She does not give up, however. She tries the doors again in the same order, and this time she shakes both knobs as well as she can and also calls out, “Hello?” in a voice that sounds at first trivial and silly, then aggrieved, but not more hopeful.

She squeezes herself in behind the desk and bangs that door, with practically no hope. It doesn’t even have a knob, just a keyhole.

There is nothing to do but get out of this place and go home.

All very cheerful and elegant, she thinks, but there is no pretense here of serving the public. Of course they shove the residents or patients or whatever they call them into bed early, it is the same old story everywhere, however glamorous the surroundings.

Still thinking about this, she gives the entry door a push. It is too heavy. She pushes again.

Again. It does not budge.

She can see the pots of flowers outside in the open air. A car going by on the road. The mild evening light.

She has to stop and think.

There are no artificial lights on in here. The place will get dark. Already in spite of the lingering light outside, it seems to be getting dark. No one will come, they have all completed their duties, or at least the duties that brought them through this part of the building. Wherever they have settled down now is where they will stay.

She opens her mouth to yell but it seems that no yell is forthcoming. She is shaking all over and no matter how she tries she cannot get her breath down into her lungs. It is as if she has a blotter in her throat. Suffocation. She knows that she has to behave differently, and more than that, she has to believe differently. Calm. Calm. Breathe. Breathe.

She doesn’t know if the panic has taken a long time or a short time. Her heart is pounding but she is nearly safe.

There is a woman here whose name is Sandy. It says so on the brooch she wears, and Nancy knows her anyway.

“What are we going to do with you?” says Sandy. “All we want is to get you into your nightie. And you go and carry on like a chicken that’s scared of being et for dinner.

“You must have had a dream,” she says. “What did you dream about now?”

“Nothing,” says Nancy. “It was back when my husband was alive and when I was still driving the car.”

“You have a nice car?”

“Volvo.”

“See? You’re sharp as a tack.”

DOLLY

THAT fall there had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. Franklin being eighty-three years old and myself seventy-one at the time, we had naturally made plans for our funerals (none) and for the burials (immediate) in a plot already purchased. We had decided against cremation, which was popular with our friends. It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.

One day we were driving around in the country not too far from where we live, and we found a road we hadn’t known about. The trees, maples and oaks and others, were second growth, though of an impressive size, indicating that there had been cleared land. Farms at one time, pastures and houses and barns. But not a sign of this was left. The road was unpaved but not untravelled. It looked as if it might see several vehicles a day. Maybe there were trucks that used it as a shortcut.

This was important, Franklin said. No way did we want to be there for a day or two, or possibly a week, with no discovery. Nor did we want to leave the car empty, with the police having to tramp through the trees in search of remains that the coyotes might already have got into.

Also, the day must not be too melancholy. No rain or early snow. The leaves turned but not many fallen. Plastered with gold, as they were on that day. But perhaps the sun would not be shining, else the gold, the glamour of the day, might make us feel like spoilers.

We had a difference about the note. That is, about whether we should leave a note or not. I thought that we owed people an explanation. They should be told that there was no question of a fatal illness, no onset of pain that blocked out the prospect of a decent life. They should be assured that this was a clearheaded, you might almost say a lighthearted decision.

Gone while the going is good.

No. I retracted that. Flippancy. An insult.

Franklin’s idea was that any explanation at all was an insult. Not to others but to ourselves. To ourselves. We belonged to ourselves and to each other and any explanation at all struck him as snivelling.

I saw what he meant but I was still inclined to disagree.

And that very fact—our disagreement—seemed to put the possibility out of his head.

He said that it was rubbish. All right for him but I was too young. We could talk again when I was seventy-five.

I said that the only thing that bothered me, a little, was the way there was an assumption that nothing more was going to happen in our lives. Nothing of importance to us, nothing to be managed anymore.

He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want?

It was too polite, I said.

I have never felt that I am younger than Franklin, except maybe when the war comes up in conversation—I mean the Second World War—and that seldom happens nowadays. For one thing, he does more strenuous exercise than I do. At one time he was the overseer of a stable—I mean the sort of stable where people board riding horses, not racehorses. He still goes there two or three times a week, and rides his own horse, and talks to the man in charge who occasionally wants his advice. Though mostly he says he tries to keep out of the way.

He is in fact a poet. He is really a poet and really a horse trainer. He has held one-term jobs at various colleges, but never so far away that he can’t keep in touch with the stables. He admits to giving readings, but only as he says once in a blue moon. He doesn’t stress the poetic employment. Sometimes I am annoyed with this attitude—I call it his aw-shucks persona—but I can see the point. When you’re busy with horses people can see that you are busy, but when you’re busy at making up a poem you look as if you’re in a state of idleness and you feel a little strange or embarrassed having to explain what’s going on.

Another problem might be that though he is a reticent sort of man, the poem that he is best known for is what people around here—that is, where he grew up—are apt to call raw. Pretty raw, I have heard him say himself, not apologizing but just maybe warning somebody off. He has a feeling for the sensibilities of those people he knows who can be upset by certain things, though he is a great defender of freedom of speech in general.

Not that there haven’t been changes around here, concerning what you can say out loud and read in print. Prizes help, and being mentioned in the papers.

All the years that I taught in a high school I didn’t teach literature, as you might expect, but mathematics. Then staying home I grew restless and undertook something else—writing tidy and I hope entertaining biographies of Canadian novelists who have been undeservedly forgotten or have never received proper attention. I don’t think I would have got the job if it wasn’t for Franklin, and the literary reputation that we don’t talk about—I was born in Scotland and really didn’t know any Canadian writers.

I never would have counted Franklin or any poet as deserving of the sympathy I gave the novelists, I mean for their faded or even vanished condition. I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps I think poetry is more of an end in itself.

I liked the work, I thought it worthwhile, and after years in classrooms I was glad of the control and the quiet. But there might come a time, say around four in the afternoon, when I just wanted to relax and have some company.

And it was around that time on a dreary closed-in day when a woman came to my door with a load of cosmetics. At any other time I wouldn’t have been glad to see her, but I was then. Her name was Gwen, and she said she hadn’t called on me before because they had told her I wasn’t the type.