Who Do You Think You Are

full of false assurance, eager and inappropriately enthusiastic.
    “He must be a true Scot,” she said. Patrick was a Scot, in spite of his name. The Blatchfords had come from Glasgow. “Weren’t the best stonemasons always Scotsmen?” (She had learned quite recently not to say “Scotch.”) “Maybe he had stonemason ancestors.”
    She cringed afterwards, thinking of these efforts, the pretense of ease and gaiety, as cheap and imitative as her clothes.
    “No,” said Patrick’s mother. “No. I don’t think they were stonema-sons.” Something like fog went out from her: affront, disapproval, dismay. Rose thought that perhaps she had been offended by the suggestion that her husband’s family might have worked with their hands. When she got to know her better—or had observed her longer; it was impossible to get to know her—she understood that Patrick’s mother disliked anything fanciful, speculative, abstract, in conversation. She would also, of course, dislike Rose’s chatty tone. Any interest beyond the factual consideration of the matter at hand—food, weather, invitations, furniture, servants—seemed to her sloppy, ill-bred, and dangerous. It was all right to say, “This is a warm day,” but not, “This day reminds me of when we used to—” She hated people being reminded .
    She was the only child of one of the early lumber barons of Vancouver Island. She had been born in a vanished northern settlement. But whenever Patrick tried to get her to talk about the past, whenever he asked her for the simplest sort of information— what steamers went up the coast, what year was the settlement abandoned, what was the route of the first logging railway—she would say irritably, “I don’t know. How would I know about that?” This irritation was the strongest note that ever got into her words.
    Neither did Patrick’s father care for this concern about the past. Many things, most things, about Patrick, seemed to strike him as bad signs.
    “What do you want to know all that for?” he shouted down the table. He was a short square-shouldered man, red-faced, astonishingly belligerent. Patrick looked like his mother, who was tall, fair, and elegant in the most muted way possible, as if her clothes, her makeup, her style, were chosen with an ideal neutrality in mind.
    “Because I am interested in history,” said Patrick in an angry, pompous, but nervously breaking voice.
    “Because-I-am-interested-in-history” said his sister Marion in an immediate parody, break and all. “History!”
    The sisters Joan and Marion were younger than Patrick, older than Rose. Unlike Patrick they showed no nervousness, no cracks in self-satisfaction. At an earlier meal they had questioned Rose.
    “Do you ride?”
    “No.”
    “Do you sail?”
    “No.”
    “Play tennis? Play golf? Play badminton?”
    “No. No. No.”
    “Perhaps she is an intellectual genius, like Patrick,” the father said.
    And Patrick, to Rose’s horror and embarrassment, began to shout at the table in general an account of her scholarships and prizes. What did he hope for? Was he so witless as to think such bragging would subdue them, would bring out anything but further scorn? Against Patrick, against his shouting boasts, his contempt for sports and television, his so-called intellectual interests, the family seemed united. But this alliance was only temporary. The father’s dislike of his daughters was minor only in comparison with his dislike of Patrick. He railed at them too, when he could spare a moment; he jeered at the amount of time they spent at their games, complained about the cost of their equipment, their boats, their horses. And they wrangled with each other, on obscure questions of scores and borrowings and damages. All complained to the mother about the food, which was plentiful and delicious. The mother spoke as little as possible to anyone and to tell the truth Rose did not blame her. She had never imagined so much true malevolence collected in one place. Billy Pope was a bigot and a grumbler, Flo was capricious, unjust, and gossipy, her father, when he was alive, had been capable of cold judgments and unremitting disapproval; but compared to Patrick’s family, all Rose’s own people seemed jovial and content.
    “Are they always like this?” she said to Patrick. “Is it me? They don’t like me.”
    “They don’t like you because I chose you,” said Patrick with some satisfaction.
    They lay on the stony beach