Too Much Happiness

get on a bus and bring me the rest of my stuff? I need my shampoo. I need my kimono. I’m going around in Ernest’s bathrobe. You should see me, I look like an old woolly brown dog. Is the car still outside?”
    I went and looked.
    “Yes.”
    “Okay then, you should get on the bus and ride up to the college just like you normally do. And then catch the bus downtown. You know where to get off. Campbell and Howe. Then walk over here. Carlisle Street. Three sixty-three. You know it, don’t you?”
    “Is Ernie there?”
    “No, dum-dum. He’s at work. He’s got to support us, doesn’t he?”
    Us?
Was Ernie to support Nina and me?
    No. Ernie and Nina.
Ernie and Nina
.
    Nina said, “Oh, please. You’re the only person I’ve got.”
    I did as directed. I caught the college bus, then the downtown bus. I got off at Campbell and Howe and walked west to Carlisle Street. The snowstorm was over; the sky was clear; it was a bright, windless, deep-frozen day. The light hurt my eyes and the fresh snow squeaked under my feet.
    Now half a block north, on Carlisle Street, to the house where Ernie had lived with his mother and father and then with his mother and then alone. And now-how was it possible?-with Nina.
    The house looked just as it had when I had come here once or twice with my mother. A brick bungalow with a tiny front yard, an arched living room window with an upper pane of colored glass. Cramped and genteel.
    Nina was wrapped, just as she had described herself, in a man’s brown woolly tasselled dressing gown, with its manly but innocent Ernie-smell of shaving lather and Lifebuoy soap.
    She grabbed my hands, which were stiff with cold inside my gloves. Each of them had been holding on to the handle of a shopping bag.
    “Frozen,” she said. “Come on, we’ll get them into some warm water.”
    “They are
not frozen,”
I said. “Just frozen.”
    But she went ahead and helped me off with my things, and took me into the kitchen and ran a bowlful of water, and then as the blood returned painfully to my fingers she told me how Ernest (Ernie) had come to the rooming house on Saturday night. He was bringing a magazine that had a lot of pictures of old ruins and castles and things that he thought might interest me. She got herself out of bed and came downstairs, because of course he could not go upstairs, and when he saw how sick she was he said she had to come home with him so he could look after her. Which he had done so well that her sore throat was practically gone and her fever completely gone. And then they had decided that she would stay here. She would just stay with him and never go back to where she was before.
    She seemed unwilling even to mention Mr. Purvis’s name.
    “But it has to be a huge big secret,” she said. “You are the only one to know. Because you’re our friend and you are the reason we met.”
    She was making coffee. “Look up there,” she said, waving at the open cupboard. “Look at the way he keeps things. Mugs here. Cups and saucers here. Every cup has got its own hook. Isn’t it tidy? The house is just like that all over. I love it.
    “You are the reason we met,” she repeated. “If we have a baby and it’s a girl, we could name it after you.”
    I held my hands round the mug, still feeling a throb in my fingers. There were African violets on the windowsill over the sink. His mother’s order in the cupboards, his mother’s house-plants. The big fern was probably still in front of the living room window, and the doilies on the armchairs. What she had said, in regard to herself and Ernie, seemed brazen and-especially when I thought of the Ernie part of it-abundantly distasteful.
    “You’re going to get married?”
    “Well.”
    “You said if you have a baby.”
    “Well, you never know, we might have started that without being married,” said Nina, ducking her head mischievously.
    “With Ernie?” I said. “With
Ernie?”
    “Well, why not? Ernie’s nice,” she said. “And anyway I’m calling him Ernest.” She hugged the bathrobe around herself.
    “What about Mr. Purvis?”
    “What about him?”
    “Well, if it’s something happening already, couldn’t it be his?”
    Everything changed about Nina. Her face turned mean and sour.
“Him,”
she said with contempt. “What do you want to talk about him for? He never had it in him.”
    “Oh?” I said, and was going to ask what about Gemma, but she interrupted.
    “What do you want to talk about the past for?