‘Your wife and your children don’t happen to be lilies of the field!’ David had heard Mary shout, and he shook his head in sorrowing admiration, thinking she might be better off not married to a basically good man.

But Mary was also affectionate, funny, and lovely to look at. Her storms of bad temper blew like sudden winds over the city leaving the landscape clarified and shining, sometimes for days at a time.

Though the rooms David occupied were in the raised basement of the house, he could still look east out over the steeply sloping lawn and across the low roof tops of Kitsilano to the high-rise cluster of downtown Vancouver, and to the north on clear days he had a glimpse of the mountains, in mist now on this damp fall evening. The children had gone out, and so should he, to a film perhaps, since neither his futile memory nor his television could block out the row upstairs.

David slipped his wallet and keys into his pockets, took his raincoat and hat out of the closet, and let himself out of his own back entrance quietly. He could have walked round the house and down on to the street, but to be less conspicuous he went up the back steps to the alley to walk the several blocks to the bus.

David rarely missed having a car. He had been a nervous, inattentive driver, and he’d always preferred to take the bus to the centre of town to work. In the last years before Patricia died, she not only kept the car during the day but did what night driving there was. She enjoyed being in control; he did not. The only positive pleasure he had ever had from the car was giving it to his oldest grandson, Ben, right after Patricia died.

‘But what will you do, Dad?’ Laura had asked him.

‘I only ever drove it to the hospital,’ he answered.

Laura worried about him. Though she admitted he’d arranged the downstairs very comfortably, she wasn’t sure it was dignified for him to live in a space originally designed for a student. But there was a really decent little kitchen and bath along with a bedroom and the ironing room he’d made into a study. He had everything he needed.

Laura probably disapproved of his generosity to Mary as well, for it dispossessed Laura of what had, after all, been her home, too, but she and Jack would never have wanted to move back in. They had been planning to sell their own large house in order to help educate their two bright sons. David had suggested they postpone the move until the boys were settled. He would take over the burden of the education.

‘But can you afford it, Daddy?’ Laura had asked.

‘What better way to spend the money?’