GWEN TURNED A QUARTER OF A CENTURY on her day off, Friday, August 1. Nothing from her brother, not a phone call, not a card. She thought of him in the jewellery store he’d taken over after their father died, her father a jeweller who never looked up, her brother a businessman who never stopped glancing around for another sale. Being on the radio, she’d discovered, was easier than dealing with certain people. There was a restfulness, an intimacy, a wonderful privacy when you didn’t have to speak to someone face to face. She’d fallen into the habit of reading out a bedtime poem “for all you lie-awakes” before she signed off at night. Then afterwards she liked to take her time going home, roaming around on summer nights that at their darkest were still light enough to pick berries by. But things were changing now—it was becoming cooler, duskier.

Friday evening, she arrived for her birthday drink with Eleanor at seven o’clock, and Dido was there. Dido, making an effort, she could see that. A measured effort, a measured welcome, and as they worked at making conversation, and nothing was easy, Gwen understood that she was going to have to live with this—her negative effect on someone who used to like her, someone she still admired.

Between glasses of wine, and during an awkward pause, Gwen took herself to the bathroom. She followed the beige-carpeted hallway, pausing to look in through the door of the small spare bedroom, Dido’s room, and it looked barely inhabited, its narrow bed more a shelf for books and papers than a place for sleeping. So she was spending her nights with Eddy. The second door was the bathroom, but a third door—the open door to Eleanor’s bedroom—offered another view, another way of stalling, of avoiding Dido. Idly, she gazed in at the unmade double bed, the armchair, the window shades, when something caught her eye. A few feet away, a bottle of patchouli on top of the dresser. An unattractive scent, she’d always thought. She noticed a pair of Dido’s slingback shoes on the floor.

As Gwen retraced her steps to the bathroom, a penny dropped in her mind.

At eight o’clock the bell rang, the door burst open, and in came Harry and Ralph and Teresa with overzealous cries of Happy Birthday.

Gwen felt tears spring to her eyes, and she smiled. She embraced everybody. “Thank you,” she said, and her voice was husky. But, in truth, she hated surprise parties. She couldn’t help feeling that it was cruel to string a person along, to say nothing all day in order to give her a hard, brotherly punch of affection at night.

For an hour or two she did her best. She mingled, listened, asked questions. She ate cake. After a while, she hid for a time inside a book she found on Eleanor’s shelf, Rasmussen’s Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos. While Harry doctored himself with Scotch and Ralph satisfied his sweet tooth, Gwen was out in the arctic wastes and fifty years back in the past when the Inuit were still living much as they had for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Small flocks of caribou were extremely shy and could not be hunted on the creaking snow in good weather, but only in a snowstorm, when it was sometimes possible to stalk quite close up to them.

Rasmussen had entered the Barren Grounds in the spring of 1922, having heard as he travelled “many harrowing tales of the privation that had prevailed that winter.” Everywhere Eskimos were starving. He followed the Kazan River looking for inland tribes, “the people of the whirlpools” and “the people of the willow thicket.” The months of March and April were always the most dangerous time. Winter food caches had been used up, the May caribou migration hadn’t begun.

“Hornby wasn’t the only one who starved to death,” Gwen thought, and she looked up to see Ralph watching her indulgently. “A serious reader,” he said. “A woman after my own heart.” He, too, liked to retreat behind a book or a magazine at parties, especially now that he had no wife to accuse him of being unforgivably and boyishly rude.

Gwen smiled and relaxed. She put the book down and returned to a party that seemed more complicated in its social tensions than the straightforward business of starving to death. A party she found touching and baffling and tiring and hard to navigate.

Dido was dancing by herself in bare feet. Teresa kicked off her shoes and joined her. Gwen watched from her armchair, fascinated by both women, afraid she’d be expected to dance too, charmed by their lack of inhibition, and envious. Would she ever be like that? Dido was much the bigger of the two, yet her hips were almost as narrow as Teresa’s. They were dancing to the Beatles—Dido reached over and jacked up the volume, she slipped her loose watch off her wrist and set it on the stereo—flirtatious, girlish, free, encouraged by applause from Ralph and Harry, who seemed as disinclined to dance as Gwen, and over the din Eleanor heard the doorbell.

It was Eddy on the doorstep. An entrance that changed everything. A visit in the manner of a visitation from an uninvited guest, although Eddy had been invited. He apologized for arriving late, he acknowledged Gwen with a squeeze of her shoulder. But the playful mood vanished, the women stopped dancing, and the music changed. Eddy had a new recording he wanted them to hear. Soon Joe Turner was singing slow, funky blues backed up by wailing trumpets. “I Know You Love Me Baby.”

