CHANCE

Halfway through June, in 1965, the term at Torrance House is over. Juliet has not been offered a permanent job—the teacher she replaced has recovered— and she could now be on her way home. But she is taking what she has described as a little detour. A little detour to see a friend who lives up the coast.

About a month ago, she went with another teacher—Juanita, who was the only person on the staff near her age, and her only friend—to see a revival of a movie called Hiroshima Mon Amour. Juanita confessed afterwards that she herself, like the woman in the picture, was in love with a married man—the father of a student. Then Juliet said that she had found herself in somewhat the same situation but had not allowed things to go on because of the tragic plight of his wife. His wife was a total invalid, more or less brain-dead. Juanita said that she wished her lover’s wife was brain-dead but she was not—she was vigorous and powerful and could get Juanita fired.

And shortly after that, as if conjured by such unworthy lies or half-lies, came a letter. The envelope looked dingy, as if it had spent some time in a pocket, and it was addressed only to “Juliet (Teacher), Torrance House, 1482 Mark St., Vancouver, B.C.” The headmistress gave it to Juliet, saying, “I assume this is for you. It’s strange there’s no surname but they’ve got the address right. I suppose they could look that up.”

Dear Juliet, I forgot which school it was that you’re teaching at but the other day I remembered, out of the blue, so it seemed to me a sign that I should write to you. I hope you are still there but the job would have to be pretty awful for you to quit before the term is up and anyway you didn’t strike me as a quitter.

How do you like our west coast weather? If you think you have got a lot of rain in Vancouver, then imagine twice as much, and that’s what we get up here.

I often think of you sitting up looking at the stairs stars. You see I wrote stairs, it’s late at night and time I was in bed.

Ann is about the same. When I got back from my trip I thought she had failed a good deal, but that was mostly because I was able to see all at once how she had gone downhill in the last two or three years. I had not noticed her decline when I saw her every day.

I don’t think I told you that I was stopping off in Regina to see my son, who is now eleven years old. He lives there with his mother. I noticed a big change in him too.

I’m glad I finally remembered the name of the school but I am awfully afraid now that I can’t remember your last name. I will seal this anyway and hope the name comes to me.

I often think of you.
I often think of you
I often think of you ZZZZZZ

 

The bus takes Juliet from downtown Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay and then onto a ferry. Then across a mainland peninsula and onto another ferry and onto the mainland again and so to the town where the man who wrote the letter lives. Whale Bay. And how quickly—even before Horseshoe Bay—you pass from city to wilderness. All this term she has been living amongst the lawns and gardens of Kerrisdale, with the north shore mountains coming into view like a stage curtain whenever the weather cleared. The grounds of the school were sheltered and civilized, enclosed by a stone wall, with something in bloom at every season of the year. And the grounds of the houses around it were the same. Such trim abundance— rhododendrons, holly, laurel, and wisteria. But before you get even so far as Horseshoe Bay, real forest, not park forest, closes in. And from then on—water and rocks, dark trees, hanging moss. Occasionally a trail of smoke from some damp and battered-looking little house, with a yard full of firewood, lumber and tires, cars and parts of cars, broken or usable bikes, toys, all the things that have to sit outside when people are lacking garages or basements.

The towns where the bus stops are not organized towns at all. In some places a few repetitive houses—company houses—are built close together, but most of the houses are like those in the woods, each one in its own wide cluttered yard, as if they have been built within sight of each other only accidentally. No paved streets, except the highway that goes through, no sidewalks. No big solid buildings to house Post Offices or Municipal Offices, no ornamented blocks of stores, built to be noticed. No war monuments, drinking fountains, flowery little parks. Sometimes a hotel, which looks as if it is only a pub. Sometimes a modern school or hospital—decent, but low and plain as a shed.

And at some time—noticeably on the second ferry— she begins to have stomach-turning doubts about the whole business.

I often think of you

I think of you often

That is only the sort of thing people say to be comforting, or out of a mild desire to keep somebody on the string.

But there will have to be a hotel, or tourist cabins at least, at Whale Bay. She will go there. She has left her big suitcase at the school, to be picked up later. She has only her travelling bag slung over her shoulder, she won’t be conspicuous. She will stay one night. Maybe phone him.

And say what?

That she happens to be up this way to visit a friend. Her friend Juanita, from the school, who has a summer place— where? Juanita has a cabin in the woods, she is a fearless outdoor sort of woman (quite different from the real Juanita, who is seldom out of high heels). And the cabin has turned out to be not far south of Whale Bay. The visit to the cabin and Juanita being over, Juliet has thought—she has thought—since she was nearly there already—she has thought she might as well . . .

Rocks, trees, water, snow. These things, constantly rearranged, made up the scene six months ago, outside the train window on a morning between Christmas and New Year’s. The rocks were large, sometimes jutting out, sometimes smoothed like boulders, dark gray or quite black. The trees were mostly evergreens, pine or spruce or cedar. The spruce trees—black spruce—had what looked like little extra trees, miniatures of themselves, stuck right on top. The trees that were not evergreens were spindly and bare—they might be poplar or tamarack or alder. Some of them had spotty trunks. Snow sat in thick caps on top of the rocks and was plastered to the windward side of the trees. It lay in a soft smooth cover over the surface of many big or small frozen lakes. Water was free of ice only in an occasional fast-flowing, dark and narrow stream.

Juliet had a book open on her lap, but she was not reading. She did not take her eyes from what was going by. She was alone in a double seat and there was an empty double seat across from her. This was the space in which her bed was made up at night. The porter was busy in this sleeping car at the moment, dismantling the nighttime arrangements. In some places the dark-green, zippered shrouds still hung down to the floor. There was a smell of that cloth, like tent cloth, and maybe a slight smell of nightclothes and toilets. A blast of fresh winter air whenever anyone opened the doors at either end of the car. The last people were going to breakfast, other people coming back.

There were tracks in the snow, small animal tracks. Strings of beads, looping, vanishing.

Juliet was twenty-one years old and already the possessor of a B.A. and an M.A. in Classics. She was working on her Ph.D. thesis, but had taken time out to teach Latin at a girls’ private school in Vancouver. She had no training as a teacher, but an unexpected vacancy at half-term had made the school willing to hire her. Probably no one else had answered the ad. The salary was less than any qualified teacher would be likely to accept. But Juliet was happy to be earning any money at all, after her years on mingy scholarships.

