorrow—you never know, do you?
You’ll see the way it is, once you’ve been
coming here for a while. You’ll learn not
to take it all so serious. Learn to take it
day by day.”
DAY by day. But things really didn’t
change back and forth and he
didn’t get used to the way they were.
Fiona was the one who seemed to get
used to him, but only as some persistent
visitor who took a special interest
in her. Or perhaps even as a nuisance
who must be prevented, according to
her old rules of courtesy, from realizing
that he was one. She treated him
with a distracted, social sort of kindness
that was successful in keeping
him from asking the most obvious, the
most necessary question: did she remember
him as her husband of nearly
fifty years? He got the impression that
she would be embarrassed by such a
question—embarrassed not for herself
but for him.
Kristy told him that Aubrey had been
the local representative of a company that
sold weed killer “and all that kind of stuff ”
to farmers. And then when he was not
very old or even retired, she said, he had
suffered some unusual kind of damage.
“His wife is the one takes care of

him, usually at home. She just put him
in here on temporary care so she could
get a break. Her sister wanted her to go
to Florida. See, she’s had a hard time,
you wouldn’t ever have expected a man
like him—they just went on a holiday
somewhere and he got something, like
some bug that gave him a terrible high
fever? And it put him in a coma and
left him like he is now.”
Most afternoons the pair could be
found at the card table. Aubrey had
large, thick-fingered hands. It was difficult
for him to manage his cards. Fiona
shuffled and dealt for him and sometimes
moved quickly to straighten a
card that seemed to be slipping from his
grasp. Grant would watch from across
the room her darting move and quick
laughing apology. He could see Aubrey’s
husbandly frown as a wisp of
her hair touched his cheek. Aubrey
preferred to ignore her, as long as she
stayed close.
But let her smile her greeting at
Grant, let her push back her chair and
get up to offer him tea—showing that
she had accepted his right to be there—
and Aubrey’s face took on its look of
sombre consternation. He would let the
cards slide from his fingers and fall on
the floor to spoil the game. And Fiona
then had to get busy and put things
right.
If Fiona and Aubrey weren’t at the
bridge table they might be walking
along the halls, Aubrey hanging on to
the railing with one hand and clutching
Fiona’s arm or shoulder with the other.
The nurses thought that it was a marvel,
the way she had got him out of his
wheelchair. Though for longer trips—
to the conservatory at one end of the
building or the television room at the
other—the wheelchair was called for.
In the conservatory, the pair would
find themselves a seat among the most
lush and thick and tropical-looking
plants—a bower, if you liked. Grant
stood nearby, on occasion, on the other
side of the greenery, listening. Mixed in
with the rustle of the leaves and the
sound of plashing water was Fiona’s soft
talk and her laughter. Then some sort of
chortle. Aubrey could talk, though his
voice probably didn’t sound as it used
to.He seemed to say something now—
a couple of thick syllables.
Take care. He’s here. My love.
Grant made an effort, and cut his
visits down to Wednesdays and Saturdays.
Saturdays had a holiday bustle and
tension. Families arrived in clusters.
Mothers were usually in charge; they
were the ones who kept the conversation
afloat. Men seemed cowed, teenagers
affronted. No children or grandchildren
appeared to visit Aubrey, and
since they could not play cards—the tables
being taken over for ice-cream parties—
he and Fiona stayed clear of the
Saturday parade. The conservatory was
far too popular then for any of their intimate
conversations. Those might be
going on, of course, behind Fiona’s
closed door.Grant could not manage to
knock when he found it closed, though
he stood there for some time staring at
the Disney-style nameplate with an intense,
a truly malignant dislike.
Or they might be in Aubrey’s room.
But he did not know where that was.
The more he explored this place the
more corridors and seating spaces and
ramps he discovered, and in his wanderings
he was still apt to get lost. One
Saturday he looked out a window and
saw Fiona—it had to be her—wheeling
Aubrey along one of the paved paths
now cleared of snow and ice. She was
wearing a silly wool hat and a jacket
with swirls of blue and purple, the sort
of thing he had seen on local women at
the supermarket. It must be that they
didn’t bother to sort out the wardrobes
of the women who were roughly the
same size and counted on the women
not to recognize their own clothes anyway.
