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“I better get off and see something of Vancouver,” she said, “seeing it isn’t likely I’ll ever get here again.”
Lorna marked some things on a map, and gave her directions, and said she was sorry she couldn’t go along, but it would be more trouble than it was worth, with the children.
“Oh. Oh, no. I wouldn’t expect you to. I didn’t come out here to be on your hands all the time.”
Elizabeth sensed the strain in the atmosphere. She said, “Why are we trouble?”
Lorna gave Daniel an early nap, and when he woke up she got him into the stroller and told Elizabeth they were going to a playground. The playground she had chosen was not the one in a nearby park-it was down the hill, close to the street Lionel lived on. Lorna knew his address, though she had never seen the house. She knew that it was a house, not an apartment building. He lived in one room, upstairs.
It did not take her long to get there-though no doubt it would take her longer to get back, pushing the stroller uphill. But she had already passed into the older part of North Vancouver, where the houses were smaller, perched on narrow lots. The house where Lionel lived had his name beside one bell, and the name B. Hutchison beside the other. She knew that Mrs. Hutchison was the landlady. She pressed that bell.
“I know Lionel’s away and I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I lent him a book, it’s a library book and now it’s overdue, and I just wondered if I could run up to his apartment and see if I could find it.”
The landlady said, “Oh.” She was an old woman with a banda
“My husband and I are friends of Lionel’s. My husband was his professor at college.”
The word “professor” was always useful. Lorna was given the key. She parked the stroller in the shade of the house and told Elizabeth to stay and watch Daniel.
“This isn’t a playground,” Elizabeth said.
“I just have to run upstairs and back. Just for a minute, okay?”
Lionel’s room had an alcove at the end of it for a two-burner gas stove and a cupboard. No refrigerator and no sink, except for the one in the toilet. A Venetian blind stuck halfway down the window, and a square of linoleum whose pattern was covered by brown paint. There was a faint smell of the gas stove, mixed with a smell of unaired heavy clothing, perspiration, and some pine-scented decongestant, which she accepted-hardly thinking of it and not at all disliking it-as the intimate smell of Lionel himself.
Other than that, the place gave out hardly any clues. She had come here not for any library book, of course, but to be for a moment inside the space where he lived, breathe his air, look out of his window. The view was of other houses, probably like this one chopped up into small apartments on the wooded slope of Grouse Mountain. The bareness, the anonymity of the room were severely challenging. Bed, bureau, table, chair. Just the furniture that had to be provided so that the room could be advertised as furnished. Even the tan chenille bedspread must have been there when he moved in. No pictures-not even a calendar-and most surprisingly, no books.
Things must be hidden somewhere. In the bureau drawers? She couldn’t look. Not only because there was no time-she could hear Elizabeth calling her from the yard-but the very absence of whatever might be personal made the sense of Lionel stronger. Not just the sense of his austerity and his secrets, but of a watchfulness-almost as if he had set a trap and was waiting to see what she would do.
What she really wanted to do was not to investigate anymore but to sit down on the floor, in the middle of the square of linoleum. To sit for hours not so much looking at this room as sinking into it. To stay in this room where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her. To stay here for a long, long time, growing sharper and lighter, light as a needle.
On Saturday morning, Lorna and Brendan and the children were to drive to Penticton. A graduate student had invited them to his wedding. They would stay Saturday night and all day Sunday and Sunday night as well, and leave for home on Monday morning.
“Have you told her?” Brendan said.
“It’s all right. She isn’t expecting to come.”
“But have you told her?”
Thursday was spent at Ambleside Beach. Lorna and Polly and the children rode there on buses, changing twice, encumbered with towels, beach toys, diapers, lunch, and Elizabeth’s blow-up dolphin. The physical predicaments they found themselves in, and the irritation and dismay that the sight of their party roused in other passengers, brought on a peculiarly feminine reaction-a mood of near hilarity. Getting away from the house where Lorna was installed as wife was helpful too. They reached the beach in triumph and ragtag disarray and set up their encampment, from which they took turns going into the water, minding the children, fetching soft drinks, Popsicles, french fries.
Lorna was lightly ta
With all the work she had to do in the two houses, and with her job in the bank, she said, there was not a quarter hour when she was free to sit in the sun. But she spoke now matter-of-factly, without her undertone of virtue and complaint. Some sour atmosphere that had surrounded her-like old dishrags-was falling away. She had found her way around Vancouver by herself-the first time she had ever done that in a city. She had talked to strangers at bus stops and asked what sights she should see and on somebody’s advice had taken the chairlift to the top of Grouse Mountain.
As they lay on the sand Lorna offered an explanation.
“This is a bad time of year for Brendan. Teaching summer school is really nerve-racking, you have to do so much so fast.”
Polly said, “Yeah? It’s not just me, then?”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course it isn’t you.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I thought he kind of hated my guts.”
She then spoke of a man at home who wanted to take her out.
“He’s too serious. He’s looking for a wife. I guess Brendan was too, but I guess you were in love with him.”
“Was and am,” said Lorna.
“Well, I don’t think I am.” Polly spoke with her face pressed into her elbow. “I guess it might work though if you liked somebody okay and you went out with them and made up your mind to see the good points.”
“So what are the good points?” Lorna was sitting up so that she could watch Elizabeth ride the dolphin.
“Give me a while to think,” said Polly, giggling. “No. There’s lots. I’m just being mean.”
As they were rounding up toys and towels she said, “I really wouldn’t mind doing all this over again tomorrow.”
“Me neither,” said Lorna, “but I have to get ready to go to the Okanagan. We’re invited to this wedding.” She made it sound like a chore-something she hadn’t bothered speaking about till now because it was too disagreeable and boring.
Polly said, “Oh. Well, I might come by myself then.”
“Sure. You should.”
“Where is the Okanagan?”
The next evening, after putting the children to bed, Lorna went into the room where Polly slept. She went to get a suitcase out of the closet, expecting the room to be empty-Polly, as she thought, still in the bathroom, soaking the day’s sunburn in lukewarm water and soda.
But Polly was in bed, with the sheet pulled up around her like a shroud.
“You’re out of the bath,” said Lorna, as if she found all this quite normal. “How does your burn feel now?”
“I’m okay,” said Polly in a muffled voice. Lorna knew at once that she had been and probably still was weeping. She stood at the foot of the bed, not able to leave the room. A disappointment had come over her that was like sickness, a wave of disgust. Polly didn’t really mean to keep hiding, she rolled over and looked out, with her face all creased and helpless, red from the sun, and her weeping. Fresh tears came welling up in her eyes. She was a mound of misery, one solid accusation.