She was a tall girl, fair-skinned and fine-boned, with light-brown hair that even when sprayed did not retain a bouffant style. She had the look of an alert schoolgirl. Head held high, a neat rounded chin, wide thin-lipped mouth, snub nose, bright eyes, and a forehead that was often flushed with effort or appreciation. Her professors were delighted with her—they were grateful these days for anybody who took up ancient languages, and particularly for someone so gifted—but they were worried, as well. The problem was that she was a girl. If she got married—which might happen, as she was not bad-looking for a scholarship girl, she was not bad-looking at all—she would waste all her hard work and theirs, and if she did not get married she would probably become bleak and isolated, losing out on promotions to men (who needed them more, as they had to support families). And she would not be able to defend the oddity of her choice of Classics, to accept what people would see as its irrelevance, or dreariness, to slough that off the way a man could. Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.

When the teaching offer came they urged her to take it. Good for you. Get out into the world a bit. See some real life.

Juliet was used to this sort of advice, though disappointed to hear it coming from these men who did not look or sound as if they had knocked about in the real world very eagerly themselves. In the town where she grew up her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or an extra thumb, and people had been quick to point out the expected accompanying drawbacks—her inability to run a sewing machine or tie up a neat parcel, or notice that her slip was showing. What would become of her, was the question.

That occurred even to her mother and father, who were proud of her. Her mother wanted her to be popular, and to that end had urged her to learn to skate and to play the piano. She did neither willingly, or well. Her father just wanted her to fit in. You have to fit in, he told her, otherwise people will make your life hell. (This ignored the fact that he, and particularly Juliet’s mother, did not fit in so very well themselves, and were not miserable. Perhaps he doubted Juliet could be so lucky.)

I do, said Juliet once she got away to college. In the Classics Department I fit in. I am extremely okay.

But here came the same message, from her teachers, who had seemed to value and rejoice in her. Their joviality did not hide their concern. Get out into the world, they had said. As if where she had been till now was nowhere.

Nevertheless, on the train, she was happy.

Taiga, she thought. She did not know whether that was the right word for what she was looking at. She might have had, at some level, the idea of herself as a young woman in a Russian novel, going out into an unfamiliar, terrifying, and exhilarating landscape where the wolves would howl at night and where she would meet her fate. She did not care that this fate—in a Russian novel—would likely turn out to be dreary, or tragic, or both.

Personal fate was not the point, anyway. What drew her in— enchanted her, actually—was the very indifference, the repetition, the carelessness and contempt for harmony, to be found on the scrambled surface of the Precambrian shield.

A shadow appeared in the corner of her eye. Then a trousered leg, moving in.

“Is this seat taken?”

Of course it wasn’t. What could she say?

Tasselled loafers, tan slacks, tan and brown checked jacket with pencil lines of maroon, dark-blue shirt, maroon tie with flecks of blue and gold. All brand-new and all—except for the shoes—looking slightly too large, as if the body inside had shrunk somewhat since the purchase.

He was a man perhaps in his fifties, with strands of bright golden-brown hair plastered across his scalp. (It couldn’t be dyed, could it, who would dye such a scanty crop of hair?) His eyebrows darker, reddish, peaked and bushy. The skin of his face all rather lumpy, thickened like the surface of sour milk.

Was he ugly? Yes, of course. He was ugly, but so in her opinion were many, many men of around his age. She would not have said, afterwards, that he was remarkably ugly.

His eyebrows went up, his light-colored, leaky eyes widened, as if to project conviviality. He settled down opposite her. He said, “Not much to see out there.”

“No.” She lowered her eyes to her book.

“Ah,” he said, as if things were opening up in a comfortable way. “And how far are you going?”

“Vancouver.”

“Me too. All the way across the country. May as well see it all while you’re at it, isn’t that right?”

“Mm.”

But he persisted.

“Did you get on at Toronto too?”

“Yes.”

“That’s my home, Toronto. I lived there all my life. Your home there too?”

“No,” said Juliet, looking at her book again and trying hard to prolong the pause. But something—her upbringing, her embarrassment, God knows perhaps her pity, was too strong for her, and she dealt out the name of her hometown, then placed it for him by giving its distance from various larger towns, its position as regarded Lake Huron, Georgian Bay.

“I’ve got a cousin in Collingwood. That’s nice country, up there. I went up to see her and her family, a couple of times. You travelling on your own? Like me?”

He kept flapping his hands one over the other.

“Yes.” No more, she thinks. No more.

“This is the first time I went on a major trip anywhere. Quite a trip, all on your own.”

Juliet said nothing.

“I just saw you there reading your book all by yourself and I thought, maybe she’s all by herself and got a long way to go too, so maybe we could just sort of chum around together?”

At those words, chum around, a cold turbulence rose in Juliet. She understood that he was not trying to pick her up. One of the demoralizing things that sometimes happened was that rather awkward and lonely and unattractive men would make a bald bid for her, implying that she had to be in the same boat as they were. But he wasn’t doing that. He wanted a friend, not a girlfriend. He wanted a chum.

Juliet knew that, to many people, she might seem to be odd and solitary—and so, in a way, she was. But she had also had the experience, for much of her life, of feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul. And usually, she let them.

Be available, be friendly (especially if you are not popular )— that was what you learned in a small town and also in a girls’ dormitory. Be accommodating to anybody who wants to suck you dry, even if they know nothing about who you are.

She looked straight at this man and did not smile. He saw her resolve, there was a twitch of alarm in his face.

“Good book you got there? What’s it about?”

She was not going to say that it was about ancient Greece and the considerable attachment that the Greeks had to the irrational. She would not be teaching Greek, but was supposed to be teaching a course called Greek Thought, so she was reading Dodds again to see what she could pick up. She said, “I do want to read. I think I’ll go to the observation car.”

And she got up and walked away, thinking that she shouldn’t have said where she was going, it was possible that he might get up and follow her, apologizing, working up to another plea. Also, that it would be cold in the observation car, and she would wish that she had brought her sweater. Impossible to go back now to get it.

The wraparound view from the observation car, at the back of the train, seemed less satisfying to her than the view from the sleeping-car window. There was now always the intrusion of the train itself, in front of you.

Perhaps the problem was that she was cold, just as she had thought she would be. And disturbed. But not sorry. One moment more and his clammy hand would have been proffered—she thought that it would have been either clammy or dry and scaly—names would have been exchanged, she would have been locked in. It was the first victory of this sort that she had ever managed, and it was against the most pitiable, the saddest opponent. She could hear him now, chewing on the words chum around. Apology and insolence. Apology his habit. And insolence the result of some hope or determination breaking the surface of his loneliness, his hungry state.

