Who Do You Think You Are

bathroom door. Rose had locked it, for this preparation, though she didn’t usually lock it when she took a bath. She let Anna in.
    “Your front is all red,” Anna said, as she hoisted herself on to the toilet. Rose found the baby oil and tried to cool herself with it. She used too much, and got oily spots on her new brassiere.
    She had thought Clifford might write to her while he was touring, but he did not. He called her from Prince George, and was business-like.
    “When do you get into Powell River?”
    “Four o’clock.”
    “Okay, take the bus or whatever they have into town. Have you ever been there?”
    “No.”
    “Neither have I. I only know the name of our hotel. You can’t wait there.”
    “How about the bus depot? Every town has a bus depot.”
    “Okay, the bus depot. I’ll pick you up there probably about five o’clock, and we can get you into some other hotel. I hope to God there’s more than one. Okay then.”
    He was pretending to the other members of the orchestra that he was spending the night with friends in Powell River.
    “I could go and hear you play,” Rose said. “Couldn’t I?”
    “Well. Sure.”
    “I’d be very inconspicuous. I’d sit at the back. I’ll disguise myself as an old lady. I love to hear you play.”
    “Okay.”
    “You don’t mind?”
    “No.”
    “Clifford?”
    “Yes?”
    “You still want me to come?”
    “Oh, Rose.”
    “I know. It’s just the way you sound.”
    “I’m in the hotel lobby. They’re waiting for me. I’m supposed to be talking to Jocelyn.”
    “Okay. I know. I’ll come.”
    “Powell River. The bus depot. Five o’clock.”
    This was different from their usual telephone conversations.
    Usually they were plaintive and silly; or else they worked each other up so that they could not talk at all.
    “Heavy breathing there.”
    “I know.”
    “We’ll have to talk about something else.”
    “What else is there?”
    “Is it foggy where you are?”
    “Yes. Is it foggy where you are too?”
    “Yes. Can you hear the foghorn?”
    “Yes.”
    “Isn’t it a horrible sound?”
    “I don’t mind it, really. I sort of like it.”
    “Jocelyn doesn’t. You know how she describes it? She says it’s the sound of a cosmic boredom.”
    They had at first avoided speaking of Jocelyn and Patrick at all. Then they spoke of them in a crisp practical way, as if they were adults, parents, to be outwitted. Now they could mention them almost tenderly, admiringly, as if they were their children.
    T HERE WAS NO BUS DEPOT in Powell River. Rose got into the airport limousine with four other passengers, all men, and told the driver she wanted to go to the bus depot.
    “You know where that is?”
    “No,” she said. Already she felt them all watching her. “Did you want to catch a bus?”
    “No.”
    “Just wanted to go to the bus depot?”
    “I planned to meet somebody there.”
    “I didn’t even know there was a bus depot here,” said one of the passengers.
    “There isn’t, that I know of,” said the driver. “Now there is a bus, it goes down to Vancouver in the morning and it comes back at night, and it stops at the old men’s home. The old loggers’ home. That’s where it stops. All I can do is take you there. Is that all right?”
    Rose said it would be fine. Then she felt she had to go on explaining.
    “My friend and I just arranged to meet there because we couldn’t think where else. We don’t know Powell River at all and we just thought, every town has a bus depot!”
    She was thinking that she shouldn’t have said my friend, she should have said my husband . They were going to ask her what she and her friend were doing here if neither of them knew the town.
    “My friend is playing in the orchestra that’s giving a concert here tonight. She plays the violin.”
    All looked away from her, as if that was what a lie deserved. She was trying to remember if there was a female violinist. What if they should ask her name?
    The driver let her off in front of a long two-story wooden building with peeling paint.
    “I guess you could go in the sunporch, there at the end. That’s where the bus picks them up, anyway.”
    In the sunporch there was a pool table. Nobody was playing. Some old men were playing checkers; others watched. Rose thought of explaining herself to them but decided not to; they seemed mercifully uninterested. She was worn out by her explanations in the limousine.
    It was ten past four by the sunporch clock. She