Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

pressed that bell.
    “I know Lionel’s away and I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I lent him a book, it’s a library book and now it’s overdue, and I just wondered if I could run up to his apartment and see if I could find it.”
    The landlady said, “Oh.” She was an old woman with a bandanna round her head and large dark spots on her face.
    “My husband and I are friends of Lionel’s. My husband was his professor at college.”
    The word “professor” was always useful. Lorna was given the key. She parked the stroller in the shade of the house and told Elizabeth to stay and watch Daniel.
    “This isn’t a playground,” Elizabeth said.
    “I just have to run upstairs and back. Just for a minute, okay?”
    Lionel’s room had an alcove at the end of it for a two-burner gas stove and a cupboard. No refrigerator and no sink, except for the one in the toilet. A Venetian blind stuck halfway down the window, and a square of linoleum whose pattern was covered by brown paint. There was a faint smell of the gas stove, mixed with a smell of unaired heavy clothing, perspiration, and some pine-scented decongestant, which she accepted—hardly thinking of it and not at all disliking it—as the intimate smell of Lionel himself.
    Other than that, the place gave out hardly any clues. She had come here not for any library book, of course, but to be for a moment inside the space where he lived, breathe his air, look out of his window. The view was of other houses, probably like this one chopped up into small apartments on the wooded slope of Grouse Mountain. The bareness, the anonymity of the room were severely challenging. Bed, bureau, table, chair. Just the furniture that had to be provided so that the room could be advertised as furnished. Even the tan chenille bedspread must have been there when he moved in. No pictures—not even a calendar—and most surprisingly, no books.
    Things must be hidden somewhere. In the bureau drawers? She couldn’t look. Not only because there was no time—she could hear Elizabeth calling her from the yard—but the very absence of whatever might be personal made the sense of Lionel stronger. Not just the sense of his austerity and his secrets, but of a watchfulness—almost as if he had set a trap and was waiting to see what she would do.
    What she really wanted to do was not to investigate anymore but to sit down on the floor, in the middle of the square of linoleum. To sit for hours not so much looking at this room as sinking into it. To stay in this room where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her. To stay here for a long, long time, growing sharper and lighter, light as a needle.

    On Saturday morning, Lorna and Brendan and the children were to drive to Penticton. A graduate student had invited them to his wedding. They would stay Saturday night and all day Sunday and Sunday night as well, and leave for home on Monday morning.
    “Have you told her?” Brendan said.
    “It’s all right. She isn’t expecting to come.”
    “But have you told her ?”
    Thursday was spent at Ambleside Beach. Lorna and Polly and the children rode there on buses, changing twice, encumbered with towels, beach toys, diapers, lunch, and Elizabeth’s blow-up dolphin. The physical predicaments they found themselves in, and the irritation and dismay that the sight of their party roused in other passengers, brought on a peculiarly feminine reaction—a mood of near hilarity. Getting away from the house where Lorna was installed as wife was helpful too. They reached the beach in triumph and ragtag disarray and set up their encampment, from which they took turns going into the water, minding the children, fetching soft drinks, Popsicles, french fries.
    Lorna was lightly tanned, Polly not at all. She stretched a leg out beside Lorna’s and said, “Look at that. Raw dough.”
    With all the work she had to do in the two houses, and with her job in the bank, she said, there was not a quarter hour when she was free to sit in the sun. But she spoke now matter-of-factly, without her undertone of virtue and complaint. Some sour atmosphere that had surrounded her—like old dishrags—was falling away. She had found her way around Vancouver by herself—the first time she had ever done that in a city. She had talked to strangers at bus stops and asked what sights she should see and on somebody’s advice had taken the chairlift to the top of Grouse Mountain.
    As they lay on the