They had cut her hair, too. They
had cut away her angelic halo.
On a Wednesday, when everything
was more normal and card games were
going on again and the women in the
Crafts Room were making silk flowers
or costumed dolls—and when Aubrey
and Fiona were again in evidence, so
that it was possible for Grant to have
one of his brief and friendly and maddening
conversations with his wife—he
said to her, “Why did they chop off
your hair?”
Fiona put her hands up to her head,
to check.
“Why—I never missed it,” she said.
WHEN Grant had first started teaching
Anglo-Saxon and Nordic
literature he got the regular sort of students
in his classes. But after a few years
he noticed a change. Married women

had started going back to school. Not
with the idea of qualifying for a better
job, or for any job, but simply to give
themselves something more interesting
to think about than their usual housework
and hobbies. To enrich their lives.
And perhaps it followed naturally that
the men who taught them these things
became part of the enrichment, that
these men seemed to these women more
mysterious and desirable than the men
they still cooked for and slept with.
Those who signed up for Grant’s
courses might have a Scandinavian
background or they might have learned
something about Norse mythology from
Wagner or historical novels. There were
also a few who thought he was teaching
a Celtic language and for whom everything
Celtic had a mystic allure. He
spoke to such aspirants fairly roughly
from his side of the desk.
“If you want to learn a pretty language
go and learn Spanish. Then you
can use it if you go to Mexico.”
Some took his warning and drifted
away. Others seemed to be moved in a
personal way by his demanding tone.
They worked with a will and brought
into his office, into his regulated satisfactory
life, the great surprising bloom
of their mature female compliance, their
tremulous hope of approval.
He chose a woman named Jacqui
Adams. She was the opposite of Fiona—
short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive.
A stranger to irony. The affair lasted for
a year, until her husband was transferred.
When they were saying goodbye
in her car, she began to shake uncontrollably.
It was as if she had hypothermia.
She wrote to him a few times, but
he found the tone of her letters overwrought
and could not decide how to
answer. He let the time for answering
slip away while he became magically
and unexpectedly involved with a girl
who was young enough to be Jacqui’s
daughter.
For another and more dizzying development
had taken place while he was
busy with Jacqui. Young girls with long
hair and sandalled feet were coming
into his office and all but declaring
themselves ready for sex. The cautious
approaches, the tender intimations of
feeling required with Jacqui were out
the window. A whirlwind hit him,
as it did many others. Scandals burst
wide open, with high and painful drama
all round but a feeling that somehow
it was better so. There were reprisals;
there were firings. But those fired went
off to teach at smaller, more tolerant
colleges or Open Learning Centers, and
many wives left behind got over the

shock and took up the costumes, the
sexual nonchalance of the girls who had
tempted their men. Academic parties,
which used to be so predictable, became
a minefield. An epidemic had broken
out, it was spreading like the Spanish
flu. Only this time people ran after contagion,
and few between sixteen and
sixty seemed willing to be left out.
That was exaggeration, of course.
Fiona was quite willing. And Grant
himself did not go overboard.What he
felt was mainly a gigantic increase in
well-being. A tendency to pudginess
which he had had since he was twelve
years old disappeared. He ran up steps
two at a time. He appreciated as never
before a pageant of torn clouds and
winter sunsets seen from his office window,
the charm of antique lamps glowing
between his neighbors’ living-room
curtains, the cries of children in the
park, at dusk, unwilling to leave the
hill where they’d been tobogganing.
Come summer, he learned the names of
flowers. In his classroom, after being
coached by his nearly voiceless motherin-
law (her affliction was cancer in the
throat), he risked reciting the majestic
and gory Icelandic ode, the Höfudlausn,
composed to honor King Erik Bloodaxe
by the skald whom that king had
condemned to death.
Fiona had never learned
Icelandic and she had never
shown much respect for the
stories that it preserved—the
stories that Grant had taught
and written about. She referred
to their heroes as “old
Njal” or “old Snorri.” But in
the last few years she had
developed an interest in the
country itself and looked at
travel guides. She read about
William Morris’s trip, and
Auden’s. She didn’t really
plan to travel there. She said
there ought to be one place
you thought about and knew
about and maybe longed for
but never did get to see.
