The Moslem Wife and Other Stories by Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler

her? Peter could not reply. He knew that Agnes lived in a bed-sitting room with a Swiss family and had her meals with them. She had been in Geneva three months, but no one had ever seen her outside the office. “You
should
know,” said Sheilah. “She must have something, more than you can see. Is she pretty? Is she brilliant? What is it?”
    “We don’t really talk,” Peter said. They talked in a way:Peter teased her and she took no notice. Agnes was not a sulker. She had taken her defeat like a sport. She did her work and a good deal of his. She sat behind her Bible, her flowers, and her Kleenex, and answered when Peter spoke. That was how he learned about the Burleighs – just by teasing and being bored. It was a January afternoon. He said, “
Miss
Brusen. Talk to me. Tell me everything. Pretend we have perfect rapport. Do you like Geneva?”
    “It’s a nice clean town,” she said. He can see to this day the red and blue anemones in the glass jar, and her bent head, and her small untended hands.
    “Are you learning beautiful French with your Swiss family?”
    “They speak English.”
    “Why don’t you take an apartment of your own?” he said. Peter was not usually impertinent. He was bored. “You’d be independent then.”
    “I am independent,” she said. “I earn my living. I don’t think it proves anything if you live by yourself. Mrs. Burleigh wants me to live alone, too. She’s looking for something for me. It mustn’t be dear. I send money home.”
    Here was the extraordinary thing about Agnes Brusen: she refused the use of Christian names and never spoke to Peter unless he spoke first, but she would tell anything, as if to say, “Don’t waste time fishing. Here it is.”
    He learned all in one minute that she sent her salary home, and that she was a friend of the Burleighs. The first he had expected; the second knocked him flat.
    “She’s got to come to dinner,” Sheilah said. “We should have had her right from the beginning. If only I’d known! But
you
were the one. You said she looked like – oh, I don’t even remember. A Norwegian mole.”
    She came to dinner one Saturday night in January, in her navy-blue dress, to which she had pinned an organdy gardenia. She sat upright on the edge of the sofa. Sheilah hadordered the meal from a restaurant. There was lobster, good wine, and a
pièce-montée
full of kirsch and cream. Agnes refused the lobster; she had never eaten anything from the sea unless it had been sterilized and tinned, and said so. She was afraid of skin poisoning. Someone in her family had skin poisoning after having eaten oysters. She touched her cheeks and neck to show where the poisoning had erupted. She sniffed her wine and put the glass down without tasting it. She could not eat the cake because of the alcohol it contained. She ate an egg, bread and butter, a sliced tomato, and drank a glass of ginger ale. She seemed unaware she was creating disaster and pain. She did not help clear away the dinner plates. She sat, adequately nourished, decently dressed, and waited to learn why she had been invited here – that was the feeling Peter had. He folded the card table on which they had dined, and opened the window to air the room.
    “It’s not the same cold as Canada, but you feel it more,” he said, for something to say.
    “Your blood has gotten thin,” said Agnes.
    Sheilah returned from the kitchen and let herself fall into an armchair. With her eyes closed she held out her hand for a cigarette. She was performing the haughty-lady act that was a family joke. She flung her head back and looked at Agnes through half-closed lids; then she suddenly brought her head forward, widening her eyes.
    “Are you skiing madly?” she said.
    “Well, in the first place there hasn’t been any snow,” said Agnes. “So nobody’s doing any skiing so far as I know. All I hear is people complaining because there’s no snow. Personally, I don’t ski. There isn’t much skiing in