Who Do You Think You Are

would write less often, or more guardedly, in case she might be hoping for too much from him. Getting ideas . But he did not, he was not so vulgar or so cowardly; he trusted her.
    She said to her friends that leaving Patrick had nothing to do with Tom and that she would probably not see Tom any oftener than she had before. She believed that, but she had chosen between the job in the mountain town and one on Vancouver Island because she liked the idea of being closer to Calgary.
    In the morning Anna was cheerful, she said it was all right. She said she wanted to stay. She wanted to stay in her school, with her friends. She turned halfway down the walk to wave and shriek at her parents.
    “Have a happy divorce!”
    R OSE HAD THOUGHT that once she got out of Patrick’s house she would live in a bare room, some place stained and shabby. She would not care, she would not bother making a setting for herself, she disliked all that. The apartment which she found—the upstairs of a brown brick house halfway up the mountainside—was stained and shabby, but she immediately set to work to fix it up. The red-and-gold wallpaper (these places, she was to discover, were often tricked out with someone’s idea of elegant wallpaper) had been hastily put on, and was ripping and curling away from the baseboard. She bought some paste and pasted it down. She bought hanging plants and coaxed them not to die. She put up amusing posters in the bathroom. She paid insulting prices for an Indian bedspread, baskets and pottery and painted mugs, in the only shop in town where such things were to be found. She painted the kitchen blue and white, trying to get the colors of willow-pattern china. The landlord promised to pay for the paint but didn’t. She bought blue candles, some incense, a great bunch of dried gold leaves and grass. What she had, when all this was finished, was a place which belonged quite recognizably to a woman, living alone, probably no longer young, who was connected, or hoped to be connected, with a college or the arts. Just as the house she had lived in before, Patrick’s house, belonged recognizably to a successful business or professional man with inherited money and standards.
    The town in the mountains seemed remote from everything. But Rose liked it, partly because of that. When you come back to living in a town after having lived in cities you have the idea that everything is comprehensible and easy there, almost as if some people have got together and said, “Let’s play Town.” You think that nobody could die there.
    Tom wrote that he must come to see her. In October (she had hardly expected it would be so soon) there was an opportunity, a conference in Vancouver. He planned to leave the conference a day early, and to pretend to have taken an extra day there, so that he could have two days free. But he phoned from Vancouver that he could not come. He had an infected tooth, he was in bad pain, he was to have emergency dental surgery on the very day he had planned to spend with Rose. So he was to get the extra day after all, he said, did she think it was a judgment on him? He said he was taking a Calvinistic view of things, and was groggy with pain and pills.
    Rose’s friend Dorothy asked did she believe him? It had not occurred to Rose not to.
    “I don’t think he’d do that,” she said, and Dorothy said quite cheerfully, even negligently, “Oh, they’ll do anything.”
    Dorothy was the only other woman at the station; she did a homemakers’ program twice a week, and went around giving talks to women’s groups; she was much in demand as mistress of ceremonies at prizegiving dinners for young people’s organizations; that sort of thing. She and Rose had struck up a friendship based mostly on their more-or-less single condition and their venturesome natures. Dorothy had a lover in Seattle, and she did not trust him.
    “They’ll do anything,” Dorothy said. They were having coffee in the Hole-in-One, a little coffee-and-doughnut shop next to the radio station. Dorothy began telling Rose a story about an affair she had had with the owner of the station who was an old man now and spent most of his time in California. He had given her a necklace for Christmas that he said was jade. He said he had bought it in Vancouver. She went to have the clasp fixed and asked proudly how much the necklace was worth. She was told it was not jade at all; the jeweler explained how to tell, holding it up to the light. A