Alice Munros Best

the accident?”
    Arthur said he did.
    “I have something to ask you and you may think it strange.”
    He nodded.
    “And my asking it – I want you to – it is confidential.”
    “Yes, indeed,” he said.
    “What did he look like?”
    Look like? Arthur was puzzled. He was puzzled by her making such a fuss and secret about it – surely it was natural to be interested in what a man might look like who had been coming in and making off with her books without her knowing about it – and because he could not help her, he shook his head. He could not bring any picture of Jack Agnew to mind.
    “Tall,” he said. “I believe he was on the tall side. Otherwise I cannot tell you. I am really not such a good person to ask. I can recognize a man easily but I can’t ever give much of a physical description, even when it’s someone I see on a daily basis.”
    “But I thought you were the one – I heard you were the one–” she said. “Who picked him up. His head.”
    Arthur said stiffly, “I didn’t think that you could just leave it lying there.” He felt disappointed in the woman, uneasy and ashamed for her. But he tried to speak matter-of-factly, keeping reproach out of his voice.
    “I could not even tell you the color of his hair. It was all – all pretty much obliterated, by that time.”
    She said nothing for a moment or two and he did not look at her. Then she said, “It must seem as if I am one of those people – one of those people who are fascinated by these sorts of things.”
    Arthur made a protesting noise, but it did, of course, seem to him that she must be like that.
    “I should not have asked you,” she said. “I should not have mentioned it. I can never explain to you why I did. I would like just to ask you, if you can help it, never to think that that is the kind of person I am.”
    Arthur heard the word “never.” She could never explain to him. He was never to think. In the midst of his disappointment he picked up this suggestion, that their conversations were to continue, and perhaps on a less haphazard basis. He heard a humility in her voice, but it was a humility that was based on some kind of assurance. Surely that was sexual.
    Or did he only think so, because this was the evening it was? It was the Saturday evening in the month when he usually went to Walley. He was going there tonight, he had only dropped in here on his way, he had not meant to stay as long as he had done. It was the night when he went to visit a woman whose name was Jane MacFarlane. Jane MacFarlane lived apart from her husband, but she was not thinking of getting a divorce. She had no children. She earned her living as a dressmaker. Arthur had first met her when she came to his house to make clothes for his wife. Nothing had gone on at that time, and neither of them had thought of it. In some ways Jane MacFarlane was a woman like the Librarian – good-looking, though not so young, plucky and stylish and good at her work. In other ways, not so like. He could not imagine Jane ever presenting a man with a mystery, and following that up with the information that it would never be solved. Jane was a woman to give a man peace. The submerged dialogue he had with her – sensual, limited, kind – was very like the one he had had with his wife.
    The Librarian went to the switch by the door, and turned out the main light. She locked the door. She disappeared among the shelves, turning out the lights there too, in a leisurely way. The town clock was striking nine. She must think that it was right. His own watch said three minutes to.
    It was time to get up, time for him to leave, time to go to Walley.
    When she had finished dealing with the lights, she came and sat down at the table beside him.
    He said, “I would never think of you in any way that would make you unhappy.”
    Turning out the lights shouldn’t have made it so dark. They were in the middle of summer. But it seemed that heavy rain clouds had moved in. When Arthur had last paid attention to the street, he had seen plenty of daylight left: country people shopping, boys squirting each other at thedrinking fountain, and young girls walking up and down in their soft, cheap, flowery summer dresses, letting the young men watch them from wherever the young men congregated – the Post Office steps, the front of the feed store. And now that he looked again he saw the street in an uproar from the loud wind that already carried a few drops of rain. The girls were