She was the only child of one of the early lumber barons of Vancouver Island. She had been born in a vanished northern settlement. But whenever Patrick tried to get her to talk about the past, whenever he asked her for the simplest sort of information — what steamers went up the coast, what year was the settlement abandoned, what was the route of the first logging railway — she would say irritably, “I don’t know. How would I know about that?” This irritation was the strongest note that ever got into her words.
Neither did Patrick’s father care for this concern about the past. Many things, most things, about Patrick seemed to strike him as bad signs.
“What do you want to know all that for?” he shouted down the table. He was a short square-shouldered man, red-faced, astonishingly belligerent. Patrick looked like his mother, who was tall, fair, and elegant in the most muted way possible, as if her clothes, her makeup, her style, were chosen with an ideal neutrality in mind.
“Because I am interested in history,” said Patrick in an angry, pompous, but nervously breaking voice.
“Because-I-am-interested-in-history,” said his sister Marion in an immediate parody, break and all. “History!”
The sisters Joan and Marion were younger than Patrick, older than Rose. Unlike Patrick they showed no nervousness, no cracks in self-satisfaction. At an earlier meal they had questioned Rose.
“Do you ride?”
“No.”
“Do you sail?”
“No.”
“Play tennis? Play golf? Play badminton?”
No. No. No.
“Perhaps she is an intellectual genius, like Patrick,” the father said. And Patrick, to Rose’s horror and embarrassment, began to shout at the table in general an account of her scholarships and prizes. What did he hope for? Was he so witless as to think such bragging would subdue them, would bring out anything but further scorn? Against Patrick, against his shouted boasts, his contempt for sports and television, his so-called intellectual interests, the family seemed united. But this alliance was only temporary. The father’s dislike of his daughters was minor only in comparison with his dislike of Patrick. He railed at them too, when he could spare a moment; he jeered at the amount of time they spent at their games, complained about the cost of their equipment, their boats, their horses. And they wrangled with each other on obscure questions of scores and borrowings and damages. All complained to the mother about the food, which was plentiful and delicious. The mother spoke as little as possible to anyone and to tell the truth Rose did not blame her. She had never imagined so much true malevolence collected in one place. Billy Pope was a bigot and a grumbler, Flo was capricious, unjust, and gossipy, her father, when he was alive, had been capable of cold judgments and unremitting disapproval; but compared to Patrick’s family, all Rose’s people seemed jovial and content.
“Are they always like this?” she said to Patrick. “Is it me? They don’t like me.”
“They don’t like you because I chose you,” said Patrick with some satisfaction.
They lay on the stony beach after dark, in their raincoats, hugged and kissed and uncomfortably, unsuccessfully, attempted more. Rose got seaweed stains on Dr. Henshawe’s coat. Patrick said, “You see why I need you? I need you so much!”
SHE TOOK HIM to Hanratty. It was just as bad as she had thought it would be. Flo had gone to great trouble, and cooked a meal of scalloped potatoes, turnips, big country sausages which were a special present from Billy Pope, from the butcher shop. Patrick detested coarse-textured food, and made no pretense of eating it. The table was spread with a plastic cloth, they ate under the tube of fluorescent light. The centerpiece was new and especially for the occasion. A plastic swan, lime green in color, with slits in the wings, in which were stuck folded, colored paper napkins. Billy Pope, reminded to take one, grunted, refused. Otherwise he was on dismally good behavior. Word had reached him, word had reached both Flo and Billy, of Rose’s triumph. It had come from their superiors in Hanratty; otherwise they could not have believed it. Customers in the butcher shop — formidable ladies, the dentist’s wife, the veterinarian’s wife — had said to Billy Pope that they heard Rose had picked herself up a millionaire. Rose knew Billy Pope would go back to work tomorrow with stories of the millionaire, or millionaire’s son, and that all these stories would focus on his — Billy Pope’s — forthright and unintimidated behavior in the situation.
“We just set him down and give him some sausages, don’t make no difference to us what he comes from!”
She knew Flo would have her comments too, that Patrick’s nervousness would not escape her, that she would be able to mimic his voice and his flapping hands that had knocked over the ketchup bottle. But at present they both sat hunched over the table in miserable eclipse. Rose tried to start some conversation, talking brightly, unnaturally, rather as if she was an interviewer trying to draw out a couple of simple local people. She felt ashamed on more levels than she could count. She was ashamed of the food and the swan and the plastic tablecloth; ashamed for Patrick, the gloomy snob, who made a startled grimace when Flo passed him the toothpick-holder; ashamed for Flo with her timidity and hypocrisy and pretensions; most of all ashamed for herself. She didn’t even have any way that she could talk, and sound natural. With Patrick there, she couldn’t slip back into an accent closer to Flo’s, Billy Pope’s, and Hanratty’s. That accent jarred on her ears now, anyway. It seemed to involve not just a different pronunciation but a whole different approach to talking. Talking was shouting; the words were separated and emphasized so that people could bombard each other with them. And the things people said were like lines from the most hackneyed rural comedy. Wal, if a feller took a notion to, they said. They really said that. Seeing them through Patrick’s eyes, hearing them through his ears, Rose too had to be amazed.
She was trying to get them to talk about local history, some things she thought Patrick might be interested in. Presently, Flo did begin to talk; she could only be held in so long, whatever her misgivings. The conversation took another line from anything Rose had intended.
“The line I lived on when I was just young,” Flo said, “it was the worst place ever created for suiciding.”
“A line is a concession road. In the township,” Rose said to Patrick. She had doubts about what was coming, and rightly so, for then Patrick got to hear about a man who cut his own throat, his own throat, from ear to ear; a man who shot himself the first time and didn’t do enough damage, so he loaded up and fired again and managed it; another man who hanged himself using a chain, the kind of chain you hook on a tractor with, so it was a wonder his head was not torn off.
Tore off, Flo said.
She went on to a woman who, though not a suicide, had been dead in her house a week before she was found, and that was in the summer. She asked Patrick to imagine it. All this happened, said Flo, within five miles of where she herself was born. She was presenting credentials, not trying to horrify Patrick, at least not more than was acceptable in a social way; she did not mean to disconcert him. How could he understand that?
“You were right,” said Patrick as they left Hanratty on the bus. “It is a dump. You must be glad to get away.”