Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Muriel, “How could you tell that? By my breathing?”
    “I could tell,” she said with some impatience. “I used to be a devil myself.”
    Her voice—the quaver or titter in it—was not like any voice of hers that Meriel remembered. She felt as if there was some betrayal stirring, in this suddenly strange old woman. A betrayal of the past, perhaps of Meriel’s mother and the friendship she had treasured with a superior person. Or of those lunches with Meriel herself, the rarefied conversations. Some degradation was in the offing. Meriel was upset by this, remotely excited.
    “Oh, I used to have friends,” Aunt Muriel said, and Meriel said, “You had lots of friends.” She mentioned a couple of names.
    “Dead,” Aunt Muriel said.
    Meriel said no, she had seen something just recently in the paper, a retrospective show or an award.
    “Oh? I thought he was dead. Maybe I’m thinking of somebody else—Did you know the Delaneys?”
    She spoke directly to the man, not to Meriel.
    “I don’t think so,” he said. “No.”
    “Some people who had a place where we all used to go, on Bowen Island. The Delaneys. I thought you might have heard of them. Well. There were various goings-on. That’s what I meant when I said I used to be a devil. Adventures. Well. It looked like adventures, but it was all according to script, if you know what I mean. So not so much of an adventure, actually. We all got drunk as skunks, of course. But they always had to have the candles lit in a circle and the music on, of course—more like a ritual. But not altogether. It didn’t mean you mightn’t meet somebody new and let the script go all to hell. Just meet for the first time and start kissing like mad and run off into the forest. In the dark. You couldn’t get very far. Never mind. Struck down.”
    She had started to cough, tried speaking through the cough, gave up and hacked violently. The doctor got up and struck her expertly a couple of times, on her bent back. The coughing ended with a groan.
    “Better,” she said. “Oh, you knew what you were doing, but you pretended not to. One time they had a blindfold on me. Not out in the woods, this was inside. It was all right, I consented. It didn’t work so well, though—I mean, I did know. There probably wasn’t anybody there that I wouldn’t have recognized, anyway.”
    She coughed again, though not so desperately as before. Then she raised her head, breathed deeply and noisily for a few minutes, holding up her hands to stall the conversation, as if she would soon have something more, something important, to say. But all she did, finally, was laugh and say, “Now I’ve got a permanent blindfold. Cataracts. Doesn’t get me taken advantage of now, not in any debauch that I know about.”
    “How long have they been growing?” the doctor said with a respectful interest, and to Meriel’s great relief there began an absorbed conversation, an informed discussion about the ripening of cataracts, their removal, the pros and cons of this operation, and Aunt Muriel’s distrust of the eye doctor who was shunted off—as she said—to look after the people in here. Salacious fantasy—that was what Meriel now decided it had been—slid without the smallest difficulty into a medical chat, agreeably pessimistic on Aunt Muriel’s side and carefully reassuring on the doctor’s. The sort of conversation that must take place regularly within these walls.
    In a little while there was a glance exchanged between Meriel and the doctor, asking whether the visit had lasted long enough.
    A stealthy, considering, almost married glance, its masquerade and its bland intimacy arousing to those who were after all not married.
    Soon.
    Aunt Muriel took the initiative herself. She said, “I’m sorry, it’s rude of me, I have to tell you, I get tired.” No hint in her manner, now, of the person who had launched the first part of the conversation. Distracted, play-acting, and with a vague sense of shame, Meriel bent over and kissed her goodbye. She had a feeling that she would never see Aunt Muriel again, and she never did.
    Around a corner, with doors open on rooms where people lay asleep or perhaps watching from their beds, the doctor touched her between her shoulder blades and moved his hand down her back to her waist. She realized that he was picking at the cloth of her dress, which had stuck to her damp skin when she sat pressed against the chairback. The dress was also damp under her