It was necessary but it hadn’t been easy, it hadn’t been easy at all. In fact it was more of a victory, surely, to stand up to someone in such a state. It was more of a victory than if he had been slick and self-assured. But for a while she would be somewhat miserable.

There were only two other people sitting in the observation car. Two older women, each of them sitting alone. When Juliet saw a large wolf crossing the snowy, perfect surface of a small lake, she knew that they must see it too. But neither broke the silence, and that was pleasing to her. The wolf took no notice of the train, he did not hesitate or hurry. His fur was long, silvery shading into white. Did he think it made him invisible?

While she was watching the wolf, another passenger had arrived. A man, who took the seat across the aisle from hers. He too carried a book. An elderly couple followed—she small and sprightly, he large and clumsy, taking heavy disparaging breaths.

“Cold up here,” he said, when they were settled.

“Do you want me to go get your jacket?”

“Don’t bother.”

“It’s no bother.”

“I’ll be all right.”

In a moment the woman said, “You certainly do get a view here.” He did not answer, and she tried again. “You can see all round.”

“What there is to see.”

“Wait till we go through the mountains. That’ll be something. Did you enjoy your breakfast?”

“The eggs were runny.”

“I know.” The woman commiserated. “I was thinking, I should just have barged into the kitchen and done them myself.”

“Galley. They call it a galley.”

“I thought that was on a boat.”

Juliet and the man across the aisle raised their eyes from their books at the same moment, and their glances met, with a calm withholding of any expression. And in this second or two the train slowed, then stopped, and they looked elsewhere.

They had come to a little settlement in the woods. On the one side was the station, painted a dark red, and on the other a few houses painted the same color. Homes or barracks, for the railway workers. There was an announcement that there would be a stop here for ten minutes.

The station platform had been cleared of snow, and Juliet, peering ahead, saw some people getting off the train to walk about. She would have liked to do this herself, but not without a coat.

The man across the aisle got up and went down the steps without a look around. Doors opened somewhere below, bringing a stealthy stream of cold air. The elderly husband asked what they were doing here, and what was the name of this place anyway. His wife went to the front of the car to try to see the name, but she was not successful.

Juliet was reading about maenadism. The rituals took place at night, in the middle of winter, Dodds said. The women went up to the top of Mount Parnassus, and when they were, at one time, cut off by a snowstorm, a rescue party had to be sent. The would-be maenads were brought down with their clothes stiff as boards, having, in all their frenzy, accepted rescue. This seemed rather like contemporary behavior to Juliet, it somehow cast a modern light on the celebrants’ carrying-on. Would the students see it so? Not likely. They would probably be armed against any possible entertainment, any involvement, as students were. And the ones who weren’t so armed wouldn’t want to show it.

The call to board sounded, the fresh air was cut off, there were reluctant shunting movements. She raised her eyes to watch, and saw, some distance ahead, the engine disappearing around a curve.

And then a lurch or a shudder, a shudder that seemed to pass along the whole train. A sense, up here, of the car rocking. An abrupt stop.

Everybody sat waiting for the train to start again, and nobody spoke. Even the complaining husband was silent. Minutes passed. Doors were opening and closing. Men’s voices calling, a spreading feeling of fright and agitation. In the club car, which was just below, a voice of authority—maybe the conductor’s. But it was not possible to hear what he was saying.

Juliet got up and went to the front of the car, looking over the tops of all the cars ahead. She saw some figures running in the snow.

One of the lone women came up and stood beside her.

“I felt there was something going to happen,” the woman said. “I felt it back there, when we were stopped. I didn’t want us to start up again, I thought something was going to happen.”

The other lone woman had come to stand behind them.

“It won’t be anything,” she said. “Maybe a branch across the tracks.”

“They have that thing that goes ahead of the train,” the first woman told her. “It goes on purpose to catch things like a branch across the tracks.”

“Maybe it had just fallen.”

Both women spoke with the same north-of-England accent and without the politeness of strangers or acquaintances. Now that Juliet got a good look at them she saw that they were probably sisters, though one had a younger, broader face. So they travelled together but sat separately. Or perhaps they’d had a row.

The conductor was mounting the stairs to the observation car. He turned, halfway up, to speak.

“Nothing serious to worry about, folks, it seems like we hit an obstacle on the track. We’re sorry for the delay and we’ll get going again as soon as we can, but we could be here a little while. The steward tells me there’s going to be free coffee down here in a few minutes.”

Juliet followed him down the stairs. She had become aware, as soon as she stood up, that there was a problem of her own which would make it necessary for her to go back to her seat and her travelling case, whether the man she snubbed was still there or not. As she made her way through the cars she met other people on the move. People were pressing against the windows on one side of the train, or they had halted between the cars, as if they expected the doors to open. Juliet had no time to ask questions, but as she slid past she heard that it might have been a bear, or an elk, or a cow. And people wondered what a cow would be doing up here in the bush, or why the bears were not all asleep now, or if some drunk had fallen asleep on the tracks.

In the dining car people were sitting at the tables, whose white cloths had all been removed. They were drinking the free coffee.

Nobody was in Juliet’s seat, or in the seat across from it. She picked up her case and hurried along to the Ladies. Monthly bleeding was the bane of her life. It had even, on occasion, interfered with the writing of important three-hour examinations, because you couldn’t leave the room for reinforcements.

Flushed, crampy, feeling a little dizzy and sick, she sank down on the toilet bowl, removed her soaked pad and wrapped it in toilet paper and put it in the receptacle provided. When she stood up she attached the fresh pad from her bag. She saw that the water and urine in the bowl was crimson with her blood. She put her hand on the flush button, then noticed in front of her eyes the warning not to flush the toilet while the train was standing still. That meant, of course, when the train was standing near the station, where the discharge would take place, very disagreeably, right where people could see it. Here, she might risk it.

But just as she touched the button again she heard voices close by, not in the train but outside the toilet window of pebbled glass. Maybe train workers walking past.

She could stay till the train moved, but how long would that be? And what if somebody desperately wanted in? She decided that all she could do was to put down the lid and get out.

She went back to her own seat. Across from her, a child four or five years old was slashing a crayon across the pages of a coloring book. His mother spoke to Juliet about the free coffee.

“It may be free but it looks like you have to go and get it yourself,” she said. “Would you mind watching him while I go?”

“I don’t want to stay with her,” the child said, without looking up.

“I’ll go,” said Juliet. But at that moment a waiter entered the car with the coffee wagon.

“There. I shouldn’t’ve complained so soon,” the mother said. “Did you hear it was a b-o-d-y?”

Juliet shook her head.

