Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories by Janette Turner Hospital Read Free Book Online

lashed its tail across the tenth day. It had come close to that for all of them, for the Cotters on her north side and for Mrs Watts across the street. It had almost come to pooling firewood and oil and all moving into just one of their houses (whose would they have chosen?). But the police and the army had made the rounds with snowmobiles and emergency supplies before such an alarming experiment had become necessary.
    Afterwards there had been a different feeling among them all, a certain confidence of kinship, not to be abused or taken advantage of, but definitely there. Any time since the blizzard it would probably have been possible to invite the neighbours in if she could have thought of the proper way to go about it. She did not want to be crass and forward and organising in the manner of all these new professional youngsters – doctors and lawyers and college professors – who were filling up the city like so many dandelions taking over a flawless lawn; young people who insisted on referring to the city as “the town”; who flitted off to Toronto and Montreal on weekends like seed puffs to a weed patch; who held incessant dinner parties where one was required to make conversation with people one had no particular desire to meet.
    No. She did not want to impose herself. She had to be careful. She was a newcomer herself. It was scarcely six years since she had bought the house.
    A newcomer and not a newcomer.
    She belonged. She understood what was expected. She had been born in a house just a few blocks away. From her upstairs window she could see the school she had attended. But then she had gone away to the great cities herself, had left for university and marriage and children and her life.
    The children had grown up and set out on their own odysseys.
    Widowhood had fallen greyly across her days like a shade pulled down by someone else’s hand.
    Life is circular, she thought, and decided to return to her roots. She used the insurance money to buy a rambling house in her own part of the city, the old ward of tree-lined streets, of limestone and brick houses, of gables and turrets and gracefully corniced doorways. It was the right sort of city in which to be a widow.
    â€œGood grief, Mother!” protested her son who was a banker close to the pulses of power. Her quaint ancestral urge irritated him. “What on earth do you want to rattle around in a vast house like that for? The maintenance will bankrupt you. If you must move so inconveniently far away from us, what you need is a condominium on the lake front. Or if you insist on history, one of those little stone cottages on lower Earl Street. That’s much more suitable for a … you know, for someone at your stage of life.”
    But Mrs Phillips wanted graciousness and privacy. She did not want to share her stairwell with other people or to own only one side of a wall. She wanted a garden big enough for lilacs and a crab apple, with a little stone path between rose bushes. She wanted the right sort of living-room for her harpsichord.
    â€œWell,” her son conceded huffily, “you can always take in student boarders on the top floor, I suppose. Fortunately you’re walking distance from the university, and location is the name of that game, you know.”
    â€œOh yes,” she said mildly.
    Her son’s work had much to do with games and gambits. She had always felt that this sort of thing was best left to the men of the family. They invariably worked something out; or rather, perhaps, matters of property and finance invariably worked themselves out. It was really a little vulgar to speak of such details even in the family, though these days, heaven knew, there were people who spoke as casually about money as they did about sex. Mrs Phillips was glad to set a hedge of bridal wreath between herself and such discourse.
    The sold sticker leered at her like a lapse in decorum.
    Perhaps the new neighbours would be a young