In a hotel room in Vancouver, Meriel as a young woman is putting on her short white summer gloves. She wears a beige linen dress and a flimsy white scarf over her hair. Dark hair, at that time. She smiles, because she has remembered something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand said, or was quoted as saying, in a magazine. A quote within a quote—something Queen Sirikit said that Balmain had said.

“Balmain taught me everything. He said, ‘Always wear white gloves. It’s best.’”

It’s best. Meriel smiles at that, not as you’d smile at a joke but as at an endearing absurdity. Her gloved hands look formal but helpless. A kitten’s paws.

Pierre asks why she’s smiling, and she says, “Nothing,” then tells him.

He says, “Who is Balmain?”

They were getting ready to go to a funeral. They had come over on the ferry last night, from their home on Vancouver Island, to be sure of being on time for the morning ceremony. It was the first time they’d stayed in a hotel since their wedding night. When they went on a holiday now, it was always with their two children, and they looked for inexpensive motels that catered to families.

This was only the second funeral they had been to as a married couple. Pierre’s father was dead, and Meriel’s mother was dead, but these deaths had happened before Pierre and Meriel met. Last year, a teacher at Pierre’s school died suddenly, and there was a fine service, with the schoolboy choir and the sixteenth-century words for the Burial of the Dead. The man had been in his mid-sixties, and his death seemed to Meriel and Pierre only a little surprising and hardly sad. It did not make much difference, as they saw it, whether you died at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five.

The funeral today was another matter. It was Jonas who was being buried. Pierre’s best friend for years and Pierre’s age—twenty-nine. They had grown up together, in West Vancouver—they could remember it before the Lions Gate Bridge was built, when it seemed like a small town. Their parents were friends. When the boys were eleven or twelve years old they had built a rowboat and launched it at Dundarave Pier. At the university, they had parted company for a while—Jonas was studying to be an engineer, while Pierre was enrolled in classics, and the arts students and the engineering students traditionally despised each other. But, in the years since then, the friendship had to some extent been revived. Jonas, who was not married, had come to visit Pierre and Meriel, and sometimes stayed with them for a week at a time.

What had happened in their lives surprised them, and they would joke about it. Jonas was the one whose choice of profession had seemed so reassuring to his parents, and had roused a muted envy in Pierre’s parents, yet it was Pierre who had married and got a teaching job and taken on ordinary responsibilities, while Jonas, after university, had never settled down with a girl or a job. He was always on some sort of probation that did not end up in a firm attachment to any company, and the girls—at least to hear him tell it—were always on some sort of probation with him. His last engineering job was in the northern part of the province, and he stayed on there after either quitting or getting fired. Employment terminated by mutual consent, he wrote to Pierre, adding that he was living at the hotel, where all the high-class people lived, and might get a job on a logging crew. He was also learning to fly a plane, and thinking of becoming a bush pilot. He promised to visit when present financial complications were worked out.

Meriel had hoped that wouldn’t happen. Jonas slept on the living-room couch and in the morning threw the covers on the floor for her to pick up. He kept Pierre awake half the night, talking about things that had happened when they were teen-agers, or even younger. His name for Pierre was “Piss-hair,” a nickname from those years, and he referred to other old friends as Stinkpool and Doc and Buster, never by the names Meriel had always heard—Stan and Don and Rick. He recalled with a gruff pedantry the details of incidents that Meriel did not think so remarkable or funny (the bag of dog shit set on fire on the teacher’s front steps, the badgering of the old man who offered boys a nickel to pull down their pants) and grew irritated if the conversation turned to the present.

When she had to tell Pierre that Jonas was dead she was apologetic, shaken. Apologetic because she hadn’t liked him and shaken because he was the first person they knew well, in their own age group, to have died. But Pierre did not seem to be surprised or particularly stricken.

“Suicide,” he said.

She said no, an accident. He was riding a motorcycle, after dark, on gravel, and he went off the road. Somebody found him, or was with him, help was at hand, but he died within an hour. His injuries were mortal.

That was what his mother had said, on the phone. She had sounded so quickly resigned, so unsurprised. As Pierre had when he said “Suicide.”

After that, Pierre and Meriel had hardly spoken about the death itself, just about the funeral, the hotel room, the need for an all-night sitter. His suit to be cleaned, a white shirt obtained. It was Meriel who made the arrangements, and Pierre kept checking up on her in an irritable, husbandly way. She understood that he wished her to be controlled and matter-of-fact, as he was, and not to lay claim to any sorrow that—he would be sure—she could not really feel. She had asked him why he had said “Suicide,” and he had told her, “That’s just what came into my head.” She felt his evasion to be some sort of warning, or even a rebuke. As if he suspected her of deriving from this death—or from their proximity to this death—a feeling that was discreditable and self-centered. A morbid, preening excitement.

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that would have to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back—during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children—into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn’t there.