“He didn’t have a coat on even. Somebody saw him get off and walk on up ahead but they never realized what he was doing. He must’ve just got round the curve so the engineer couldn’t see him till it was too late.”

A few seats ahead, on the mother’s side of the aisle, a man said, “Here they come back,” and some people got up, from Juliet’s side, and stooped to see. The child stood up too, pressed his face to the glass. His mother told him to sit down.

“You color. Look at the mess you made, all over the lines.”

“I can’t look,” she said to Juliet. “I can’t stand to look at anything like that.”

Juliet got up and looked. She saw a small group of men tramping back towards the station. Some had taken off their coats, which were piled on top of the stretcher that a couple of them were carrying.

“You can’t see anything,” a man behind Juliet said to a woman who had not stood up. “They got him all covered.”

Not all of the men who proceeded with their heads lowered were railway employees. Juliet recognized the man who had sat across from her up in the observation car.

After ten or fifteen minutes more, the train began to move. Around the curve there was no blood to be seen, on either side of the car. But there was a trampled area, a shovelled mound of snow. The man behind her was up again. He said, “That’s where it happened, I guess,” and watched for a little while to see if there was anything else, then turned around and sat down. The train, instead of speeding to make up for lost time, seemed to be going more slowly than previously. Out of respect, perhaps, or with apprehension about what might lie ahead, around the next curve. The headwaiter went through the car announcing the first seating for lunch, and the mother and child at once got up and followed him. A procession began, and Juliet heard a woman who was passing say, “Really?”

The woman talking to her said softly, “That’s what she said. Full of blood. So it must have splashed in when the train went over—”

“Don’t say it.”

A little later, when the procession had ended and the early lunchers were eating, the man came through—the man from the observation car who had been seen outside walking in the snow.

Juliet got up and quickly pursued him. In the black cold space between the cars, just as he was pushing the heavy door in front of him, she said, “Excuse me. I have to ask you something.”

This space was full of sudden noise, the clanking of heavy wheels on the rails.

“What is it?”

“Are you a doctor? Did you see the man who—”

“I’m not a doctor. There’s no doctor on the train. But I have some medical experience.”

“How old was he?”

The man looked at her with a steady patience and some displeasure.

“Hard to say. Not young.”

“Was he wearing a blue shirt? Did he have blondish-brown-colored hair?”

He shook his head, not to answer her question but to refuse it.

“Was this somebody you knew?” he said. “You should tell the conductor if it was.”

“I didn’t know him.”

“Excuse me, then.” He pushed open the door and left her.

Of course. He thought she was full of disgusting curiosity, like many other people.

Full of blood. That was disgusting, if you liked.

She could never tell anybody about the mistake that had been made, the horrid joke of it. People would think her exceptionally crude and heartless, were she ever to speak of it. And what was at one end of the misunderstanding—the suicide’s smashed body—would seem, in the telling, to be hardly more foul and frightful than her own menstrual blood.

Never tell that to anybody. (Actually she did tell it, a few years later, to a woman named Christa, a woman whose name she did not yet know.)

But she wanted very much to tell somebody something. She got out her notebook and on one of its ruled pages began to write a letter to her parents.

We have not yet reached the Manitoba border and most people have been complaining that the scenery is rather monotonous but they cannot say that the trip has been lacking in dramatic incident. This morning we stopped at some godforsaken little settlement in the northern woods, all painted Dreary Railway Red. I was sitting at the back of the train in the Observation Car, and freezing to death because they skimp on the heat up there (the idea must be that the scenic glories will distract you from your discomfort) and I was too lazy to trudge back and get my sweater. We sat around there for ten or fifteen minutes and then started up again, and I could see the engine rounding a curve up ahead, and then suddenly there was a sort of Awful Thump . . .

She and her father and her mother had always made it their business to bring entertaining stories into the house. This had required a subtle adjustment not only of the facts but of one’s position in the world. Or so Juliet had found, when her world was school. She had made herself into a rather superior, invulnerable observer. And now that she was away from home all the time this stance had become habitual, almost a duty.

But as soon as she had written the words Awful Thump, she found herself unable to go on. Unable, in her customary language, to go on.

She tried looking out the window, but the scene, composed of the same elements, had changed. Less than a hundred miles on, it seemed as if there was a warmer climate. The lakes were fringed with ice, not covered. The black water, black rocks, under the wintry clouds, filled the air with darkness. She grew tired watching, and she picked up her Dodds, opening it just anywhere, because, after all, she had read it before. Every few pages she seemed to have had an orgy of underlining. She was drawn to these passages, but when she read them she found that what she had pounced on with such satisfaction at one time now seemed obscure and unsettling.

. . . what to the partial vision of the living appears as the act of a fiend, is perceived by the wider insight of the dead to be an aspect of cosmic justice . . .

The book slipped out of her hands, her eyes closed, and she was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentameter. But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realized her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it.

She woke and saw the same man, the man she had followed and pestered between the cars, sitting across from her.

“You were sleeping.” He smiled slightly at what he had said. “Obviously.”

She had been sleeping with her head hanging forward, like an old woman, and there was a dribble at the corner of her mouth. Also, she knew she must get to the Ladies Toilet at once, hoping there was nothing on her skirt. She said “Excuse me” (just what he had last said to her) and took up her case and walked away with as little self-conscious haste as she could manage.

When she came back, washed and tidied and reinforced, he was still there.

He spoke at once. He said that he wanted to apologize.

“It occurred to me I was rude to you. When you asked me—”

“Yes,” she said.

“You had it right,” he said. “The way you described him.”

This seemed less an offering, on his part, than a direct and necessary transaction. If she did not care to speak he might just get up and walk away, not particularly disappointed, having done what he’d come to do.

Shamefully, Juliet’s eyes overflowed with tears. This was so unexpected that she had no time to look away.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

She nodded quickly, several times, sniffled wretchedly, blew her nose on the tissue she eventually found in her bag.

“It’s all right,” she said, and then she told him, in a straightforward way, just what had happened. How the man bent over and asked her if the seat was taken, how he sat down, how she had been looking out the window and how she couldn’t do that any longer so she had tried or had pretended to read her book, how he had asked where she had got on the train, and found out where she lived, and kept trying to make headway with the conversation, till she just picked up and left him.

The only thing she did not reveal to him was the expression chum around. She had a notion that if she were to say that she would burst into tears all over again.

“People interrupt women,” he said. “Easier than men.”

“Yes. They do.”

“They think women are bound to be nicer.”

“But he just wanted somebody to talk to,” she said, shifting sides a little. “He wanted somebody worse than I didn’t want somebody. I realize that now. And I don’t look mean. I don’t look cruel. But I was.”

