Cloud

1

SO IT WAS THAT at the age of twenty-five, I married Alicia Smith. Gordon’s dislike of “public displays” was more than reason enough for us to hold the marriage ceremony in the Camberloo Registry Office, with only Gordon himself and Jonson present as guests and witnesses.

The wedding reception was equally small — just the four of us. Alicia had reserved one of the little enclosed dining areas upstairs at the Hanging Gardens Tavern in the village of St. Herbert, just north of Camberloo. She and I had sometimes gone there for lunch and enjoyed the antique atmosphere. The interior was wood-panelled, with bare roof beams and heavy oak furniture.

But it was the exterior that delighted Alicia most. The three-storey-high front wall was clothed in ivy. During the summer months, from little alcoves amongst the vines, hundreds of flowering plants and flowers protruded. When they were in full bloom, the wall looked like a perpendicular garden, or a marvellous painting. Presumably that was how the name The Hanging Gardens came about.

Though a piece of local folklore gave an alternative explanation. According to it, one of the nineteenth-century builders of the tavern hanged himself from a roof beam because of a failed love affair.

I liked that version, but Alicia, being Alicia, never gave any credence to it. I think she really doubted that human beings could be soft-hearted enough to kill themselves for love.

Our honeymoon consisted of a week at a remote, luxurious inn amongst the Muskoka lakes, a couple of hundred miles to the north of Camberloo. It was late September, so in that region the leaves of the deciduous trees were already changing colour.

On our return to Camberloo, I was permanently installed in the Smith household. Gordon gave up the main bedroom, which was actually a two-room suite with its own huge bathroom, to Alicia and me. He took over what had been her bedroom.

Otherwise, my presence seemed not to disturb in any major way the customary rhythms of the Smiths’ existence. Not that they had to go much out of their way to absorb me into their routine, for I tried to make myself, as much as possible, a seamless fit. On weekday mornings while Alicia slept on, I’d join Gordon in the kitchen for breakfast. We’d have toast and coffee, and skim through the newspapers without much talk. The limo would pick us up at eight-thirty.

My typical workday, as before the marriage, was spent at the office, where Gordon instructed me further in the art of sales. Occasionally I’d go to the factory. There, Lew Jonson would patiently explain the more subtle aspects of pumps and ventilators (p’s and v’s, as I learned to call them).

After work, our routines were quite fixed. At six-thirty, Gordon, Alicia, and I (and, occasionally, Jonson) would assemble in the dining room and await the serving of dinner. For the first time in my life, I learned to experience food as a sensual delight in itself and not, as in the Tollgate, simply the way of staving off hunger. I came to marvel at mouth-watering smells and flavours so refined I often didn’t know whether I was eating fish, lamb, poultry, or beef.

When the meal was over, we’d all head to the library for coffee and brandy and the men would smoke cigars. We’d talk about this and that, or we’d read quietly. We were all comfortable with each other. At ten o’clock, Gordon would say his goodnights and adjourn to his room (if Jonson had come for dinner, he’d already have left). Shortly thereafter, Alicia and I would go upstairs. She’d take her nightly bath — her second of the day, for she always liked to have a bath in the early afternoon, too — while I’d read in bed, waiting for her.

She’d eventually come to me all soft and perfumed with rosewater. By midnight we’d be asleep in each other’s arms. Often, when we woke in the mornings, I’d tell her about particularly interesting dreams I’d had. She’d lie there, half asleep, listening. As for her own dreams, she said she rarely remembered them but that, when she did, they were too unpleasant to talk about.

I didn’t press her.

DURING THE DAY, when Gordon and I were gone, Alicia was busy in her own way. She didn’t cook or do housework, but she did advise the maid, whose duties these were, on possible menus for dinner and on special cleaning tasks. Then there was the gardener to be dealt with, and so on.

Several mornings a week, as a member of the acquisitions committee at the art gallery, she’d visit local artists’ studios in search of potential exhibits. Being the daughter of a successful citizen of Camberloo, she also sat on the boards of St. Polycarp’s Hospital and of the Camberloo Symphony. These obligations involved fund-raising activities which kept her occupied.

