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His mother didn’t live in West Vancouver anymore but had come in from White Rock for the funeral. And she wasn’t quite confident about a direct reprimand, now that Pierre was a teacher and a married man.
“Or didn’t you think there’d be any left?” she said.
Pierre said carelessly, “Maybe not of what I wanted.”
His mother spoke to Meriel. “What a nice dress.”
“Yes, but look,” said Meriel, smoothing down the wrinkles that had formed while she sat through the service.
“That’s the trouble,” Pierre’s mother said.
“What’s the trouble?” said Jonas’s mother brightly, sliding some tarts onto the warming-dish.
“That’s the trouble with linen,” said Pierre’s mother. “Meriel was just saying how her dress had wrinkled up”-she did not say, “during the funeral service”-”and I was saying that’s the trouble with linen.”
Jonas’s mother might not have been listening. Looking across the room, she said, “That’s the doctor who looked after him. He flew down from Smithers in his own plane. Really, we thought that was so good of him.”
Pierre’s mother said, “That’s quite a venture.”
“Yes. Well. I suppose he gets around that way, to attend people in the bush.”
The man they were talking about was speaking to Pierre. He was not wearing a suit, though he had a decent jacket on, over a turtlenecked sweater.
“I suppose he would,” said Pierre’s mother, and Jonas’s mother said, “Yes,” and Meriel felt as if something-about the way he was dressed?-had been explained and settled, between them.
She looked down at the table napkins, which were folded in quarters. They were not as big as di
At the funeral service, the minister had compared Jonas’s life on earth to the life of a baby in the womb. The baby, he said, knows nothing of any other existence and inhabits its warm, dark, watery cave with not an inkling of the great bright world it will soon be thrust into. And we on earth have an inkling, but are really quite unable to imagine the light that we will enter after we have survived the travail of death. If the baby could somehow be informed of what would happen to it in the near future, would it not be incredulous, as well as afraid? And so are we, most of the time, but we should not be, for we have been given assurance. Even so, our blind brains ca
Meriel looked at the minister, who stood in the hall doorway with a glass of sherry in his hand, listening to a vivacious woman with blond puffed hair. It didn’t seem to her that they were talking about the pangs of death and the light ahead. What would he do if she walked over and tackled him on that subject?
Nobody would have the heart to. Or the bad ma
Instead she looked at Pierre and the bush doctor. Pierre was talking with a boyish liveliness not often seen in him these days. Or not often seen by Meriel. She occupied herself by pretending that she was seeing him for the first time, now. His curly, short-cropped, very dark hair receding at the temples, baring the smooth, gold-tinged ivory skin. His wide, sharp shoulders and long, fine limbs and nicely shaped rather small skull. He smiled enchantingly but never strategically and seemed to distrust smiling altogether since he had become a teacher of boys. Faint lines of permanent fret were set in his forehead.
She thought of a teachers’ party-more than a year ago-when she and he had found themselves, at opposite sides of the room, left out of the nearby conversations. She had circled the room and got close to him without his noticing, and then she had begun to talk to him as if she were a discreetly flirtatious stranger. He smiled as he was smiling now-but with a difference, as was natural when talking to an ensnaring woman-and he took up the charade. They exchanged charged looks and vapid speeches until they both broke down laughing. Someone came up to them and told them that married jokes were not allowed.
“What makes you think we’re really married?” said Pierre, whose behavior at such parties was usually so circumspect.
She crossed the room to him now with no such foolishness in mind. She had to remind him that they must soon go their separate ways. He was driving to Horseshoe Bay to catch the next ferry, and she would have to get across the North Shore to Ly
It’s not as if she was a real aunt.
So now Meriel was going to see her by herself. She had said that she would feel guilty if she didn’t go when she had the chance. Also, though she didn’t say so, she was looking forward to the time that this would give her to be away from her family.
“Maybe I could drive you,” Pierre said. “God knows how long you’ll have to wait for the bus.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You’d miss the ferry.” She reminded him of their arrangement with the sitter.
He said, “You’re right.”
The man he’d been talking to-the doctor-had not had any choice but to listen to this conversation, and he said unexpectedly, “Let me drive you.”
“I thought you came here in an airplane,” said Meriel, just as Pierre said, “This is my wife, excuse me. Meriel.”
The doctor told her a name which she hardly heard.
“It’s not so easy landing a plane on Hollyburn Mountain,” he said. “So I left it at the airport and rented a car.”
Some slight forcing of courtesy, on his part, made Meriel think that she had sounded obnoxious. She was either too bold or too shy, much of the time.
“Would that really be okay?” Pierre said. “Do you have time?”
The doctor looked directly at Meriel. This was not a disagreeable look-it was not bold or sly, it was not appraising. But it was not socially deferential, either.
He said, “Of course.”
So it was agreed that this was how it would be. They would start saying their good-byes now and Pierre would leave for the ferry and Asher, as his name was-or Dr. Asher-would drive Meriel to Ly
What Meriel pla
The nursing home was called Princess Manor. It was a one-story building with extended wings, covered in pinkish-brown stucco. The street was busy, and there were no grounds to speak of, no hedges or screen-fences to shut out noise or protect the scraps of lawn. On one side there was a Gospel Hall with a joke of a steeple, on the other a gas station.