A pause, while she once more got her sniffling and her leaky eyes under control.

He said, “Haven’t you ever wanted to do that to anybody before?”

“Yes. But I’ve never done it. I never have gone so far. And why I did it this time—it was that he was so humble. And he had all new clothes on he’d probably bought for the trip. He was probably depressed and thought he’d go on a trip and it was a good way to meet people and make friends.

“Maybe if he’d just been going a little way—,” she said. “But he said he was going to Vancouver and I would have been saddled with him. For days.”

“Yes.”

“I really might have been.”

“Yes.”

“So.”

“Rotten luck,” he said, smiling a very little. “The first time you get up the nerve to give somebody the gears he throws himself under a train.”

“It could have been the last straw,” she said, now feeling slightly defensive. “It could have been.”

“I guess you’ll just have to watch out, in future.”

Juliet raised her chin and looked at him steadily.

“You mean I’m exaggerating.”

Then something happened that was as sudden and unbidden as her tears. Her mouth began to twitch. Unholy laughter was rising.

“I guess it is a little extreme.”

He said, “A little.”

“You think I’m dramatizing?”

“That’s natural.”

“But you think it’s a mistake,” she said, with the laughter under control. “You think feeling guilty is just an indulgence?”

“What I think is—,” he said. “I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life—things will probably happen in your life—that will make this seem minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about.”

“Don’t people always say that, though? To somebody who is younger? They say, oh, you won’t think like this someday. You wait and see. As if you didn’t have a right to any serious feelings. As if you weren’t capable.”

“Feelings,” he said. “I was talking about experience.”

“But you are sort of saying that guilt isn’t any use. People do say that. Is it true?”

“You tell me.”

They went on talking about this for a considerable time, in low voices, but so forcefully that people passing by sometimes looked astonished, or even offended, as people may when they overhear debates that seem unnecessarily abstract. Juliet realized, after a while, that though she was arguing—rather well, she thought—for the necessity of some feelings of guilt both in public and in private life, she had stopped feeling any, for the moment. You might even have said that she was enjoying herself.

He suggested that they go forward to the lounge, where they could drink coffee. Once there Juliet discovered that she was quite hungry, though the lunch hours were long over. Pretzels and peanuts were all that could be procured, and she gobbled them up in such a way that the thoughtful, slightly competitive conversation they were having before was not retrievable. So they talked instead about themselves. His name was Eric Porteous, and he lived in a place called Whale Bay, somewhere north of Vancouver, on the west coast. But he was not going there immediately, he was breaking the trip in Regina, to see some people he had not seen for a long time. He was a fisherman, he caught prawns. She asked about the medical experience he had referred to, and he said, “Oh, it’s not very extensive. I did some medical study. When you’re out in the bush or on the boat anything can happen. To the people you’re working with. Or to yourself.”

He was married, his wife’s name was Ann.

Eight years ago, he said, Ann had been injured in a car accident. For several weeks she was in a coma. She came out of that, but she was still paralyzed, unable to walk or even to feed herself. She seemed to know who he was, and who the woman who looked after her was—with the help of this woman he was able to keep her at home—but her attempts to talk, and to understand what was going on around her, soon faded away.

They had been to a party. She hadn’t particularly wanted to go but he had wanted to go. Then she decided to walk home by herself, not being very happy with things at the party.

It was a gang of drunks from another party who ran off the road and knocked her down. Teenagers.

Luckily, he and Ann had no children. Yes, luckily.

“You tell people about it and they feel they have to say, how terrible. What a tragedy. Et cetera.”

“Can you blame them?” said Juliet, who had been about to say something of the sort herself.

No, he said. But it was just that the whole thing was a lot more complicated than that. Did Ann feel that it was a tragedy? Probably not. Did he? It was something you got used to, it was a new kind of life. That was all.

All of Juliet’s enjoyable experience of men had been in fantasy. One or two movie stars, the lovely tenor—not the virile heartless hero—on a certain old recording of Don Giovanni. Henry V, as she read about him in Shakespeare and as Laurence Olivier had played him in the movie.

This was ridiculous, pathetic, but who ever needed to know? In actual life there had been humiliation and disappointment, which she had tried to push out of her mind as quickly as possible.

There was the experience of being stranded head and shoulders above the gaggle of other unwanted girls at the high school dances, and being bored but making a rash attempt to be lively on college dates with boys she didn’t much like, who did not much like her. Going out with the visiting nephew of her thesis adviser last year and being broken into—you couldn’t call it rape, she too was determined—late at night on the ground in Willis Park.

On the way home he had explained that she wasn’t his type. And she had felt too humiliated to retort—or even to be aware, at that moment—that he was not hers.

She had never had fantasies about a particular, real man— least of all about any of her teachers. Older men—in real life—seemed to her to be slightly unsavory.

This man was how old? He had been married for at least eight years—and perhaps two years, two or three years, more than that. Which made him probably thirty-five or thirty-six. His hair was dark and curly with some gray at the sides, his forehead wide and weathered, his shoulders strong and a little stooped. He was hardly any taller than she was. His eyes were wide set, dark, and eager but also wary. His chin was rounded, dimpled, pugnacious.

She told him about her job, the name of the school— Torrance House. (“What do you want to bet it’s called Torments?”) She told him that she was not a real teacher but that they were glad to get anybody who had majored in Greek and Latin at college. Hardly anybody did anymore.

“So why did you?”

“Oh, just to be different, I guess.”

Then she told him what she had always known that she should never tell any man or boy, lest he lose interest immediately.

“And because I love it. I love all that stuff. I really do.”

They ate dinner together—each drinking a glass of wine— and then went up to the observation car, where they sat in the dark, all by themselves. Juliet had brought her sweater this time.

“People must think there’s nothing to see up here at night,” he said. “But look at the stars you can see on a clear night.”

Indeed the night was clear. There was no moon—at least not yet—and the stars appeared in dense thickets, both faint and bright. And like anyone who had lived and worked on boats, he was familiar with the map of the sky. She was able to locate only the Big Dipper.

“That’s your start,” he said. “Take the two stars on the side of the Dipper opposite the handle. Got them? Those are the pointers. Follow them up. Follow them, you’ll find the pole-star.” And so on.

He found for her Orion, which he said was the major constellation in the Northern Hemisphere in winter. And Sirius, the Dog Star, at that time of year the brightest star in the whole northern sky.

Juliet was pleased to be instructed but also pleased when it came her turn to be the instructor. He knew the names but not the history.

