Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

a Sunday afternoon there was hardly any traffic, except on the main thoroughfares. Sometimes my route coincided with a bus route for a few blocks. A bus might go by with only two or three people in it. People I did not know and who did not know me. What a blessing.
    I had lied, I was not meeting any friends. My friends had mostly all gone home to wherever they lived. My fiancé would be away until the next day—he was visiting his parents, in Cobourg, on the way home from Ottawa. There would be nobody in the rooming house when I got there—nobody I had to bother talking to or listening to. I had nothing to do.
    When I had walked for over an hour, I saw a drugstore that was open. I went in and had a cup of coffee. The coffee was reheated, black and bitter—its taste was medicinal, exactly what I needed. I was already feeling relieved, and now I began to feel happy. Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late-afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows. To hear from the back of the shop the sounds of the ball game that the man who had served me was listening to on the radio. I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.
    This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.

Comfort

    Nina had been playing tennis in the late afternoon, on the high-school courts. After Lewis had left his job at the school she had boycotted the courts for a while, but that was nearly a year ago, and her friend Margaret—another retired teacher, whose departure had been routine and ceremonious, unlike Lewis’s—had talked her into playing there again.
    “Better get out a bit while you still can.”
    Margaret had already been gone when Lewis’s trouble occurred. She had written a letter from Scotland in support of him. But she was a person of such wide sympathies, such open understanding and far-reaching friendships, that the letter perhaps did not carry much weight. More of Margaret’s good-heartedness.
    “How is Lewis?” she said, when Nina drove her home that afternoon.
    Nina said, “Coasting.”
    The sun had already dropped nearly to the rim of the lake. Some trees that still held their leaves were flares of gold, but the summer warmth of the afternoon had been snatched away. The shrubs in front of Margaret’s house were all bundled up in sacking like mummies.
    This moment of the day made Nina think of the walks she and Lewis used to take after school and before supper. Short walks, of necessity as the days got dark, along out-of-town lanes and old railway embankments. But crowded with all that specific observation, spoken or not spoken, that she had learned or absorbed from Lewis. Bugs, grubs, snails, mosses, reeds in the ditch and shaggy-manes in the grass, animal tracks, nannyberries, cranberries—a deep mix stirred up a little differently every day. And every day a new step towards winter, an increased frugality, a withering.
    The house Nina and Lewis lived in had been built in the 1840s, close up to the sidewalk in the style of that time. If you were in the living room or dining room you could hear not only footsteps but conversations outside. Nina expected that Lewis would have heard the car door close.
    She entered whistling, as well as she could. See the conquering hero comes.
    “I won. I won. Hello?”

    But while she was out, Lewis had been dying. In fact, he had been killing himself. On the bedside table lay four little plastic packets, backed with foil. Each had contained two potent painkillers. Two extra packets lay beside these, inviolate, the white capsules still plumping up the plastic cover. When Nina picked these up, later, she would see that one of them had a mark on the foil, as if he had started to dig in, with a fingernail, then had given up as if he’d decided he had already had enough, or had at that moment been drawn into unconsciousness.
    His drinking glass was nearly empty. No water spilled.
    This was a thing they had talked about. The plan had been agreed to, but always as a thing that could happen—would happen—in the future. Nina had assumed that