Nonetheless, the next time
he went to Meadowlake, Grant
brought Fiona a book he’d
found of nineteenth-century
watercolors made by a lady
traveller to Iceland. It was a

Wednesday. He went looking
for her at the card tables but

didn’t see her. A woman called out to
him, “She’s not here. She’s sick.”
Her voice sounded self-important
and excited—pleased with herself for
having recognized him when he knew
nothing about her. Perhaps also pleased
with all she knew about Fiona, about
Fiona’s life here, thinking it was maybe
more than he knew.
“He’s not here, either,” she added.
Grant went to find Kristy, who didn’t
have much time for him. She was talking
to a weepy woman who looked like
a first-time visitor.
“Nothing really,” she said, when he
asked what was the matter with Fiona.
“She’s just having a day in bed today,
just a bit of an upset.”
Fiona was sitting straight up in the
bed. He hadn’t noticed, the few times
that he had been in this room, that this
was a hospital bed and could be cranked
up in such a way. She was wearing one
of her high-necked maidenly gowns,
and her face had a pallor that was like
flour paste.
Aubrey was beside her in his wheelchair,
pushed as close to the bed as he
could get. Instead of the nondescript
open-necked shirts he usually wore, he
was wearing a jacket and tie. His nattylooking
tweed hat was resting on the bed.
He looked as if he had been out on important
business.
Whatever he’d been doing, he looked
worn out by it. He, too, was gray in
the face.
They both looked up at Grant with
a stony grief-ridden apprehension that
turned to relief, if not to welcome, when
they saw who he was. Not who they
thought he’d be.They were hanging on to
each other’s hands and they did not let go.
The hat on the bed.The jacket and tie.
It wasn’t that Aubrey had been out.
It wasn’t a question of where he’d been
or whom he’d been to see. It was where
he was going.
Grant set the book down on the bed
beside Fiona’s free hand.
“It’s about Iceland,” he said. “I thought
maybe you’d like to look at it.”
“Why, thank you,” said Fiona. She
didn’t look at the book.
“Iceland,” he said.
She said, “Ice-land.” The first syllable
managed to hold a tinkle of interest,
but the second fell flat. Anyway,
it was necessary for her to turn her attention
back to Aubrey, who was pull

ing his great thick hand out of hers.
“What is it?” she said. “What is it,
dear heart?”
Grant had never heard her use this
flowery expression before.
“Oh all right,” she said. “Oh here.”
And she pulled a handful of tissues
from the box beside her bed. Aubrey
had begun to weep.
“Here. Here,” she said, and he got
hold of the Kleenex as well as he could
and made a few awkward but lucky
swipes at his face.While he was occupied,
Fiona turned to Grant.
“Do you by any chance have any influence
around here?” she said in a whisper.
“I’ve seen you talking to them . . .”
Aubrey made a noise of protest or
weariness or disgust. Then his upper
body pitched forward as if he wanted
to throw himself against her. She scrambled
half out of bed and caught him
and held on to him. It seemed improper
for Grant to help her.
“Hush,” Fiona was saying. “Oh,
honey. Hush.We’ll get to see each other.
We’ll have to. I’ll go and see you. You’ll
come and see me.”
Aubrey made the same sound again
with his face in her chest and there was
nothing Grant could decently do but
get out of the room.
“I just wish his wife would hurry up
and get here,” Kristy said when he ran
into her. “I wish she’d get him out of
here and cut the agony short.We’ve got
to start serving supper before long and
how are we supposed to get her to swallow
anything with him still hanging
around?”
Grant said, “Should I stay?”
“What for? She’s not sick, you know.”
“To keep her company,” he said.
Kristy shook her head.
“They have to get over these things
on their own. They’ve got short memories,
usually. That’s not always so bad.”
Grant left without going back to
Fiona’s room. He noticed that the wind
was actually warm and the crows were
making an uproar. In the parking lot a
woman wearing a tartan pants suit was
getting a folded-up wheelchair out of
the trunk of her car.
FIONA did not get over her sorrow.