She told him that Orion was blinded by Enopion but had got his sight back by looking at the sun.

“He was blinded because he was so beautiful, but Hephaestus came to his rescue. Then he was killed anyway, by Artemis, but he got changed into a constellation. It often happened when somebody really valuable got into bad trouble, they were changed into a constellation. Where is Cassiopeia?”

He directed her to a not very obvious W.

“It’s supposed to be a woman sitting down.”

“That was on account of beauty too,” she said.

“Beauty was dangerous?”

“You bet. She was married to the king of Ethiopia and she was the mother of Andromeda. And she bragged about her beauty and for punishment she was banished to the sky. Isn’t there an Andromeda, too?”

“That’s a galaxy. You should be able to see it tonight. It’s the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye.”

Even when guiding her, telling her where to look in the sky, he never touched her. Of course not. He was married.

“Who was Andromeda?” he asked her.

“She was chained to a rock but Perseus rescued her.”

Whale Bay.

A long dock, a number of large boats, a gas station and store that has a sign in the window saying that it is also the bus stop and the Post Office.

A car parked at the side of this store has in its window a homemade taxi sign. She stands just where she stepped down from the bus. The bus pulls away. The taxi toots its horn. The driver gets out and comes towards her.

“All by yourself,” he says. “Where are you headed for?”

She asks if there is a place where tourists stay. Obviously there won’t be a hotel.

“I don’t know if there’s anybody renting rooms out this year. I could ask them inside. You don’t know anybody around here?”

Nothing to do but to say Eric’s name.

“Oh sure,” he says with relief. “Hop in, we’ll get you there in no time. But it’s too bad, you pretty well missed the wake.”

At first she thinks that he said wait. Or weight? She thinks of fishing competitions.

“Sad time,” the driver says, now getting in behind the wheel. “Still, she wasn’t ever going to get any better.”

Wake. The wife. Ann.

“Never mind,” he says. “I expect there’ll still be some people hanging around. Of course you did miss the funeral. Yesterday. It was a monster. Couldn’t get away?”

Juliet says, “No.”

“I shouldn’t be calling it a wake, should I? Wake is what you have before they’re buried, isn’t it? I don’t know what you call what takes place after. You wouldn’t want to call it a party, would you? I can just run you up and show you all the flowers and tributes, okay?”

Inland, off the highway, after a quarter of a mile or so of rough dirt road, is Whale Bay Union Cemetery. And close to the fence is the mound of earth altogether buried in flowers. Faded real flowers, bright artificial flowers, a little wooden cross with the name and date. Tinselly curled ribbons that have blown about all over the cemetery grass. He draws her attention to all the ruts, the mess the wheels of so many cars made yesterday.

“Half of them had never even seen her. But they knew him, so they wanted to come anyway. Everybody knows Eric.”

They turn around, drive back, but not all the way back to the highway. She wants to tell the driver that she has changed her mind, she does not want to visit anybody, she wants to wait at the store to catch the bus going the other way. She can say that she really did get the day wrong, and now she is so ashamed of having missed the funeral that she does not want to show up at all.

But she cannot get started. And he will report on her, no matter what.

They are following narrow, winding back roads, past a few houses. Every time they go by a driveway without turning in, there is a feeling of reprieve.

“Well, here’s a surprise,” the driver says, and now they do turn in. “Where’s everybody gone? Half a dozen cars when I drove past an hour ago. Even his truck’s gone. Party over. Sorry—I shouldn’t’ve said that.”

“If there’s nobody here,” Juliet says eagerly, “I could just go back down.”

“Oh, somebody’s here, don’t worry about that. Ailo’s here. There’s her bike. You ever meet Ailo? You know, she’s the one took care of things?” He is out and opening her door.

As soon as Juliet steps out, a large yellow dog comes bounding and barking, and a woman calls from the porch of the house.

“Aw go on, Pet,” the driver says, pocketing the fare and getting quickly back into the car.

“Shut up. Shut up, Pet. Settle down. She won’t hurt you,” the woman calls. “She’s just a pup.”

Pet’s being a pup, Juliet thinks, would not make her any less likely to knock you down. And now a small reddish-brown dog arrives to join in the commotion. The woman comes down the steps, yelling, “Pet. Corky. You behave. If they think you are scared of them they will just get after you the worse.”

Her just sounds something like chust.

“I’m not scared,” says Juliet, jumping back when the yellow dog’s nose roughly rubs her arm.

“Come on in, then. Shut up, the two of you, or I will knock your heads. Did you get the day mixed up for the funeral?”

Juliet shakes her head as if to say that she is sorry. She introduces herself.

“Well, it is too bad. I am Ailo.” They shake hands.

Ailo is a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a thick but not flabby body, and yellowish-white hair loose over her shoulders. Her voice is strong and insistent, with some rich production of sounds in the throat. A German, Dutch, Scandinavian accent?

“You better sit down here in the kitchen. Everything is in a mess. I will get you some coffee.”

The kitchen is bright, with a skylight in the high, sloping ceiling. Dishes and glasses and pots are piled everywhere. Pet and Corky have followed Ailo meekly into the kitchen, and have started to lap out whatever is in the roasting pan that she has set down on the floor.

Beyond the kitchen, up two broad steps, there is a shaded, cavernous sort of living room, with large cushions flung about on the floor.

Ailo pulls out a chair at the table. “Now sit down. You sit down here and have some coffee and some food.”

“I’m fine without,” says Juliet.

“No. There is the coffee I have just made, I will drink mine while I work. And there are so much things left over to eat.”

She sets before Juliet, with the coffee, a piece of pie—bright green, covered with some shrunken meringue.

“Lime Jell-O,” she says, withholding approval. “Maybe it tastes all right, though. Or there is rhubarb?”

Juliet says, “Fine.”

“So much mess here. I clean up after the wake, I get it all settled. Then the funeral. Now after the funeral I have to clean up all over again.”

Her voice is full of sturdy grievance. Juliet feels obliged to say, “When I finish this I can help you.”

“No. I don’t think so,” Ailo says. “I know everything.” She is moving around not swiftly but purposefully and effectively. (Such women never want your help. They can tell what you’re like.) She continues drying the glasses and plates and cutlery, putting what she has dried away in cupboards and drawers. Then scraping the pots and pans—including the one she retrieves from the dogs—submerging them in fresh soapy water, scrubbing the surfaces of the table and the counters, wringing the dishcloths as if they were chickens’ necks. And speaking to Juliet, with pauses.

“You are a friend of Ann? You know her from before?”

“No.”