Eddy and Dido were dancing, and Gwen could see exactly what Eddy brought to Dido. Dido moved differently with Eddy. She was slower, unhurried. Her breasts looked heavier, riper, her hips wider, lower, fuller. She shone with a different glow, a dark, erotic radiance.

By now Teresa was sitting cross-legged on the carpet beside Gwen’s armchair, rolling a smoke, her hands trembling. Looking down at her, Gwen could see the traces of grey that she’d never noticed before in the dark hair on top of Teresa’s head. She could see the side of her face, and was struck by what seemed to be a sad and knowing smile. The other day Teresa had told her that although she’d followed her sister into the nunnery, she’d never followed her into a bad marriage. That was the great sadness of her life, she said. Her sister’s terrible marriage.

It was late. Harry lay semi-sprawled on the floor. He gave up trying to make his point, having forgotten what it was. Gwen was curled up in an armchair, reading again. Eleanor’s eyes rested on the birthday girl and a memory came back of a boy she knew growing up, Ronny Ferguson, a strange boy: other kids would be playing outside and he would be inside reading Marvel comics; even at his birthday party he kept on reading. His mother let him, that was the marvellous thing.

Gwen closed the book and asked what time it was. She asked the room at large. Everyone, except herself, was at this point sitting on the floor.

Dido, across the room with her back against the wall and Eddy beside her, waited a moment before she replied. “What time do you want it to be?”

Dido had slipped her shoes back on, low heels, black. Her bare arms were the colour of peeled almonds. Her watch was conspicuous again on her wrist.

Gwen wanted it to be very late. She wanted to go home. “I want it to be the time it is.”

“But what time do you want it to be?”

Gwen felt herself being toyed with, baited by Dido’s amused, provocative, subtly hostile tone, and her own voice came out hard and strained. “I. want. it. to. be. the. time. it. is.”

Eleanor leaned her head back against the wall. It seemed to her that something was going on here that was closer than friendship, just as the scratchy label of a sweater is closer than the sweater.

The smile widened on Dido’s lips. She shifted and looked at her watch. Then she looked at Gwen. “Why are you sitting on a chair? All the rest of us are on the floor.”

“I’m comfortable on the chair.” But she didn’t feel comfortable. And didn’t look it either, she knew that.

“You don’t look comfortable,” said Dido with that slightly mocking smile.

“I’m as comfortable as I ever am.”

“But you’re apart from us, sitting up there. You’ve set yourself apart.”

“I know. I know I’m sitting on a chair and everyone else is on the floor.”

“Do you feel apart from the rest of us?”

“Maybe a little. Is that a crime?”

Dido was watching Gwen, but nobody else was. “It’s not a crime. I just wonder what’s going on. And why you’re so angry.”

Somebody had to break the silence, but nobody did.

Then Harry spoke, his voice low, conversational, a little slurred. “What’s the book, Gwen?”

She looked down at the book in her hands.

“Show me.”

She stood up then and handed him the book. And that’s how she got off the chair-island on which she’d been stranded. She knelt on the floor beside Harry. From here she could see partway down the hall and picture the rest—the underused small bedroom, the fully used big bedroom. She could scarcely credit it. Yet it nudged her again. The eerie feeling that she knew something she could use against Dido.

Only in a snowstorm, she thought, a flurry of stuff in the air, was it possible to outwit the caribou. Outwitting people, however, that was easy. They were at the door. Eleanor embraced her and soothed her heart by saying, “Let’s have lunch tomorrow. I’ll ring your bell at noon.” But brazen Dido took her face between her hands and kissed her on the mouth. “Happy birthday, birthday girl.”

Dido’s lips felt thin and oversoft, innocent yet all wrong. Harmless, but not harmless at all.

It was I a.m., and Dido and Eleanor were listening to Billie Holiday sing good morning to her heartache as they emptied ashtrays, stacked dishes, began to wash up after the party.

Dido dried a plate. She reached for another, and as she did so, she remembered something, and the towel went still.

“I had a terrible dream last night.”

Eleanor stopped too, and turned to look at Dido, who stood transfixed. She was back in the dream.

“I was in a big city and it was very dark, pitch dark. It felt like Eastern Europe somewhere. Pitch black, I mean. A taxi pulled up and I got into it, and we began to drive down this old, narrow street. There were two men in the front seat in black suits. They were staring straight ahead. I couldn’t see their faces. I had no idea who they were, I didn’t know where we were going either, I didn’t know where I was.” Dido rubbed her forehead with one hand. “There was nothing in here,” she said slowly. “I had no memory. I had no mind. I didn’t know anything. It was as black in here as it was outside.” She looked at Eleanor. “It was terrifying.”