She didn’t eat at mealtimes, though
she pretended to, hiding food in her
napkin. She was being given a supplementary
drink twice a day—someone
stayed and watched while she swallowed
it down. She got out of bed and
dressed herself, but all she wanted to do
then was sit in her room. She wouldn’t
have had any exercise at all if Kristy,
or Grant during visiting hours, hadn’t
walked her up and down in the corridors
or taken her outside.Weeping had
left her eyes raw-edged and dim. Her
cardigan—if it was hers—would be
buttoned crookedly. She had not got to
the stage of leaving her hair unbrushed
or her nails uncleaned, but that might
come soon. Kristy said that her muscles
were deteriorating, and that if she
didn’t improve they would put her on
a walker.
“But, you know, once they get a
walker they start to depend on it and
they never walk much anymore, just get
wherever it is they have to go,” she said
to Grant. “You’ll have to work at her
harder.Try to encourage her.”
But Grant had no luck at that. Fiona
seemed to have taken a dislike to him,
though she tried to cover it up. Perhaps
she was reminded, every time she saw
him, of her last minutes with Aubrey,
when she had asked him for help and
he hadn’t helped her.
He didn’t see much point in mentioning
their marriage now.
The supervisor called him in to her
office. She said that Fiona’s weight was
going down even with the supplement.
“The thing is, I’m sure you know, we
don’t do any prolonged bed care on the
first floor.We do it temporarily if someone
isn’t feeling well, but if they get too
weak to move around and be responsible
we have to consider upstairs.”
He said he didn’t think that Fiona
had been in bed that often.
“No. But if she can’t keep up her
strength she will be. Right now she’s
borderline.”
Grant said that he had thought the
second floor was for people whose minds
were disturbed.
“That, too,” she said.
THE street Grant found himself
driving down was called Blackhawks
Lane. The houses all looked to
have been built around the same time,
perhaps thirty or forty years ago. The
street was wide and curving and there
were no sidewalks. Friends of Grant
and Fiona’s had moved to places something
like this when they began to have

their children, and young families still
lived here. There were basketball hoops
over garage doors and tricycles in the
driveways. Some of the houses had
gone downhill. The yards were marked
by tire tracks, the windows plastered
with tinfoil or hung with faded flags.
But a few seemed to have been kept up
as well as possible by the people who
had moved into them when they were
new—people who hadn’t had the money
or perhaps hadn’t felt the need to move
on to some place better.
The house that was listed in the
phone book as belonging to Aubrey and
his wife was one of these. The front
walk was paved with flagstones and
bordered by hyacinths that stood as stiff
as china flowers, alternately pink and
blue.
He hadn’t remembered anything about
Aubrey’s wife except the tartan suit he
had seen her wearing in the parking lot.
The tails of the jacket had flared open
as she bent into the trunk of the car. He
had got the impression of a trim waist
and wide buttocks.
She was not wearing the tartan suit
today. Brown belted slacks and a pink
sweater. He was right about the waist—
the tight belt showed she made a point
of it. It might have been better if she
didn’t, since she bulged out considerably
above and below.
She could be ten or twelve years
younger than her husband. Her hair
was short, curly, artificially reddened.
She had blue eyes—a lighter blue than
Fiona’s—a flat robin’s-egg or turquoise
blue, slanted by a slight puffiness. And a
good many wrinkles, made more noticeable
by a walnut-stain makeup. Or
perhaps that was her Florida tan.
He said that he didn’t quite know
how to introduce himself.
“I used to see your husband at Meadowlake.
I’m a regular visitor there myself.”
“Yes,” said Aubrey’s wife, with an aggressive
movement of her chin.
“How is your husband doing?”
The “doing” was added on at the last
moment.
“He’s O.K.,” she said.
“My wife and he struck up quite a
close friendship.”
“I heard about that.”
“I wanted to talk to you about something
if you had a minute.”
“My husband did not try to start
anything with your wife if that’s what
you’re getting at,” she said. “He did not
molest her. He isn’t capable of it and he
wouldn’t anyway. From what I heard it
was the other way round.”
Grant said, “No. That isn’t it at all. I
didn’t come here with any complaints
about anything.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m sorry. I
thought you did. You better come in
then. It’s blowing cold in through the
door. It’s not as warm out today as it
looks.”