“No. I think you don’t. You are too young. So why do you want to come to her funeral?”

“I didn’t,” says Juliet. “I didn’t know. I just came by to visit.” She tries to sound as if this was a whim of hers, as if she had lots of friends and wandered about making casual visits.

With singular fine energy and defiance Ailo polishes a pot, as she chooses not to reply to this. She lets Juliet wait through several more pots before she speaks.

“You come to visit Eric. You found the right house. Eric lives here.”

“You don’t live here, do you?” says Juliet, as if this might change the subject.

“No. I do not live here. I live down the hill, with my hussband.” The word hussband carries a weight, of pride and reproach.

Without asking, Ailo fills up Juliet’s coffee cup, then her own. She brings a piece of pie for herself. It has a rosy layer on the bottom and a creamy layer on top.

“Rhubarb cusstart. It has to be eaten or it will go bad. I do not need it, but I eat it anyway. Maybe I get you a piece?”

“No. Thank you.”

“Now. Eric has gone. He will not be back tonight. I do not think so. He has gone to Christa’s place. Do you know Christa?”

Juliet tightly shakes her head.

“Here we all live so that we know the other people’s situations. We know well. I do not know what it is like where you live. In Vancouver?” (Juliet nods.) “In a city. It is not the same. For Eric to be so good to look after his wife he must need help, do you see? I am one to help him.”

Quite unwisely Juliet says, “But do you not get paid?”

“Certain I am paid. But it is more than a job. Also the other kind of help from a woman, he needs that. Do you understand what I am saying? Not a woman with a hussband, I do not believe in that, it is not nice, that is a way to have fights. First Eric had Sandra, then she has moved away and he has Christa. There was a little while both Christa and Sandra, but they were good friends, it was all right. But Sandra has her kids, she wants to move away to bigger schools. Christa is an artist. She makes things out of wood that you find on the beach. What is it you call that wood?”

“Driftwood,” says Juliet unwillingly. She is paralyzed by disappointment, by shame.

“That is it. She takes them to places and they sell them for her. Big things. Animals and birds but not realist. Not realist?”

“Not realistic?”

“Yes. Yes. She has never had any children. I don’t think she will want to be moving away. Eric has told you this? Would you like more coffee? There is still some in the pot.”

“No. No thanks. No he hasn’t.”

“So. Now I have told you. If you have finish I will take the cup to wash.”

She detours to nudge with her shoe the yellow dog lying on the other side of the refrigerator.

“You got to get up. Lazy girl. Soon we are going home.

“There is a bus goes back to Vancouver, it goes through at ten after eight,” she says, busy at the sink with her back to the room. “You can come home with me and when it is time my hussband will drive you. You can eat with us. I ride my bike, I ride slow so you can keep up. It is not far.”

The immediate future seems set in place so firmly that Juliet gets up without a thought, looks around for her bag. Then she sits down again, but in another chair. This new view of the kitchen seems to give her resolve.

“I think I’ll stay here,” she says.

“Here?”

“I don’t have anything much to carry. I’ll walk to the bus.”

“How will you know your way? It is a mile.”

“That’s not far.” Juliet wonders about knowing the way, but thinks that, after all, you just have to head downhill.

“He is not coming back, you know,” says Ailo. “Not tonight.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Ailo gives a massive, perhaps disdainful, shrug.

“Get up, Pet. Up.” Over her shoulder she says, “Corky stays here. Do you want her in or out?”

“I guess out.”

“I will tie her up, then, so she cannot follow. She may not want to stay with a stranger.”

Juliet says nothing.

“The door locks when we go out. You see? So if you go out and want to come back in, you have to press this. But when you leave you don’t press. It will be locked. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“We did not use to bother locking here, but now there are too many strangers.”

After they had been looking at the stars, the train had stopped for a while in Winnipeg. They got out and walked in a wind so cold that it was painful for them to breathe, let alone speak. When they boarded the train again they sat in the lounge and he ordered brandy.

“Warm us up and put you to sleep,” he said.

He was not going to sleep. He would sit up until he got off at Regina, some time towards morning.

Most of the berths were already made up, the dark-green curtains narrowing the aisles, when he walked her back to her car. All the cars had names, and the name of hers was Miramichi.

“This is it,” she whispered, in the space between the cars, his hand already pushing the door for her.

“Say good-bye here, then.” He withdrew his hand, and they balanced themselves against the jolting so that he could kiss her thoroughly. When that was finished he did not let go, but held her and stroked her back, and then began to kiss her all over her face.

But she pulled away, she said urgently, “I’m a virgin.”

“Yes, yes.” He laughed, and kissed her neck, then released her and pushed the door open in front of her. They walked down the aisle till she located her own berth. She flattened herself against the curtain, turning, and rather expecting him to kiss her again or touch her, but he slid by almost as if they had met by accident.

How stupid, how disastrous. Afraid, of course, that his stroking hand would go farther down and reach the knot she had made securing the pad to the belt. If she had been the sort of girl who could rely on tampons this need never have happened.

And why virgin? When she had gone to such unpleasant lengths, in Willis Park, to insure that such a condition would not be an impediment? She must have been thinking of what she would tell him—she would never be able to tell him that she was menstruating—in the event that he hoped to carry things further. How could he have had plans like that, anyway? How? Where? In her berth, with so little room and all the other passengers very likely still awake around them? Standing up, swaying back and forth, pressed against a door, which anybody could come along and open, in that precarious space between the cars?

So now he could tell someone how he listened all evening to this fool girl showing off what she knew about Greek mythology, and in the end—when he finally kissed her good night, to get rid of her—she started screaming that she was a virgin.

He had not seemed the sort of man to do that, to talk like that, but she could not help imagining it.

She lay awake far into the night, but had fallen asleep when the train stopped at Regina.

Left alone, Juliet could explore the house. But she does no such thing. It is twenty minutes, at least, before she can be rid of the presence of Ailo. Not that she is afraid that Ailo might come back to check up on her, or to get something she has forgotten. Ailo is not the sort of person who forgets things, even at the end of a strenuous day. And if she had thought Juliet would steal anything, she would simply have kicked her out.

She is, however, the sort of woman who lays claim to space, particularly to kitchen space. Everything within Juliet’s gaze speaks of Ailo’s occupation, from the potted plants (herbs?) on the windowsill to the chopping block to the polished linoleum.

And when she has managed to push Ailo back, not out of the room but perhaps back beside the old-fashioned refrigerator, Juliet comes up against Christa. Eric has a woman. Of course he has. Christa. Juliet sees a younger, a more seductive Ailo. Wide hips, strong arms, long hair—all blond with no white—breasts bobbing frankly under a loose shirt. The same aggressive— and in Christa, sexy—lack of chic. The same relishing way of chewing up and then spitting out her words.