Her membership in the symphony board surprised me a little. I’d never heard her or Gordon humming or whistling a tune, the way my parents used to. Apart from the night Alicia had put on a record when Gordon left for Montreal, music was rarely heard around the house. They’d both listen to the news on the radio, but if music came on, one or the other of them would switch it off as though tidying something up.

IN FACT, they often may have put me in the category of an untidiness. They made a fuss — though in a good-humoured way — over replacing my books in exactly their proper spots on the shelves, adjusting the cushions on chairs I’d been sitting on, or lining up my discarded shoes neatly on the doormat beside their own.

Eventually, I got the hang of it. But from time to time I’d leave something out of place, just to give them a chance to put it back where it ought to be.

On occasion, one of Alicia’s board meetings might be held at our house during daytime when Gordon and I were at the office. The board members were invariably gone by the time we came home. When I’d ask about them, Alicia would wrinkle her nose to let me know I wasn’t missing much. But I’d no doubt she was the perfect hostess.

Only rarely did she or Gordon have anyone else over to the house on a purely social basis — except for Jonson. In fact, aside from him, they seemed to desire no close friends outside of each other, and now me.

In that sense, things hadn’t changed for me since my life in the Tollgate: I was part of another very un-extended family.

2

Gordon, as promised, came with me on my earliest sales efforts during that first year. These journeys meant we were both gone from Camberloo, sometimes for as long as a month. Alicia didn’t complain. She’d been well trained in the demands of running a business.

As for the journeys themselves: we always went first class if it was available, whether by ship, or plane, or train, and we stayed in good hotels. Of course there were exceptions. At times we could only travel on roads so primitive we needed Land Rovers to tackle them. Once in a while there weren’t even roads of any sort and we had to resort to riverboats or even smaller craft such as canoes, which were particularly hard on Gordon.

“If I have to spend another hour in one of these things I’ll never be able to stand up again,” he used to complain.

Nor was it always possible to find decent hotels. In bush towns or on remote islands, the hotels were often so primitive they even lacked electricity. The toilet might consist of a little cubicle on stilts over a river or where tidal water would scour away the evidence. Sometimes, the only shower was an overhead tank of water located outdoors, amongst palm trees and flowering shrubs. We’d have to tiptoe cautiously around to avoid scorpions or spiders. Such hotels weren’t much better than the verminridden huts I’d sometimes stayed in when I was a tutor.

At the actual business meetings we attended on these trips, Gordon was always just as sharp and efficient as when I’d first seen him at the La Mancha mine. But at night, back in our quarters, those remarkable eyes were sometimes almost lifeless, his face pale and drawn. I fully understood then how wearing these trips had become for him and why he’d been so keen on passing them on to me.

And, for the first time, I really began to confront the ethical problems that went along with the job.

THAT FEBRUARY we were in La Coruna, a provincial capital in the northwestern region of the Andes. Gordon had given a successful presentation at one of the big strip-mine companies and they’d bought two of our pumps and a ventilator.

Out of the blue, another opportunity arose. We were at the hotel preparing to head back to Canada when Gordon received a lengthy phone call from the manager of an old-established gold mine near the town of Santa Cruz, eighty miles away, asking for his help.

Apparently, for at least a hundred years, waste water from this gold mine had emptied into the Rio del Sol, a river that ran past Santa Cruz. Out of deference to the town, the waste had always been directed round it by means of a pipe that opened into the river a mile or so farther downstream.

In the course of a hundred years the townspeople had benefited economically from the mine and never had any cause to complain about the waste.

But just three days before, a tricky situation had arisen. The pump controlling the waste pipe had become sluggish, as it often did over the years if too much debris gathered in the metal grille over its intake valve. Stopping the pump to clear this debris safely and then restarting it could take as long as a full day.

So, the usual procedure was just to keep the pump running while workers removed the grille. In that way, they could clean it and put it back on without any major suspension of work.

Two workers had been delegated to perform this very operation. With the pump still running, they’d managed to unscrew the rusty bolts that held the grille on. But as they were trying to lift it out they slipped and were sucked into the uncovered intake valve. The huge impeller blade then became a very efficient meat grinder.