So it was something of a victory for
him even to get inside.
She took him past the living room,
saying, “We’ll have to sit in the kitchen,
where I can hear Aubrey.”
Grant caught sight of two layers of
front-window curtains, both blue, one
sheer and one silky, a matching blue
sofa and a daunting pale carpet, various
bright mirrors and ornaments. Fiona
had a word for those sort of swooping
curtains—she said it like a joke, though
the women she’d picked it up from used
it seriously. Any room that Fiona fixed
up was bare and bright. She would have
deplored the crowding of all this fancy
stuff into such a small space. From a
room off the kitchen—a sort of sunroom,
though the blinds were drawn
against the afternoon brightness—he
could hear the sounds of television.
The answer to Fiona’s prayers sat a
few feet away, watching what sounded
like a ballgame. His wife looked in
at him.
She said, “You O.K.?” and partly
closed the door.
“You might as well have a cup of
coffee,” she said to Grant. “My son got
him on the sports channel a year ago
Christmas. I don’t know what we’d do
without it.”
On the kitchen counters there were
all sorts of contrivances and appliances—
coffeemaker, food processor, knife sharpener,
and some things Grant didn’t
know the names or uses of. All looked
new and expensive, as if they had just
been taken out of their wrappings, or
were polished daily.
He thought it might be a good idea
to admire things. He admired the coffeemaker
she was using and said that he
and Fiona had always meant to get one.
This was absolutely untrue—Fiona had
been devoted to a European contraption
that made only two cups at a time.
“They gave us that,” she said. “Our

son and his wife. They live in Kamloops.
B.C. They send us more stuff
than we can handle. It wouldn’t hurt if
they would spend the money to come
and see us instead.”
Grant said philosophically, “I suppose
they’re busy with their own lives.”
“They weren’t too busy to go to
Hawaii last winter. You could understand
it if we had somebody else in
the family, closer at hand. But he’s the
only one.”
She poured the coffee into two
brown-and-green ceramic mugs that
she took from the amputated branches
of a ceramic tree trunk that sat on
the table.
“People do get lonely,” Grant said.
He thought he saw his chance now. “If
they’re deprived of seeing somebody
they care about, they do feel sad. Fiona,
for instance. My wife.”
“I thought you said you went and
visited her.”
“I do,” he said. “That’s not it.”
Then he took the plunge, going on
to make the request he’d come to make.
Could she consider taking Aubrey back
to Meadowlake, maybe just one day a
week, for a visit? It was only a drive of a
few miles. Or if she’d like to take the time
off—Grant hadn’t thought of this before
and was rather dismayed to hear
himself suggest it—then he himself could
take Aubrey out there, he wouldn’t mind
at all. He was sure he could manage it.
While he talked she moved her closed
lips and her hidden tongue as if she
were trying to identify some dubious
flavor. She brought milk for his coffee
and a plate of ginger cookies.
“Homemade,” she said as she set
the plate down. There was challenge
rather than hospitality in her tone. She
said nothing more until she had sat
down, poured milk into her coffee, and
stirred it.
Then she said no.
“No. I can’t do that. And the reason
is, I’m not going to upset him.”
“Would it upset him?” Grant said
earnestly.
“Yes, it would. It would. That’s no
way to do. Bringing him home and taking
him back. That would just confuse
him.”
“But wouldn’t he understand that it
was just a visit? Wouldn’t he get into
the pattern of it?”
“He understands everything all right.”
She said this as if he had offered an
insult to Aubrey. “But it’s still an interruption.
And then I’ve got to get him
all ready and get him into the car, and
he’s a big man, he’s not so easy to manage
as you might think. I’ve got to maneuver
him into the car and pack his
chair and all that and what for? If I go
to all that trouble I’d prefer to take him
someplace that was more fun.”
“But even if I agreed to do it?” Grant
said, keeping his tone hopeful and reasonable.
“It’s true, you shouldn’t have
the trouble.”
“You couldn’t,” she said flatly. “You
don’t know him. You couldn’t handle
him. He wouldn’t stand for you doing
for him. All that bother and what would
he get out of it?”
