Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.
    How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back—during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children—into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn’t there.

    After the funeral some people had been invited back to Jonas’s parents’ house in Dundarave. The rhododendron hedge was in bloom, all red and pink and purple. Jonas’s father was complimented on the garden.
    “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “We had to get it in shape in a bit of a hurry.”
    Jonas’s mother said, “This isn’t a real lunch, I’m afraid. Just a pickup.” Most people were drinking sherry, though some of the men had whisky. Food was set out on the extended dining-room table—salmon mousse and crackers, mushroom tarts, sausage rolls, a light lemon cake and cut-up fruit and pressed-almond cookies, as well as shrimp and ham and cucumber-and-avocado sandwiches. Pierre heaped everything onto his small china plate, and Meriel heard his mother say to him, “You know, you could always come back for a second helping.”
    His mother didn’t live in West Vancouver anymore but had come in from White Rock for the funeral. And she wasn’t quite confident about a direct reprimand, now that Pierre was a teacher and a married man.
    “Or didn’t you think there’d be any left?” she said.
    Pierre said carelessly, “Maybe not of what I wanted.”
    His mother spoke to Meriel. “What a nice dress.”
    “Yes, but look,” said Meriel, smoothing down the wrinkles that had formed while she sat through the service.
    “That’s the trouble,” Pierre’s mother said.
    “What’s the trouble?” said Jonas’s mother brightly, sliding some tarts onto the warming-dish.
    “That’s the trouble with linen,” said Pierre’s mother. “Meriel was just saying how her dress had wrinkled up”—she did not say, “during the funeral service”—“and I was saying that’s the trouble with linen.”
    Jonas’s mother might not have been listening. Looking across the room, she said, “That’s the doctor who looked after him. He flew down from Smithers in his own plane. Really, we thought that was so good of him.”
    Pierre’s mother said, “That’s quite a venture.”
    “Yes. Well. I suppose he gets around that way, to attend people in the bush.”
    The man they were talking about was speaking to Pierre. He was not wearing a suit, though he had a decent jacket on, over a turtlenecked sweater.
    “I suppose he would,” said Pierre’s mother, and Jonas’s mother said, “Yes,” and Meriel felt as if something—about the way he was dressed?—had been explained and settled, between them.
    She looked down at the table napkins, which were folded in quarters. They were not as big as dinner napkins or as small as cocktail napkins. They were set in overlapping rows so that a corner of each napkin (the corner embroidered with a tiny blue or pink or yellow flower) overlapped the folded corner of its neighbor. No two napkins embroidered with the same color of flower were touching each other. Nobody had disturbed them, or if they had—for she did see a few people around the room holding napkins—they had picked up napkins from the end of the row in a careful way and this order had been maintained.
    At the funeral service, the minister had compared Jonas’s life on earth to the life of a baby in the womb. The baby, he said, knows nothing of any other existence and inhabits its warm, dark, watery cave with not an inkling of the great bright world it will soon be thrust into. And we on earth have an inkling, but are really quite unable to imagine the light that we will enter after we have survived the travail of death. If the baby could somehow be informed of what would happen to it in the near future, would it not be incredulous,