This kind of horror had happened, apparently, on several occasions over the decades during grille-cleaning time, and not much fuss was made about it. What caused the present crisis was that the oversized spanners and crowbars the men had been using were also sucked in. As a consequence, the impeller, its gears, its massive cast-iron valve, and its housing were shattered, as was the connection to the escape pipe. The lagoon immediately began backing up and spilled directly into the Rio del Sol just above the town. The fact that the river flowing past the town had turned bright orange, the fact that the fish all floated belly up — these might have provoked only a mild reaction.

But the smell! It was a public relations nightmare for the gold mine. The stink of rotten eggs given off by the chemicalfilled water permeated Santa Cruz day and night, causing babies to cry and appalling their parents and the citizens in general. Especially upset were the mayor and the bishop, whose town hall and palace, respectively, stood on the riverbank.

Civic outrage resulted. For the first time in its long, profitable history the gold mine was ordered closed.

“AND WHAT EXACTLY would you like me to do?” I heard Gordon ask the manager on the other end of the phone.

Gordon was well known amongst the mining fraternity. The manager of the Santa Cruz mine wondered if he could come and make a speedy assessment of the condition of the broken pump.

“If you send transportation, I’ll come down tomorrow morning,” Gordon said. “I’ll bring my colleague with me.”

IN THE MORNING, a company car picked us up at our hotel and took us to the mine, a two-hour drive away. It was a typical sprawl of buildings with corrugated roofing amidst high mounds of broken rocks. The river ran nearby. We were met by the manager, a small, hollow-chested man who reminded me a little of my father: a cigarette dangled from his lips and he had a chronic cough.

The broken pump, he informed us in quite good English, was located in “the lagoon.” That was the romantic-sounding word used by the mining industry for the septic ponds that resulted from cleaning the gold with a mix of chemicals. The cleaning process lasted for two weeks out of each month. The contaminated water was then forced, by means of a huge hundred-year-old cast-iron pump, into a two-mile-long pipe. The pipe, in turn, disgorged its contents into the Rio del Sol safely below the town. The only human beings affected by it were natives whose villages were on the banks of the river far below when the waste pipe was in use. These villagers would see the Rio del Sol turn an orange colour, for the waste water contained clay from the galleries of the mine, mixed with cyanide and a number of other chemicals used to clean the gold.

For two weeks after such a discharge all the fish in the river would die. Then the water would clear, the fish would return, and everything would seem normal. Or relatively normal, though there were unsupported reports of villagers who had died from what appeared to be cyanide poisoning.

The mine manager told us the owners wanted things returned to that quite acceptable situation.

“They say the pump must be repaired or replaced pronto so that we can begin operation again,” he said.

He now took us to see the problem for ourselves.

The lagoon was several hundred yards away along a pathway from his office. In the sticky heat, in the silence broken only by the squawking of birds in the surrounding jungle, I sweated. Gordon looked as cool as ever and impervious to our escort of mosquitoes.

As we got nearer to the lagoon the stink became eye-watering. The path was lined with bushes of red and yellow frangipani in full blossom, but whatever fragrance they might have given off was undetectable in the manmade stench.

We were soon on the bank of the lagoon itself. It was the size of a football field, with walls about ten feet high. Most of the water it once held had already seeped back into the river. The ancient pump stood half immersed in sludge, like some primeval water creature. From the bank, the engineer pointed out the jagged cracks in the shell of the engine and the areas where the impeller’s blade and housing had shattered. The manager translated for him, then asked Gordon hopefully:

“You can repair it, señor?”

Gordon shook his head.

“I’m afraid its days are over,” he said. “The miracle is that it’s survived so many years.”

WE WENT BACK to the office and began discussing the specifications for a new pump with the manager and his engineer. Gordon did all the talking. We’d brought along the briefcase of brochures and diagrams. He showed the engineer our most powerful model, made of alloys incomparably tougher and more flexible than the cast iron of the old pump. He said he was confident that our engineer, Jonson, could very quickly adapt it to their needs.

Questions were asked about price and installation date — less than a month, in Gordon’s view. The manager said he’d consult the owners and then get back to us with a decision that evening at our hotel in the city.

ON THE RIDE BACK to La Coruna, Gordon was in a very good mood. The road was newly paved and the company car was air-conditioned.

But I wasn’t so happy. I’d seen during my experience as a tutor just how mercenary the mining industry often was. The only thing the owners seemed to care about was keeping their mines operating and maximizing profits. In the case of the Santa Cruz mine, giving it a new, better pump would only ensure that it would carry on just as before, and might make the men work even harder. As for the pollution of the river and the poisoning of the natives downstream, they would be carried out even more efficiently.