Two other women come into her mind. Briseis and Chryseis. Those playmates of Achilles and Agamemnon. Each of them described as being “of the lovely cheeks.” When the professor read that word (which she could not now remember), his forehead had gone quite pink and he seemed to be suppressing a giggle. For that moment, Juliet despised him.

So if Christa turns out to be a rougher, more northerly version of Briseis/Chryseis, will Juliet be able to start despising Eric as well?

But how will she ever know, if she walks down to the highway and gets on the bus?

The fact is that she never intended to get on that bus. So it seems. With Ailo out of the way, it is easier to discover her own intentions. She gets up at last and makes more coffee, then pours it into a mug, not one of the cups that Ailo has put out.

She is too keyed up to be hungry, but she examines the bottles on the counter, which people must have brought for the wake. Cherry brandy, peach schnapps, Tia Maria, sweet vermouth. These bottles have been opened but the contents have not proved popular. The serious drinking has been done from the empty bottles ranged by Ailo beside the door. Gin and whisky, beer and wine.

She pours Tia Maria into her coffee, and takes the bottle with her up the steps into the big living room.

This is one of the longest days of the year. But the trees around here, the big bushy evergreens and the red-limbed arbutus, shut out the light from the descending sun. The skylight keeps the kitchen bright, while the windows in the living room are nothing but long slits in the wall, and there the darkness has already begun to accumulate. The floor is not finished—old shabby rugs are laid down on squares of plywood—and the room is oddly and haphazardly furnished. Mostly with cushions, lying about on the floor, a couple of hassocks covered in leather, which has split. A huge leather chair, of the sort that leans back and has a rest for your feet. A couch covered by an authentic but ragged patchwork quilt, an ancient television set, and brick-and-plank bookshelves—on which there are no books, only stacks of old National Geographics, with a few sailing magazines and issues of Popular Mechanics.

Ailo obviously has not got around to cleaning up this room. There are smudges of ashes where ashtrays have been upset onto the rugs. And crumbs everywhere. It occurs to Juliet that she might look for the vacuum cleaner, if there is one, but then she thinks that even if she could get it to work it is likely that some mishap would occur—the thin rugs might get scrunched up and caught in the machine, for instance. So she just sits in the leather chair, adding more Tia Maria as the level of her coffee goes down.

Nothing is much to her liking on this coast. The trees are too large and crowded together and do not have any personality of their own—they simply make a forest. The mountains are too grand and implausible and the islands that float upon the waters of the Strait of Georgia are too persistently picturesque. This house, with its big spaces and slanted ceilings and unfinished wood, is stark and self-conscious.

The dog barks from time to time, but not urgently. Maybe she wants to come in and have company. But Juliet has never had a dog—a dog in the house would be a witness, not a companion, and would only make her feel uncomfortable.

Perhaps the dog is barking at exploring deer, or a bear, or a cougar. There has been something in the Vancouver papers about a cougar—she thinks it was on this coast—mauling a child.

Who would want to live where you have to share every part of outdoor space with hostile and marauding animals?

Kallipareos. Of the lovely cheeks. Now she has it. The Homeric word is sparkling on her hook. And beyond that she is suddenly aware of all her Greek vocabulary, of everything which seems to have been put in a closet for nearly six months now. Because she was not teaching Greek, she put it away.

That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

That is what happens.

And even if it’s not put away, even if you make your living from it, every day? Juliet thinks of the older teachers at the school, how little most of them care for whatever it is that they teach. Take Juanita, who chose Spanish because it goes with her Christian name (she is Irish) and who wants to speak it well, to use it in her travels. You cannot say that Spanish is her treasure.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.

The Tia Maria has worked in a certain way with the coffee. It makes her feel careless, but powerful. It enables her to think that Eric, after all, is not so important. He is someone she might dally with. Dally is the word. As Aphrodite did, with Anchises. And then one morning she will slip away.

She gets up and finds the bathroom, then comes back and lies down on the couch with the quilt over her—too sleepy to notice Corky’s hairs on it, or Corky’s smell.

When she wakes it is full morning, though only twenty past six by the kitchen clock.

She has a headache. There is a bottle of aspirin in the bathroom—she takes two, and washes herself and combs her hair and gets her toothbrush from her bag and brushes her teeth. Then she makes a fresh pot of coffee and eats a slice of homemade bread without bothering to heat or butter it. She sits at the kitchen table. Sunlight, slipping down through the trees, makes coppery splashes on the smooth trunks of the arbutus. Corky begins to bark, and barks for quite a long time before the truck turns into the yard and silences her.

Juliet hears the door of the truck close, she hears him speaking to the dog, and dread comes over her. She wants to hide somewhere (she says later, I could have crawled under the table, but of course she does not think of doing anything so ridiculous). It’s like the moment at school before the winner of the prize is announced. Only worse, because she has no reasonable hope. And because there will never be another chance so momentous in her life.

When the door opens she cannot look up. On her knees the fingers of both hands are interwoven, clenched together.

“You’re here,” he says. He is laughing in triumph and admiration, as if at a most spectacular piece of impudence and daring. When he opens his arms it’s as if a wind has blown into the room and made her look up.

Six months ago she did not know this man existed. Six months ago, the man who died under the train was still alive, and perhaps picking out the clothes for his trip.

“You’re here.”

She can tell by his voice that he is claiming her. She stands up, quite numb, and sees that he is older, heavier, more impetuous than she has remembered. He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness. How astonishing this is. How close to dismay.

It turns out that Eric was not taken so much by surprise as he pretended. Ailo phoned him last night, to warn him about the strange girl, Juliet, and offered to check for him as to whether the girl had got on the bus. He had thought it somehow right to take the chance that she would do so—to test fate, maybe—but when Ailo phoned to say that the girl had not gone he was startled by the joy he felt. Still, he did not come home right away, and he did not tell Christa, though he knew he would have to tell her, very soon.

All this Juliet absorbs bit by bit in the weeks and months that follow. Some information arrives accidentally, and some as the result of her imprudent probing.

Her own revelation (of nonvirginity) is considered minor.

Christa is nothing like Ailo. She does not have wide hips or blond hair. She is a dark-haired, thin woman, witty and sometimes morose, who will become Juliet’s great friend and mainstay during the years ahead—though she will never quite forgo a habit of sly teasing, the ironic flicker of a submerged rivalry.