Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

with wandering, and also that he had a perfectly good Biology degree and a teaching certificate from New Zealand. Nina told him about the town on the east shore of Lake Huron, in Canada, where she had visited relatives when she was a child. She described the tall trees along the streets, the plain old houses, the sunsets over the lake—an excellent place for their life together, and a place where, because of Commonwealth connections, Lewis might find it easier to get a job. They did get jobs, both of them, at the high school—though Nina gave up teaching a few years later, when Latin was phased out. She could have taken upgrading courses, preparing herself to teach something else, but she was just as glad, secretly, to no longer be working in the same place, and at the same sort of job, as Lewis. The force of his personality, the unsettling style of his teaching, made enemies as well as friends, and it was a rest, for her, not to be in the thick of it.
    They had left it rather late to have a child. And she suspected that they were both a little too vain—they didn’t like the thought of wrapping themselves up in the slightly comic and diminished identities of Mom and Dad. Both of them—but particularly Lewis—were admired by the students for being unlike the adults around home. More energetic mentally and physically, more complex and vivid and capable of getting some good out of life.
    She joined a choral society. Many of its recitals were given in churches, and it was then that she learned what a deep dislike Lewis had of these places. She argued that there often wasn’t any other suitable space available and it didn’t mean that the music was religious (though it was a bit hard to argue this when the music was the Messiah) . She said that he was being old-fashioned and that there was little harm any religion could do nowadays. This started a great row. They had to rush around slamming down the windows, so that their roused voices might not be heard out on the sidewalk in the warm summer evening.
    A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles.
    Can’t you tolerate people being different, why is this so important?
    If this isn’t important, nothing is.
    The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went to bed speechless, parted speechless the next morning, and during the day were overtaken by fear—hers that he would never come home, his that when he did she would not be there. Their luck held, however. They came together in the late afternoon pale with contrition, shaking with love, like people who had narrowly escaped an earthquake and had been walking around in naked desolation.
    That was not the last time. Nina, brought up to be so peaceable, wondered if this was normal life. She couldn’t discuss it with him—their reunions were too grateful, too sweet and silly. He called her Sweet Nina-Hyena and she called him Merry Weather Lewis.

    A few years ago, a new sort of sign started appearing on the roadside. For a long time there had been signs urging conversion, and those with large pink hearts and the flattening line of beats, meant to discourage abortion. What was showing up now were texts from Genesis.

    In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth.
    God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light.
    God created Man in his own image. Male and Female created
he them.

    Usually there was a rainbow or a rose or some symbol of Edenic loveliness painted alongside the words.
    “What is the meaning of all this?” said Nina. “It’s a change anyway. From ‘God so loved the world.’”
    “It’s creationism,” said Lewis.
    “I could figure that. I mean, why is it up on signs all over the place?“
    Lewis said there was a definite movement now to reinforce belief in the literal Bible story.
    “Adam and Eve. The same old rubbish.”
    He seemed not greatly disturbed about this—or any more affronted than he might be by the crèche that was put up every Christmas not in front of a church but on the lawn of the Town Hall. On church property was one thing, he said, town property another. Nina’s Quaker teaching had not put much emphasis on Adam and Eve, so when she got home she took out the King James Bible and read the story all the way through. She was delighted