Grant didn’t think he should mention
Fiona again.
“It’d make more sense to take him to
the mall,” she said. “Or now the lake
boats are starting to run again, he might
get a charge out of going and watching
that.”
She got up and fetched her cigarettes
and lighter from the window above the
sink.
“You smoke?” she said.
He said no, thanks, though he didn’t
know if a cigarette was being offered.
“Did you never? Or did you quit?”
“Quit,” he said.
“How long ago was that?”
He thought about it.
“Thirty years. No—more.”
He had decided to quit around the
time he started up with Jacqui. But he
couldn’t remember whether he quit first,
and thought a big reward was coming
to him for quitting, or thought that the
time had come to quit, now that he had
such a powerful diversion.
“I’ve quit quitting,” she said, lighting
up. “Just made a resolution to quit quitting,
that’s all.”
Maybe that was the reason for the
wrinkles. Somebody—a woman—had
told him that women who smoked
developed a special set of fine facial
wrinkles. But it could have been from
the sun, or just the nature of her skin—
her neck was noticeably wrinkled as
well.Wrinkled neck, youthfully full and
uptilted breasts. Women of her age
usually had these contradictions. The
bad and good points, the genetic luck
or lack of it, all mixed up together. Very
few kept their beauty whole, though

shadowy, as Fiona had done. And perhaps
that wasn’t even true. Perhaps
he only thought that because he’d
known Fiona when she was young.
When Aubrey looked at his wife did
he see a high-school girl full of scorn
and sass, with a tilt to her blue eyes,
pursing her fruity lips around a forbidden
cigarette?
“So your wife’s depressed?” Aubrey’s
wife said. “What’s your wife’s name? I
forget.”
“It’s Fiona.”
“Fiona. And what’s yours? I don’t
think I was ever told that.”
Grant said, “It’s Grant.”
She stuck her hand out unexpectedly
across the table.
“Hello, Grant. I’m Marian.”
“So now we know each other’s names,”
she said, “there’s no point in not telling
you straight out what I think. I don’t
know if he’s still so stuck on seeing
your—on seeing Fiona. Or not. I don’t
ask him and he’s not telling me. Maybe
just a passing fancy. But I don’t feel like
taking him back there in case it turns
out to be more than that. I can’t afford
to risk it. I don’t want him upset and
carrying on. I’ve got my hands full with
him as it is. I don’t have any help. It’s
just me here. I’m it.”
“Did you ever consider—I’m sure it’s
very hard for you—”Grant said. “Did you
ever consider his going in there for good?”
He had lowered his voice almost to a
whisper but she did not seem to feel a
need to lower hers.
“No,” she said. “I’m keeping him
right here.”
Grant said, “Well. That’s very good
and noble of you.” He hoped the word
“noble” had not sounded sarcastic. He
had not meant it to be.
“You think so?” she said. “Noble is
not what I’m thinking about.”
“Still. It’s not easy.”
“No, it isn’t. But the way I am, I
don’t have much choice. I don’t have
the money to put him in there unless I
sell the house. The house is what we
own outright. Otherwise I don’t have
anything in the way of resources. Next
year I’ll have his pension and my pension,
but even so I couldn’t afford to
keep him there and hang on to the
house. And it means a lot to me, my
house does.”
“It’s very nice,” said Grant.
“Well, it’s all right. I put a lot into it.
Fixing it up and keeping it up. I don’t
want to lose it.”
“No. I see your point.”
“The company left us high and dry,”
she said. “I don’t know all the ins and
outs of it but basically he got shoved
out. It ended up with them saying he
owed them money and when I tried
to find out what was what he just went
on saying it’s none of my business.
What I think is he did something pretty
stupid. But I’m not supposed to ask so
I shut up. You’ve been married. You
are married. You know how it is. And
in the middle of me finding out about
this we’re supposed to go on this trip
and can’t get out of it. And on the trip
he takes sick from this virus you never
heard of and goes into a coma. So that
pretty well gets him off the hook.”
Grant said, “Bad luck.”
“I don’t mean he got sick on purpose.
It just happened. He’s not mad at me
anymore and I’m not mad at him. It’s
just life. You can’t beat life.”
