Alice Munros Best

curved glass as through the bottom of a bottle. The sideboard too had a curving, gleaming belly, and seemed as big as a boat. Size was noticeable everywhere and particularly thickness. Thickness of towels and rugs and handles of knives and forks, and silences. There was a terrible amount of luxury and unease. After a day or so there Rose became so discouraged that her wrists and ankles felt weak. Picking up her knife and fork was a chore; cutting and chewing the perfect roast beef was almost beyond her; she got short of breath climbing the stairs. She had never known before how some places could choke you off, choke off your very life. She had not known this in spite of a number of very unfriendly places she had been in.
    The first morning, Patrick’s mother took her for a walk on the grounds, pointing out the greenhouse, the cottage where “the couple” lived: a charming, ivied, shuttered cottage, bigger than Dr. Henshawe’s house. The couple, the servants, were more gentle-spoken, more discreet and dignified, than anyone Rose could think of in Hanratty, and indeed they were superior in these ways to Patrick’s family.
    Patrick’s mother showed her the rose garden, the kitchen garden. There were many low stone walls.
    “Patrick built them,” said his mother. She explained anything with an indifference that bordered on distaste. “He built all these walls.”
    Rose’s voice came out full of false assurance, eager and inappropriately enthusiastic.
    “He must be a true Scot,” she said. Patrick was a Scot, in spite of his name. The Blatchfords had come from Glasgow. “Weren’t the beststonemasons always Scotsmen?” (She had learned quite recently not to say “Scotch.”) “Maybe he had stonemason ancestors.”
    She cringed afterward, thinking of these efforts, the pretense of ease and gaiety, as cheap and imitative as her clothes.
    “No,” said Patrick’s mother. “No. I don’t think they were stonemasons.” Something like fog went out from her: affront, disapproval, dismay. Rose thought that perhaps she had been offended by the suggestion that her husband’s family might have worked with their hands. When she got to know her better – or had observed her longer; it was impossible to get to know her – she understood that Patrick’s mother disliked anything fanciful, speculative, abstract, in conversation. She would also, of course, dislike Rose’s chatty tone. Any interest beyond the factual consideration of the matter at hand – food, weather, invitations, furniture, servants – seemed to her sloppy, ill-bred, and dangerous. It was all right to say, “This is a warm day,” but not, “This day reminds me of when we used to–” She hated people being
reminded.
    She was the only child of one of the early lumber barons of Vancouver Island. She had been born in a vanished northern settlement. But whenever Patrick tried to get her to talk about the past, whenever he asked her for the simplest sort of information – what steamers went up the coast, what year was the settlement abandoned, what was the route of the first logging railway – she would say irritably, “I don’t know. How would I know about that?” This irritation was the strongest note that ever got into her words.
    Neither did Patrick’s father care for this concern about the past. Many things, most things, about Patrick seemed to strike him as bad signs.
    “What do you want to know all that for?” he shouted down the table. He was a short square-shouldered man, red-faced, astonishingly belligerent. Patrick looked like his mother, who was tall, fair, and elegant in the most muted way possible, as if her clothes, her makeup, her style, were chosen with an ideal neutrality in mind.
    “Because I am interested in history,” said Patrick in an angry, pompous, but nervously breaking voice.
    “Because-I-am-interested-in-history,” said his sister Marion in an immediate parody, break and all. “History!”
    The sisters Joan and Marion were younger than Patrick, older than Rose. Unlike Patrick they showed no nervousness, no cracks in self-satisfaction. At an earlier meal they had questioned Rose.
    “Do you ride?”
    “No.”
    “Do you sail?”
    “No.”
    “Play tennis? Play golf? Play badminton?”
    No. No. No.
    “Perhaps she is an intellectual genius, like Patrick,” the father said. And Patrick, to Rose’s horror and embarrassment, began to shout at the table in general an account of her scholarships and prizes.