Maclean by Allan Donaldson Page A

been like. She never said what had happened to him. Perhaps she didn’t know.
    For a while, what they did talk about were mostly things of no deep importance—her job, his job, the things they had done (or not done), the people they met, the goings-on of the town—sometimes, though not often, the goings-on in the great world that neither of them wanted anything more to do with.
    She didn’t have a lot of schooling. Grade Eight, she said, in a country school in Cape Breton. Coming across unexpected abysses of ignorance, he sometimes wondered if she had even less schooling than that and was lying to him because she was intimidated by his year and a half of high school with its Shakespeare and French and Latin. But although she might not have been well-educated, she was clever and alert and knew far more about life—meaning the lives of men and women—than he had ever had a chance to know.
    Among the many things they didn’t talk about was the future, which was to say, their future. She didn’t talk about it, he suspected, because she was afraid. He didn’t talk about it, he told himself, because for the moment the present was enough.
    Sometime in the next few weeks, the right moment would come when they would talk. But before that moment came, there came the morning when he went to the factory and found out that he had lost his job.
    He could still have afforded his room on his pension and the money he had saved, but the very next week, he moved out and into a one-room apartment in an old, wooden tenement building beside the creek, a great rabbit-warren of a place full of poor people, mostly Catholic Irish, with broods of sad, dirty children.
    â€œWhy?” Claudine shouted at him. “Why for Christ’s sake? Tell me why?”
    â€œIt’s all I can afford.”
    â€œBullshit. And anyway you can live here.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy not? Why in Christ’s name not?”
    Why not?
    As the money he had saved began to run out, he found a job helping to dig a basement, another chopping the winter’s firewood for a store.
    He began to drink more, and she drank along with him although never so much. Some nights now, he did stay all night, waking in the morning in the stale heat of the apartment with an aching head and a dead weight in his stomach.
    This went on for weeks. Sometimes they fought, usually over nothing of any importance. Mostly they merely wallowed in a kind of dank despair which gathered at first in him but soon generated a counterpart in her. They hardly went anywhere any more, and there were times when they sat all evening at her kitchen table and hardly said a word. He brooded about his lost job, his lost education, the war. He didn’t know what she brooded about, apart perhaps from her lost husband. As was her way, she never said.
    One day in early fall, she told him she was going to visit her sister in Halifax. A week after she left, he got a letter saying she wasn’t coming back. It said hardly more than that she saw no future for them and that it seemed to her they would do better without each other.
    The letter was postmarked Halifax. It had no return address, but the little she had told him about her people was still enough that he knew he could get in touch with her if he wanted to. Maybe she knew that too. Maybe it was all a kind of test.
    For months, he carried the letter around in his billfold. One of the boys from the army lived in Halifax, and he could easily have written him and given him the information he would need to locate Claudine. Twice he sat down and began to write, but before he had finished, something, he hardly knew what, came between him and his intent.
    Then one night, very drunk, going through his billfold in a futile search for money, he came across Claudine’s letter and tore it up and threw the pieces away.
    Why? In Christ’s name, why? Was there lurking somewhere some kind of insane pride, without sense