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By Root 579 0

now, she would not have her two children, she would not have her life, not the same life. That is true. She is sure of it, but it is too ugly to think about. The angle from which she has to see that can never be admitted to; it would seem monstrous. And if he hadn’t gone out that day—Frances is thinking as she talks to him—where would we all be now? Bobby would be about forty years old, perhaps he would be an engineer—his childish interests, recalled now more often by Ted, made that seem likely—he would have a good job, maybe even an interesting job, a wife and children. Greta would be going to see Ted in the hospital, looking after his emphysema. Frances might still be here, in Hanratty, teaching music; or she might be elsewhere. She might have recovered, fallen in love with someone else, or she might have grown hard and solitary around her wound.

What difference, thinks Frances. She doesn’t know where that thought comes from or what it means, for of course there is a difference, anybody can see that, a life’s difference. She’s had her love, her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.

Not altogether the same, surely.

The same.

I’ll be as bad as Mother when I get old, she thinks, turning eagerly to greet somebody. Never mind. She has a way to go yet.

Bardon Bus

I think of being an old maid, in another generation. There were plenty of old maids in my family. I come of straitened people, madly secretive, tenacious, economical. Like them, I could make a little go a long way. A piece of Chinese silk folded in a drawer, worn by the touch of fingers in the dark. Or the one letter, hidden under maid-enly garments, never needing to be opened or read because every word is known by heart, and a touch communicates the whole. Perhaps nothing so tangible, nothing but the memory of an ambiguous word, an intimate, casual tone of voice, a hard, helpless look. That could do. With no more than that I could manage, year after year as I scoured the milk pails, spit on the iron, followed the cows along the rough path among the alder and the black-eyed Susans, spread the clean wet overalls to dry on the fence, and the tea towels on the bushes. Who would the man be? He could be anybody. A soldier killed at the Somme or a farmer down the road with a rough-tongued wife and a crowd of children; a boy who went to Saskatchewan and promised to send for me, but never did, or the preacher who rouses me every Sunday with lashings of fear and promises of torment. No matter. I could fasten on any of them, in secret. A lifelong secret, lifelong dream-life. I could go round singing in the kitchen, polishing the stove, wiping the lamp chimneys, dipping water for the tea from the drinking-pail. The faintly sour smell of the scrubbed tin, the worn scrub-cloths. Upstairs my bed with the high headboard, the crocheted spread, and the rough, friendly-smelling flannelette sheets, the hot-water bottle to ease my cramps or be clenched between my legs. There I come back again and again to the center of my fantasy, to the moment when you give yourself up, give yourself over, to the assault which is guaranteed to finish off everything you’ve been before. A stubborn virgin’s belief, this belief in perfect mastery; any broken-down wife could tell you there is no such thing.

Dipping the dipper in the pail, lapped in my harmless craziness, I’d sing hymns, and nobody would wonder.

“He’s the Lily of the Valley,

The Bright and Morning Star.

He’s the Fairest of Ten Thousand to my Soul.”

2

This summer I’m living in Toronto, in my friend Kay’s apartment, finishing a book of family history which some rich people are paying me to write. Last spring, in connection with this book, I had to spend some time in Australia. There I met an anthropologist whom I had known slightly, years before, in Vancouver. He was then married to his first wife (he is now married to his third) and I was married to my first husband (I am now divorced). We both lived in Fort Camp, which was the