Free The Diviners by Margaret Laurence

garden.”
    Silence. What a fatuous thing to say. As if they didn’t know. As if they didn’t know it all better than she did. They’d been part of it all their lives, from childhood, in a way she never had. She had lived in cities as though passing through briefly. Even when she’d lived in one city or another for years, they’d never taken hold of her consciousness. Her childhood had taken place in another world, a world A-Okay and Maudie had never known and couldn’t begin to imagine, a world which in some ways Morag could still hardly believe was over and gone forever. These kids had been born and had grown up in Toronto. They weren’t afraid of cities in the way Morag was afraid. They knew how to live there, how to survive. But they hated the city much more than Morag ever could, simply because they knew. A-Okay had once taught computer programming at a technical college. The decision to leave was, for them, an irrevocable one and hadn’t been made lightly. Morag had met them through mutual friends in Toronto atthe precise moment when they had decided to leave the city. She had suggested they give it a try at her place, and they had done that, paying their way both financially and in physical work. However they might feel sometimes, now they were living and had to live as though their faith in their decision was not to be broken.
    â€œI’m sorry,” Morag said, truthfully. “I didn’t mean to say that. I didn’t even mean it.”
    â€œNo,” A-Okay said suddenly. “We were talking at you, not with you. Weren’t we? I guess we’ve done a lot of that since we got our own place. We didn’t have any right.”
    â€œWell, now that you mention it, there may be some small degree of the Bible-puncher in you, A-Okay.”
    More in Maudie than in him. But she did not say this.
    â€œYour writing is your real work,” A-Okay said, with embarrassing loyalty and evident belief. “It’s there you have to make your statement.”
    Or not make it. You can’t write a novel that way, in any event. They’d been real to her, the people in the books. Breathing inside her head.
    Phone. Her ring. Morag leapt up and shot over to the telephone on the sideboard. Pique. Cool it, Morag.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œThat you, Morag?”
    Oh God. Him. Not him surely? Yes. How long since she’d seen him? Three years, only. Before the Smiths moved in. The Smiths had never seen him, and didn’t even know anything much about him, as Morag only ever talked about him to Pique, sometimes.
    â€œYes. Speaking.”
    A deep gust of hoarse laughter.
    â€œDon’t try to make out you don’t know who this is, eh?”
    â€œYeh, I know. I’m surprised you’re still alive, is all.”
    â€œYeh? I plan on living forever–didn’t you know?”
    Yes. You told me once you used to believe that, and didn’t now. Are you all right?
    â€œAre you all right? Are you okay?”
    â€œOf course not,” he said. “What do you think? I got busted for peddling. The hard stuff, naturally. I’m phoning from Kingston Pen. Got a private phone in the cell.”
    Well, at least he was okay.
    â€œOh, sorry to cast doubts on your blameless reputation. Why did you phone?”
    And do you remember the last time I saw you, and what happened and didn’t happen?
    â€œTo ask you, you mad bitch,” he said, “what in hell you think you’re doing with that girl?”
    He had two speaking voices, one like gravel in a cement-mixer, the other exceedingly low-pitched, quiet. He used the second when very angry. As now.
    â€œWhat do I think I’m doing?” Morag shouted. “What do you mean by that? Wait–have you seen her, then?”
    â€œOf course I’ve seen her. She turned up here.”
    â€œWhere is here?”
    â€œToronto. Yesterday. Don’t ask me how she found out where I was.