Two Solitudes by Hugh Maclennan Page A

these pictures. Not that his father would have cared. It was a matter of guarding his thoughts and essentialself from others; this had become an obsession with Marius.
    He replaced the book and dropped into an armchair before the cold hearth, resting his head on cold leather. His father was very proud of this library; in a way he was proud of it himself, for it belonged to the family.
    Steps were audible on the stairs. Marius sat upright, listening, tense. He was facing the door, and as it opened he saw his stepmother before she caught sight of him. Kathleen Tallard stopped still, staring. “Great heavens!” she said, speaking in English. “What are you doing here?”
    Marius leaned back in the chair with an elaborate show of indifference.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” she said. “Are you in trouble?” Her voice had a husky, pulsing quality, but it was friendly, warm and frank.
    â€œCan’t I come home when I feel like it without you thinking something’s wrong? It’s my home, isn’t it? I was born here, wasn’t I?”
    â€œWhy sure it’s your home. But you ought to be in Montreal. You don’t have a vacation for another month. What will your father say?”
    â€œWhat business is that of yours?”
    She was silent a moment. Then she said, “I only wanted to be pleasant. I don’t see why you always talk that way to me.”
    â€œDon’t you?”
    She turned from him and picked up a long-sticked match from a bowl on the table, struck it, lifted the mantle of the lamp that stood there and touched the match to the wick. Then she struck another match and lit the lamps above the hearth. After that she turned back to him with a smile. “There. That’s better. A little light makes even this place cozy. You need a fire, too.”
    She bent and sprinkled kerosene from a brass can over the logs which were already set on the andirons, then struck another match and dropped it on them. Flames leaped over the kindlings and the birch logs, and a pleasant smell of burning wood seeped into the room as the smoke made wreaths around the stones at the edge of the fireplace before the draft sucked them up the chimney. Marius lay back in the long chair with his hands in his pockets and his feet straight out, watching this woman he always thought of as “my father’s wife.”
    Kathleen stood up from the fire and moved with an easy, indolent grace to the centre of the room. The boy followed her with his eyes. “You’re in trouble, Marius,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to tell me what it is?”
    â€œWhy should I? Nobody ever pays any attention to me around here. What’s the idea of you starting now?”
    She picked up a book from the table and laid it down again, her mild eyes watching him. She was thirty-one and he was twenty. The fact that she was much closer to his age than to her husband’s was always an unspoken knowledge between them. “You haven’t come out here for fun,” she said. “I know men well enough to know how they feel when they look the way you do.”
    â€œI’ll bet you know how men feel!”
    Her voice flared up in lazy anger. “If you say things like that I’ll have to tell your father.”
    He continued to stare at her, his eyes mocking. “You wouldn’t dare.”
    She made a slow movement with one foot, as if to stamp in anger, but the gesture died. “How do you know I wouldn’t?”
    His teeth showed white. “Because you’re afraid of trouble.”
    Kathleen shrugged her shoulders and picked up some magazines, putting them down again and making their edges straight. One dropped to the floor and she bent to retrieve it while Marius watched her, his lips opening slightly. God, she was beautiful!
    Ever since she had come to Saint-Marc nine years before, the house had seemed mysteriously evil, warm with sin. It was more than her