She flicked her tongue in a cat’s
businesslike way across her top lip, getting
the cookie crumbs. “I sound like
I’m quite the philosopher, don’t I? They
told me out there you used to be a university
professor.”
“Quite a while ago,” Grant said.
“I bet I know what you’re thinking,”
she said. “You’re thinking there’s a mercenary
type of a person.”
“I’m not making judgments of that
sort. It’s your life.”
“You bet it is.”
He thought they should end on a
more neutral note. So he asked her if
her husband had worked in a hardware
store in the summers, when he was
going to school.
“I never heard about it,” she said. “I
wasn’t raised here.”
GRANT realized he’d failed with
Aubrey’s wife. Marian. He had
thought that what he’d have to contend
with would be a woman’s natural sexual
jealousy—or her resentment, the
stubborn remains of sexual jealousy.He
had not had any idea of the way she
might be looking at things. And yet in
some depressing way the conversation
had not been unfamiliar to him. That
was because it reminded him of conversations
he’d had with people in his
own family. His relatives, probably even
his mother, had thought the way Mar

ian thought. Money first. They had believed
that when other people did not
think that way it was because they had
lost touch with reality. That was how
Marian would see him, certainly. A silly
person, full of boring knowledge and
protected by some fluke from the truth
about life. A person who didn’t have to
worry about holding on to his house
and could go around dreaming up the
fine generous schemes that he believed
would make another person happy.What
a jerk, she would be thinking now.
Being up against a person like that
made him feel hopeless, exasperated, finally
almost desolate.Why? Because he
couldn’t be sure of holding on to himself,
against people like that? Because he was
afraid that in the end they were right?
Yet he might have married her. Or some
girl like that. If he’d stayed back where
he belonged. She’d have been appetizing
enough. Probably a flirt. The fussy way
she had of shifting her buttocks on the
kitchen chair, her pursed mouth, a
slightly contrived air of menace—that
was what was left of the more or less
innocent vulgarity of a small-town flirt.
She must have had some hopes
when she picked Aubrey. His good
looks, his salesman’s job, his white-collar
expectations. She must have believed
that she would end up better off than
she was now. And so it often happened
with those practical people. In spite
of their calculations, their survival instincts,
they might not get as far as
they had quite reasonably expected. No
doubt it seemed unfair.
IN the kitchen the first thing he saw was
the light blinking on his answering
machine. He thought the same
thing he always thought now.
Fiona. He pressed the button
before he took his coat off.
“Hello, Grant. I hope I
got the right person. I just
thought of something. There
is a dance here in town at the
Legion supposed to be for singles on
Saturday night and I am on the lunch
committee, which means I can bring a
free guest. So I wondered whether you
would happen to be interested in that?
Call me back when you get a chance.”
A woman’s voice gave a local number.
Then there was a beep and the
same voice started talking again.
“I just realized I’d forgotten to say

who it was. Well, you probably recognized
the voice. It’s Marian. I’m still
not so used to these machines. And I
wanted to say I realize you’re not a single
and I don’t mean it that way. I’m not
either, but it doesn’t hurt to get out once
in a while. If you are interested you can
call me and if you are not you don’t
need to bother. I just thought you might
like the chance to get out. It’s Marian
speaking. I guess I already said that.
O.K. then. Goodbye.”
Her voice on the machine was different
from the voice he’d heard a short
time ago in her house. Just a little different
in the first message, more so in
the second. A tremor of nerves there,
an affected nonchalance, a hurry to get
through and a reluctance to let go.
Something had happened to her. But
when had it happened? If it had been
immediate, she had concealed it very
successfully all the time he was with her.
More likely it came on her gradually,
maybe after he’d gone away. Not necessarily
as a blow of attraction. Just the
realization that he was a possibility, a
man on his own. More or less on his
own. A possibility that she might as
well try to follow up.
But she’d had the jitters when she
made the first move. She had put herself
at risk. How much of herself he
could not yet tell. Generally a woman’s
vulnerability increased as time went on,
as things progressed. All you could tell
at the start was that if there was an edge
of it then, there’d be more later. It gave
him a satisfaction—why deny it?—to
have brought that out in her. To have
roused something like a shimmer, a
blurring, on the surface of her personality.