I told Gordon what was on my mind.

“I agree, to a certain extent,” he said. “But if we don’t sell them a new pump, one of our rivals will. That’s how business works.” He could see this didn’t cheer me up. “Look, Harry. Our pump will make things better for the miners, if the owners go for it. It’ll be much more reliable and won’t need cleaning the dangerous way the old one did.”

I didn’t say anything, so he knew I still wasn’t as excited as he thought I ought to have been.

“Surely you can see it’s not our job to tell our customers what we think is right or wrong about their practices,” he said. “If we did that, believe me, we’d soon be bankrupt. I’m not saying we don’t have our own moral responsibilities and that we don’t have to adhere to them as well as we can. For example, we use the very best materials and we make our machinery as safe and reliable as possible. Isn’t that a benefit to the miners who depend on them?

“Another thing is, we never cheat our customers. We sell our products at a fair profit and we stand by the quality of our workmanship. Those are our ethical responsibilities and we live up to them. The business world’s just as complicated as the rest of the world — that’s something you’ll find out. There are no simple solutions, so we can’t expect everyone to do what we think is the right thing when perhaps it isn’t.”

I wasn’t convinced by that defence. Perhaps because the manager had reminded me of him, I wished my father were here to make one of his astute comments. But of course, he was long gone now and I couldn’t think of anything astute to say.

LATER THAT NIGHT, the manager phoned Gordon at the hotel to tell him to go ahead with the new pump. Afterwards we went down to the bar to celebrate the sale — the pump in question was our finest, most expensive model. This sale had been an unexpected bonus.

Back in my hotel room, I phoned Alicia to tell her I missed her.

“Me too,” she said. “I can’t wait to see you again. Gordon called me a couple of hours ago to say the trip’s been very successful.”

He hadn’t mentioned to me that he’d already spoken to her. I wasn’t as surprised as I used to be that they’d communicated with each other without involving me. Nor did I tell her about my own mixed feelings about the sale. She was too much like Gordon to appreciate my squeamishness. Perhaps they were both right and I was taking too personally what was really only a business deal.

Her voice over the phone was seductive. “You and I will find a special way to celebrate when you’re home.”

THAT NIGHT I LAY in the hotel bed for a while, unable to sleep, thinking over what had happened. Eventually, I convinced myself that the Smiths’ common-sense way of looking at the world was probably a very reasonable one and that the scraps of idealism I’d retained were nothing but a sign I hadn’t really grown up.

Then I slept an uneasy sleep.

3

On our return to wintry Camberloo, Alicia did try to make my homecoming more than usually enjoyable. Gordon and I had arrived from the airport late in the day. We’d eaten a light meal and Alicia had toasted our success with a glass of wine. Soon Gordon, exhausted by the journey, bade us goodnight and headed off to bed.

Shortly afterwards, Alicia and I went upstairs. She prepared the tub in the bathroom, surrounding it with candles which she lit while the tub filled. We lay together in the warm water for a while. Then we dried each other off and made good use of a jug of aromatic oil before entering into the most pleasurable of exertions.

BUT WHAT MADE this occasion particularly memorable was something Alicia revealed to me later, as we lay in each other’s arms.

“Do you remember the first time we made love?” she said.

How could I ever forget that night Gordon went off to Montreal, leaving us the house to ourselves?

“I told him all about it when he came back,” she said.

Surely she didn’t mean all about it?

“Yes, all about it,” she said, nuzzling into my shoulder. “I’d always made it clear to him that I couldn’t marry someone I wasn’t comfortable with in bed. That’s why he told you to stay with me that night. He wanted me to have a chance to try you out. When he came home and asked me about it, I assured him it was a great success.”

She saw how surprised I was at hearing this. Not that I hadn’t suspected he’d connived with her to get us alone together — maybe even as far as the bed. But that she’d then given him an evaluation of our love-making! That struck me as very unromantic. I thought of asking her if she’d “tried out” those previous suitors Gordon had mentioned. I knew she’d tell me the truth if that was what I really wanted, for she was by nature a truth-teller. But I didn’t want to know.

