Comfort

Alice Munro

Comfort

This story was first published in the STORYCUTS series by Vintage Digital 2011

Taken from the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

Alice Munro has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Contents

Cover

Comfort

Backmatter

We hope you enjoyed this story. If you want to read more stories by Alice Munro, try her other contributions to the Storycuts series such as

Nettles 9781448128464

Floating Bridge 9781448128396

Queenie 9781448128488

Alternatively, read the original parent collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 9780099422747.

Comfort

NINA HAD BEEN playing tennis in the late afternoon, on the high school courts. After Lewis had left his job at the school she had boycotted the courts for a while, but that was nearly a year ago, and her friend Margaret—another retired teacher, whose departure had been routine and ceremonious, unlike Lewis’s—had talked her into playing there again.

“Better get out a bit while you still can.”

Margaret had already been gone when Lewis’s trouble occurred. She had written a letter from Scotland in support of him. But she was a person of such wide sympathies, such open understanding and far-reaching friendships, that the letter perhaps did not carry much weight. More of Margaret’s good-heartedness.

“How is Lewis?” she said, when Nina drove her home that afternoon.

Nina said, “Coasting.”

The sun had already dropped nearly to the rim of the lake. Some trees that still held their leaves were flares of gold, but the summer warmth of the afternoon had been snatched away. The shrubs in front of Margaret’s house were all bundled up in sacking like mummies.

This moment of the day made Nina think of the walks she and Lewis used to take after school and before supper. Short walks, of necessity as the days got dark, along out-of-town lanes and old railway embankments. But crowded with all that specific observation, spoken or not spoken, that she had learned or absorbed from Lewis. Bugs, grubs, snails, mosses, reeds in the ditch and shaggymanes in the grass, animal tracks, nannyberries, cranberries—a deep mix stirred up a little differently every day. And every day a new step towards winter, an increased frugality, a withering.

The house Nina and Lewis lived in had been built in the 1840s, close up to the sidewalk in the style of that time. If you were in the living room or dining room you could hear not only footsteps but conversations outside. Nina expected that Lewis would have heard the car door close.

She entered whistling, as well as she could. See the conquering hero comes.

“I won. I won. Hello?”

But while she was out, Lewis had been dying. In fact, he had been killing himself. On the bedside table lay four little plastic packets, backed with foil. Each had contained two potent painkillers. Two extra packets lay beside these, inviolate, the white capsules still plumping up the plastic cover. When Nina picked these up, later, she would see that one of them had a mark on the foil, as if he had started to dig in, with a fingernail, then had given up as if he’d decided he had already had enough, or had at that moment been drawn into unconsciousness.

His drinking glass was nearly empty. No water spilled.

This was a thing they had talked about. The plan had been agreed to, but always as a thing that could happen—would happen—in the future. Nina had assumed that she would be present and that there would be some ceremonial recognition. Music. The pillows arranged and a chair drawn up so that she could hold his hand. Two things she had not thought of—his extreme dislike of ceremony of any sort, and the burden such participation would put on her. The questions asked, the opinions passed, her jeopardy as a party to the act.

In doing it this way he had given her as little as possible that was worth covering up.

She looked for a note. What did she think it would say? She didn’t need instructions. She certainly did not need an explanation, let alone an apology. There was nothing a note could tell her that she didn’t know already. Even the question, Why so soon? was one she could figure out the answer for by herself. They had talked—or he had—about the threshold of intolerable helplessness or pain or self-disgust, and how it was important to recognize that threshold, not slide over it. Sooner, rather than later.

Just the same, it seemed impossible that he would not still have something to say to her. She looked first on the floor, thinking that he might have swiped the paper off the bedside table with his pajama sleeve when he set the water glass down for the last time. Or he could have taken special care not to do that—she looked under the base of the lamp. Then in the drawer of the table. Then under, and in, his slippers. She picked up and shook loose the pages of the book he had lately been reading, a paleontology book about what she believed was called the Cambrian explosion of multi-celled life-forms.

Nothing there.

She began rifling through the bedclothes. She stripped off the duvet, then the top sheet. There he lay, in the dark-blue silk pajamas which she had bought for him a couple of weeks ago. He had complained of feeling cold—he who had never been cold in bed before—so she went out and bought the most expensive pajamas in the store. She bought them because silk was both light and warm, and because all the other pajamas she saw—with their stripes, and their whimsical or naughty messages—made her think of old men, or comic-strip husbands, defeated shufflers. These were almost the same color as the sheets, so that little of him was revealed to her. Feet, ankles, shins. Hands, wrists, neck, head. He lay on his side, facing away from her. Still intent on the note, she moved the pillow, dragged it roughly away from under his head.

No. No.