To have heard in her testy
broad vowels this faint plea.
He set out the eggs and
mushrooms to make himself
an omelette. Then he thought
he might as well pour a drink.
Anything was possible.Was
that true—was anything possible?
For instance, if he wanted to,
would he be able to break her down, get
her to the point where she might listen
to him about taking Aubrey back to
Fiona? And not just for visits but for
the rest of Aubrey’s life. And what
would become of him and Marian after
he’d delivered Aubrey to Fiona?
Marian would be sitting in her house
now, waiting for him to call. Or proba

bly not sitting. Doing things to keep
herself busy. She might have fed Aubrey
while Grant was buying the mushrooms
and driving home. She might
now be preparing him for bed. But
all the time she would be conscious
of the phone, of the silence of the
phone. Maybe she would have calculated
how long it would take Grant to
drive home. His address in the phone
book would have given her a rough
idea of where he lived. She would calculate
how long, then add to that the
time it might take him to shop for supper
(figuring that a man alone would
shop every day). Then a certain amount
of time for him to get around to listening
to his messages. And as the
silence persisted she’d think of other
things. Other errands he might have
had to do before he got home. Or perhaps
a dinner out, a meeting that meant
he would not get home at suppertime
at all.
What conceit on his part. She was
above all things a sensible woman. She
would go to bed at her regular time
thinking that he didn’t look as if he’d
be a decent dancer anyway.Too stiff, too
professorial.
He stayed near the phone, looking
at magazines, but he didn’t pick it up
when it rang again.
“Grant. This is Marian. I was down
in the basement putting the wash in the
dryer and I heard the phone and when I
got upstairs whoever it was had hung
up. So I just thought I ought to say I
was here. If it was you and if you are
even home. Because I don’t have a machine,
obviously, so you couldn’t leave a
message. So I just wanted. To let you
know.” The time was now twenty-five
after ten.
“Bye.”
He would say that he’d just got
home. There was no point in bringing
to her mind the picture of his sitting
here weighing the pros and cons.
Drapes. That would be her word for
the blue curtains—drapes. And why
not? He thought of the ginger cookies
so perfectly round that she had to announce
they were homemade, the ceramic
coffee mugs on their ceramic tree,
a plastic runner, he was sure, protecting
the hall carpet. A high-gloss exactness
and practicality that his mother
had never achieved but would have
admired—was that why he could feel
this twinge of bizarre and unreliable
affection? Or was it because he’d had
two more drinks after the first?
The walnut-stain tan—he believed
now that it was a tan—of her face and
neck would most likely continue into
her cleavage, which would be deep,
crêpey-skinned, odorous and hot. He
had that to think of as he dialled the
number that he had already written
down. That and the practical sensuality
of her cat’s tongue. Her gemstone
eyes.
FIONA was in her room but not in
bed. She was sitting by the open
window, wearing a seasonable but oddly
short and bright dress. Through the
window came a heady warm blast of
lilacs in bloom and the spring manure
spread over the fields.
She had a book open in her lap.
She said, “Look at this beautiful
book I found. It’s about Iceland. You
wouldn’t think they’d leave valuable
books lying around in the rooms. But I
think they’ve got the clothes mixed
up—I never wear yellow.”
“Fiona,” he said.
“Are we all checked out now?” she
said. He thought the brightness of her
voice was wavering a little. “You’ve been
gone a long time.”
“Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for
you. Do you remember Aubrey?”
She stared at Grant for a moment, as
if waves of wind had come beating into
her face. Into her face, into her head,
pulling everything to rags. All rags and
loose threads.
“Names elude me,” she said harshly.
Then the look passed away as she
retrieved, with an effort, some bantering
grace. She set the book down carefully
and stood up and lifted her arms
to put them around him. Her skin or
her breath gave off a faint new smell, a
smell that seemed to Grant like green
stems in rank water.
“I’m happy to see you,” she said, both
sweetly and formally. She pinched his
earlobes, hard.
“You could have just driven away,”
she said. “Just driven away without a
care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken
me. Forsaken.”
He kept his face against her white
hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped
skull.
He said, “Not a chance.”

-------------------The End-------------------------------