“Did I say the wrong thing?” she said, laughing at my reaction. “I’d have kept it to myself if I’d realized that’s what you preferred.”

She was looking at me now, her brown eyes warm and affectionate. I think she was fond of me, as much as anything because I was so guileless — just as I was fond of her, as much as anything because she was so honest. Perhaps that was a good enough basis for a marriage.

BUT LOVE? True love? On that matter, I felt I had some basis for comparison. If I loved Alicia at all, it was a lesser kind of love than the all-consuming kind I’d experienced with Miriam. Just remembering that love made me both sad and happy: sad that it didn’t work out, but happy that the possibility of it existed and that I’d once known it. Or, at least, so I believed, and I’d held on to that belief in the way others might hold on to a belief in a great power that makes sense of their world for better or for worse.

So, I tried to make a case on my own behalf. A man — myself, for instance — might behave in a practical and self-serving way such as marrying for advancement, or working at some lucrative but unethical job on the pretext that if he didn’t do it, someone else surely would. Yet that man — myself, again — might still, in his deepest being, cling to principles fundamentally at odds with his actual behaviour. Indeed, this was perhaps how most men lived. Despite their failure to live up to a higher ideal, their belief in its existence allowed them to be relatively happy.

The logic of my case seemed somehow defective. Still, as before, I’d almost convinced myself of it.

On this note of relative happiness, lying beside the honest Alicia, I fell into a sound sleep.

At some point in my dreams, I was young again, running along a grey street in the Tollgate — or perhaps it was Duncairn— being pursued by a stranger with a scar on his cheek. Terrified and out of breath, I could run no longer and crouched with my hands up to shield myself. Then, in that odd way dreams work, I was all at once aware that I was looking into a mirror and that the stranger was no stranger — he was only the grown-up version of myself.

When I awoke the next morning, that dream was stuck in my mind. It seemed a concrete image of my ongoing anxiety over who I was and what I’d become. But, of course, it was only a dream and not to be taken too seriously.

4

That spring was important for me. Gordon and I made a weeklong trip to a large uranium mine in Northern Ontario. There, I took the leading role in presenting an offer to sell two new pumps as well as spare parts for older equipment. I’d also warned Gordon that I was going to propose the mine buy a ventilator. In most of these older mines, the workers depended on the feeble drafts of air that penetrated the tunnels — natural ventilation, it was called. Miners almost invariably suffered from lung problems caused by breathing in dust particles and gases, had to take a lot of time off work, and generally died young.

So, in my presentation I suggested to the mine’s negotiators that an efficient ventilation system would actually be a good (I didn’t use the word “ethical”) investment in the long run, and they agreed. Gordon was delighted and surprised. He’d been noticeably worn out during much of our trip and was more than happy to leave the sales up to me.

WE’D BEEN BACK in Camberloo only a week when he called me into his office at work one morning with a smile on his face.

“Well done, Harry!” he said. “Look what’s just arrived by courier.” He was holding the signed contracts for the deal at the uranium mine. “As far as I’m concerned, your apprenticeship is officially over. You are hereby promoted to Head of Sales for Smith’s Pumps and Ventilators. Congratulations!” He shook my hand vigorously and added, “This is altogether quite a significant day for us.”

I naturally assumed he was still talking about my promotion.

But when we got home from work that night, Alicia met us at the door.

“We’re going to have a baby!” she said to me, her dark eyes warmer than I’d ever seen them. “The doctor told me this morning. Isn’t it wonderful? Father was thrilled to bits when he heard.”

“Indeed, I was,” said Gordon, smiling.

She’d told him before she told me. She’d phoned him after she left the doctor’s — hence his comment to me about the great significance of the day. It was his idea that she should surprise me with the news when we came home, then we’d all go out and celebrate the pregnancy as well as my promotion. But it was clear which was more important to them.

I tried to sound enthusiastic, for Alicia’s sake, though I felt quite let down.

We went to a restaurant for dinner and Gordon ordered an expensive bottle of wine for the occasion. He and Alicia speculated excitedly about the baby throughout. I chimed in from time to time and they smiled fondly at me. Not much was said about my promotion.

THE BABY WAS BORN in Camberloo General Hospital at six-thirty on a bitterly cold January morning. Gordon was determined he’d be present at the birth, so I went with him although I knew I’d feel squeamish.

