The Progress of Love

She hears her father laughing on the patio. The guests have arrived—two pleasant, rich couples, not cottagers. One couple comes from Boston, one from Montreal. They have summer houses in Westfield.
    Denise hears her father say, “Weltschmerz.” He says it as if in quotation marks. He must be quoting some item they all know about, from a magazine they all read.
    I should be like Peter, she thinks. I should stop coming here.
    But perhaps it’s all right, and this is happiness, which she is too stubborn, too childish, too glumly political—too mired in a past that everyone else has abandoned—to accept?
    The dining room has been extended to take in the area where part of the veranda was, and the extension is all glass—walls and slanting roof, all glass. In the darkening glass, she sees herself—a tall, careful woman with a long braid, very plainly dressed, setting down on the long pine table, among the prettily overflowing bowls of nasturtiums, little blue glass dishes full of salt. Red-and-orange linen napkins, yellow candles like round pats of butter, thick white country plates with a pattern of grapes around the edges. Layers of forthcoming food and wine, and the talk that cuts off the living air: layers of harmony and satisfaction.
    Magda, bearing in the salad, stops humming.
    “Your mother—is she happy, out in British Columbia?”
    Her fault, Denise thinks. Isabel’s.
    Unfair, unbidden thoughts can strike her here, reverberating harshly, to no purpose.
    “Yes,” she says. “Yes. I think so.” By which she means that Isabel, at least, has no regrets.
II .
    Sophie’s tread made the floorboards shudder. She was barefoot, naked under the striped terry-cloth bathrobe, in the early morning. She had swum naked in the lake since she was a child and all this shore belonged to her father, down as far as Bryce’s farm. If she wanted to swim like that now, she had to get up early in the morning. That was all right. She woke early. Old people did.
    After she had her swim, she liked to sit on the rocks and smoke her first cigarette. That was what she was looking for now—not her cigarettes, but her lighter. She looked on the shelf over the sink, in the cutlery drawer—not meaning to make such a clatter—and on the dining-room buffet. Then she remembered that she had been sitting in the living room last night, watching David Copperfield on television. And there it was, her lighter, on the grubby arm of the chintz-covered chair.
    Laurence had rented a television set so that they could watch the moon shot. She had agreed that that was an occasion the children shouldn’t miss—that none of them should miss, said Laurence sternly—but she had supposed it would mean a twenty-four-hour rental, the presence of the television set in the house overnight. Laurence pointed out her mistake. The moon shot would take place Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, and the landing, if all went well, on Sunday. Had she really thought the trip would be only a matter of hours? And Laurence said there would be no hope of renting a decent set if you waited until the last moment. All the cottagers would be after them. So they had got one ten days ahead of time, and Laurence’s campaign, ever since it came into the house, had been to get Sophie to watch it. He had been lucky, discovering reruns of last winter’s National Geographic series: one about the Galapagos Islands, which Sophie watched without protest, and one on America’s National Parks, which she said was good but tainted by American boasting. Then there was David Copperfield , a British-made series shown every Sunday night in hour-long segments.
    “You see what you’ve been missing?” said Laurence to Sophie. She had refused to have television all these years—not only at the Log House, but in her apartment in Toronto.
    “Oh, Laurence. Don’t rub it in,” said Isabel. Her tone was affectionate but weary. Sophie, saying nothing, was annoyed with Isabel more than with Laurence. How little that girl knew her husband if she expected him to take any triumph discreetly. And how little she knew Sophie if she expected Laurence’s pushing to discomfort her. It was his way—their way. He would push and push at Sophie, and no matter what he got out of her it would never be enough. Sophie’s capitulation about the television had turned out not to be enough; she didn’t really care enough, and that was what Laurence knew.
    It was the same about the steps. (Sophie was