David had never regretted it. He wasn’t sure his nerves could have stood the film clips to illustrate the horrors of his nightly announcements, and he was glad not to have to pass the test night after night of being made up to look like himself. Could his hand have been steady at the mirror if his job had been to shave a public face? He would have been ashamed to have to become interested in ties. It was frivolous enough, what he had done, without having to endure the world looking at him while he did it.

Acting would have been different. What little he had done of it as a boy and a very young man gave him a sense of how he could rise out of himself into a creature of intent and direction, articulate even at the heights of emotion, which weren’t emotion at all but an energy-charged will, focusing.

David Crown had not believed he was gifted enough nor was he foolhardy enough to go against all the practical and outraged advice of mother and stepfather. He had a very ordinary and clear-cut part to play in the real world and one advantage: he could begin his career just before nearly everyone else his age came back from the war half-educated and ill-adapted for civilian life, confused about what was owed them. David married Patricia, too, before a real man came back to claim her as the flower of his victory.

His mother hadn’t approved of Patricia who even as a girl was sure of herself. ‘Opinionated’ was his mother’s word for it. ‘But please yourself,’ she had said.

Only extraordinary people pleased themselves, surely. It wasn’t really a matter of privilege. Other people didn’t know how, even if they were free to, except in the small details: the bus driver there with his Zero bar on the dashboard who otherwise wheeled his life under the trolley lines at the mercy of the traffic.

Night had come on, ablaze and aglitter compared to the dullness of misty evening, and the city rose up on the other side of Grandville Bridge, a chicanery of lights. David never got used to this new skyline, its cancerous swiftness obliterating what he wanted to remember, the town of his growing up, modest at the foot of mountains, at the edge of the infiltrating sea, a place for modest lives in the shadow of wilderness and remote snow. But there before him was an inflated city where you had to be at least twenty floors up for a view of the mountains and the water and pay dearly for it by the square inch.

David’s younger colleagues, those who weren’t being laid off as redundant without severance pay or pensions, had been moved down instead into the underground studios in the new CBC building, where newscasters joked about weather reports in a sky they could not see.