Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

as well as afraid? And so are we, most of the time, but we should not be, for we have been given assurance. Even so, our blind brains cannot imagine, cannot conceive of, what we will pass into. The baby is lapped in its ignorance, in the faith of its dumb, helpless being. And we who are not entirely ignorant or entirely knowing must take care to wrap ourselves in our faith, in the word of our Lord.
    Meriel looked at the minister, who stood in the hall doorway with a glass of sherry in his hand, listening to a vivacious woman with blond puffed hair. It didn’t seem to her that they were talking about the pangs of death and the light ahead. What would he do if she walked over and tackled him on that subject?
    Nobody would have the heart to. Or the bad manners.
    Instead she looked at Pierre and the bush doctor. Pierre was talking with a boyish liveliness not often seen in him these days. Or not often seen by Meriel. She occupied herself by pretending that she was seeing him for the first time, now. His curly, short-cropped, very dark hair receding at the temples, baring the smooth, gold-tinged ivory skin. His wide, sharp shoulders and long, fine limbs and nicely shaped rather small skull. He smiled enchantingly but never strategically and seemed to distrust smiling altogether since he had become a teacher of boys. Faint lines of permanent fret were set in his forehead.
    She thought of a teachers’ party—more than a year ago—when she and he had found themselves, at opposite sides of the room, left out of the nearby conversations. She had circled the room and got close to him without his noticing, and then she had begun to talk to him as if she were a discreetly flirtatious stranger. He smiled as he was smiling now—but with a difference, as was natural when talking to an ensnaring woman—and he took up the charade. They exchanged charged looks and vapid speeches until they both broke down laughing. Someone came up to them and told them that married jokes were not allowed.
    “What makes you think we’re really married?” said Pierre, whose behavior at such parties was usually so circumspect.
    She crossed the room to him now with no such foolishness in mind. She had to remind him that they must soon go their separate ways. He was driving to Horseshoe Bay to catch the next ferry, and she would have to get across the North Shore to Lynn Valley by bus. She had arranged to take this chance to visit a woman her dead mother had loved and admired, and in fact had named her daughter for, and whom Meriel had always called Aunt, though they were not related by blood. Aunt Muriel. (It was when she went away to college that Meriel had changed the spelling.) This old woman was living in a nursing home in Lynn Valley, and Meriel had not visited her for over a year. It took too much time to get there, on their infrequent family trips to Vancouver, and the children were upset by the atmosphere of the nursing home and the looks of the people who lived there. So was Pierre, though he did not like to say so. Instead, he asked what relation this person was to Meriel, anyway.
    It’s not as if she was a real aunt.
    So now Meriel was going to see her by herself. She had said that she would feel guilty if she didn’t go when she had the chance. Also, though she didn’t say so, she was looking forward to the time that this would give her to be away from her family.
    “Maybe I could drive you,” Pierre said. “God knows how long you’ll have to wait for the bus.”
    “You can’t,” she said. “You’d miss the ferry.” She reminded him of their arrangement with the sitter.
    He said, “You’re right.”
    The man he’d been talking to—the doctor—had not had any choice but to listen to this conversation, and he said unexpectedly, “Let me drive you.”
    “I thought you came here in an airplane,” said Meriel, just as Pierre said, “This is my wife, excuse me. Meriel.”
    The doctor told her a name which she hardly heard.
    “It’s not so easy landing a plane on Hollyburn Mountain,” he said. “So I left it at the airport and rented a car.”
    Some slight forcing of courtesy, on his part, made Meriel think that she had sounded obnoxious. She was either too bold or too shy, much of the time.
    “Would that really be okay?” Pierre said. “Do you have time?”
    The doctor looked directly at Meriel. This was not a disagreeable look—it was not bold or sly, it was not appraising. But it was not socially deferential,