Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

she wondered whether the child was happy, whether she ought to be doing more things for her—taking her to the new swimming pool, registering her for tennis lessons. Then she remembered that Jeanette was too big to be taken anywhere, and if she wanted tennis lessons surely she would ask about them. Most of the time Jeanette liked to read. This was exactly what Dorothy herself had liked to do when she was young, and still did like to do. It seemed quite natural to them both to sit through meals together, each of them reading a book. Now Jeanette seemed to read very little. Perhaps her education had made her tired of it.
    Dorothy was less curious in those days. In the classroom, she never sought to know anything but whether her pupils had grasped those principles of arithmetic and spelling, those facts of history and science and geography which it was her duty to teach them. She saw Jeanette as a shy serious girl, a bit older than her pupils. Studious was the word she would have used for her, an old-fashioned word. She believed then, without having to inquire or think about it, that Jeanette was in some important way a continuation of herself. This was not apparent any longer; the connection had either broken or gone invisible. Dorothy looked down for some time from her bedroom window at her granddaughter’s spare brown body, as if it were a hieroglyph on her grass.

    “And on the M1—” said Blair King despairingly, sitting on the side porch drinking gin. It was Jeanette he despaired to. Dorothy followed the conversation with attention, but not with ease.
    “Oh, the M1! That was the worst experience of my life, driving down to London in the fog, and they do sixty in the fog, you can’t do less, pure fog and you literally cannot see ten feet. My friend and I had just hired a camper, and I wasn’t even that used to driving it, and we got into one of those roundabouts and we couldn’t get off. We literally couldn’t see where to get off and we were going round and round forever, it was like some very symbolic undergraduate play.”
    Did Blair King know what she meant? He seemed to. He watched her face and murmured encouragingly. This was the first Dorothy had heard of the camper, or the friend, or for that matter of the M1. To her grandmother and Viola, Jeanette had not said much more about Europe than that most places were overrun with tourists, the houses in Greece were clammy in the winter, and that frozen fish brought in from Athens cost less than local fish caught by the villagers. She had described some things they ate, until Viola said she felt queasy.
    Was the friend a man friend or a girl? Dorothy could tell Viola was wondering.
    Blair King and his wife had spent six months in Europe three years ago. He did not let them forget her. Nancy and I. Nancy did the driving in Switzerland. Nancy loved Portugal but didn’t care as much for Spain. Nancy preferred the Portuguese style of bullfighting. Viola got in her oar occasionally about the three weeks she and her husband had spent in Great Britain in 1956. Dorothy sat and listened and sipped her drink, which she did not like the taste of, thought Jeanette had promised to be parsimonious with the gin. She could not complain, really, even if she had trouble keeping up with what they said. This was what she had been counting on—that Blair King might turn out to be more the sort of person Jeanette was used to, that she could talk to, and that she herself listening to this talk could get a better idea of what Jeanette was like than she had been able to get up to now. So she sat concentrating, with not much more than the sound of their voices to concentrate on, because it was dark on the porch. Shall we turn the lights on, Dorothy had asked, and Jeanette had cried no, no, then it’s like sitting in a hot little box here with all the bugs beating at the screen.
    “I don’t mind sitting in the dark do you?” she said to Blair King, and Dorothy caught something in her tone—was it arch, deferential, disparaging?—that she put away for future consideration.
    They talked about food and drink and illness and medicine and a strange doctor in Crete who assumed, Jeanette said, that all foreign women who consulted him had come for an abortion, so that he could only with the greatest difficulty be persuaded to treat a sore throat. Blair King told about a doctor in Spain, consulted for Nancy’s stomach trouble, who had given her such a rending purgative that two