She’s describing a hearse, thought Eleanor. She’s describing her own journey into death.

She took the tea towel out of Dido’s hand. “You’re tired, honey. It’s late.”

Dido turned to stare at the clock on the kitchen wall. “Eddy said, ‘Loon at three o’clock’ the other day. I didn’t know whether to turn my head right or left. I couldn’t remember where three was on the clock.”

Eleanor put her arm around Dido and drew her away from the clock. “I get confused by things too and I’m not trying to juggle two languages and two countries the way you are.”

Gwen had driven Harry home. On the way they didn’t talk and were comfortable not talking. They came down Franklin Avenue, named for the man who ate his boots, the explorer who managed to lose the lives of all one hundred and twenty-nine of his men in one of those foolhardy attempts to find the Northwest Passage. Proof to Harry that if your disaster was on a large enough scale, your incompetence would be forgiven.

In passing the Capitol Theatre, Gwen saw The Godfather Part II on the marquee, and she said, “Eddy has cruel lips.”

“Women go for that,” replied Harry with a dry laugh.

She knew he meant the movie male aggressiveness that was undeniably exciting. “Dido has cruel lips too,” she said.

Harry pretended not to hear this quiet remark. It was August 2 now, and the darkness was like a partially open drawer.

“There’s Mrs. Dargabble,” said Harry.

Lorna Dargabble was on the other side of the street, out for a walk at one in the morning, hands in her pockets, oversized chapeau on her head. A lonely figure, slow, heavy, troubled. The last time Gwen had knocked on her door, no one had answered, but she’d heard a radio, faintly; Lorna always had the radio on—it was her lifeline, she said. In the hallway Gwen had called out her name, and up came Lorna from the basement, full of apologies for not having her teeth in and dressed in much the same style as the half-renovated kitchen: she wore the most elegant shoes, green suede with straps at the back, a long green velvet skirt, and a lumber jacket. The kitchen had insulation but no drywall, a new stove not yet installed, and a true boarding house smell of none-too-clean.

“I don’t see her at the station any more,” said Harry.

“Oh, she still comes in. She’s been talking about moving back to Boston. She says Yellowknife is no place for an old woman.”

Harry nodded. Or an old man, for that matter.

When Gwen pulled into Harry’s driveway, she turned off the motor and sat back, unwilling to end a night she’d held steadfastly at bay. There was something she wanted to ask.

“Harry?” She ran her necklace of blue beads back and forth across her lower lip.

The gesture reminded Harry of his ex-wife, who used to draw forward a strand of her long hair and curl it around and around her finger.

What she wanted to ask was why Dido had kissed her on the mouth like that. What was she trying to prove? And why were her personal things in Eleanor’s bedroom when she was obviously sleeping with Eddy? She wanted to say, What’s going on with Dido, this woman you’re so in love with?

But an easier statement slipped out. “I’d like to live down here,” she said.

Then she said something else. “I don’t really like living alone. I liked it better when I lived with Eleanor. I mean, lived with her, sort of.”

“Too bad she doesn’t have more room.”

She looked at him. “There’s enough room. Dido’s bedroom doesn’t seem to get much use, even when she’s there.”

For a second his eyes drilled her. Then he looked ahead with a bleak little smile.

It had slipped out innocently enough, cloaked in honesty, even delicacy. She had observed something. How could she not take credit?

Iago. Iago had bobbed up inside her.

“It’s late, Gwen.” He reached for the door handle. “Thanks for the ride.”

But she was Iago and Othello in one: insinuating and sorry. “I’m sorry. Forget what I just said. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” She was looking over at him. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean to be nasty.”

Harry remained silent.

“Or maybe I do,” she said.

Harry heard the misery in her voice. Now she was staring at her hands in her lap. It was cool enough that he was surprised she wasn’t shivering in her light jacket.

Later, he would ponder on what she’d implied. Dido’s bedroom doesn’t seem to get much use. A shock—if it was true. But his world wasn’t destroyed by the thought of Dido in Eleanor’s bed. It’s not the thought of a woman with another woman that makes a man unhappy, it’s the thought of a woman with another man. Anyway, he didn’t buy it—although he’d give anything to see Eddy’s face if it were true. No, the remark said more about Gwen than it did about anyone else. She’d leapt to a conclusion for reasons of her own, and then she’d had the decency to regret it.