It turned out to be very hard to watch — an agonizing, protracted struggle. Alicia must have been suffering badly but didn’t complain. The baby was in the wrong position for delivery, so a lot of forceps work was needed. Eventually a boy emerged, but by then Alicia was in such a state she really didn’t care. Before he was swathed in cloths, a brief glimpse of the baby’s face showed he had a large bruise on his right cheek. An attending nurse assured Gordon and me that the bruise, caused by the forceps, was superficial and would soon disappear.

For the next twenty-four hours, Alicia lay in the recovery room, heavily sedated. Gordon and I took turns at her bedside, but we both happened to be present when she eventually awoke. Right away, she asked to see the baby. When the nurse laid him down beside her on the bed, Alicia had to be reassured that the mark on his cheek was only temporary. Then she concentrated on him and a look came into her eyes I’d never seen before. She began cooing words to the baby, her speech a little slurred: “Shweet ’ittle Franshish. Shweet ’ittle Franshish.” She kept repeating this over and over.

Gordon explained the meaning to me.

“We’d agreed that if it was a boy we’d call him Francis, in memory of my father,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind? Everyone called him Frank.”

I really didn’t mind, but I wished they’d asked me. Though the name was really quite fitting. There was indeed a frankness in the blue eyes of the little boy with the bruised cheek who lay there on the bed, staring up now at his wounded mother, now at his grandfather, and now at me, his father, as though appraising us. I couldn’t help wondering what he might have thought of a father who’d had no say in his son’s naming.

ALICIA EVENTUALLY came home to heal. A series of nannies helped look after little Francis, or Frank, which we all preferred. Much as she loved him, Alicia tired easily and often had to go to bed early.

When we got home from work at night, Gordon and I tried to abide by some of the old rituals. We still went to the library to sip a whisky and read. At that time he was reading an illustrated History of Scotland and would ask me questions, now and then, about some of the old customs. Around nine, the nanny would leave for home after making sure Frank was asleep in the nursery, which was the room adjoining our bedroom. At ten, Gordon would go to bed and I’d look in to check on Frank before slipping into bed beside Alicia, careful not to disturb her sleep. If Frank woke during the night, I’d see to his needs.

Such was our new routine for many weeks as we waited for Alicia to regain her strength.

5

One night during that period, when Gordon and I had made our ritual retreat to the library after dinner, he sipped his brandy, cleared his throat, and embarked on what I soon realized was to be a fatherly talk. The subject: a mature relationship between husband and wife.

“I often think about what you told me when we first met— about your great love affair in Scotland,” he said. “Your idealism was one of the things I liked about you at the time.

“As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, idealism isn’t in my own makeup. I’ve always been a much more pragmatic type. Take my marriage to Alicia’s mother, for example. I was very fond of her and deeply saddened when she died so young. But neither of us had married strictly for love. No, it was for much more practical reasons. I worked for her father, who owned a small engineering firm that manufactured machine parts. He and I had an understanding that if I married his daughter I’d become his partner. Which is exactly what happened. Then when he retired, I changed the firm’s direction to more specialized work: it became Smith’s Pumps and Ventilators.

“So, in the business sense, the marriage was clearly a great success. And, of course, it produced Alicia. What more could a man ask for? What would have been the purpose in my getting married again?”

The preliminaries of Gordon’s speech were over. His eyes seemed to become even more brilliant as he was about to come to the point.

“From what I’ve read, up till recent times men of ambition wouldn’t have thought of marrying just for love. I mean, if there wasn’t some material advantage to be got from it, they wouldn’t have considered it. Marriage was strictly about property, or inheritance, or business.

“You see what I mean? The idea of love as a basis for marriage was apparently one of those notions invented to keep ordinary folks happy. It allowed them to believe their marriages were just as important as anyone else’s — especially those they had to work for.

“Now if that sounds cynical, I don’t mean it to be. As far as I’m concerned, even in a marriage based on practical, business considerations it’s better if a man does love his wife.

“But what I’m trying to get at is this: let’s say, for any reason, a man’s wife can’t give him what he needs physically. Yes, physically — you know what I mean? Well, in that case, surely there’s no harm in him finding his satisfactions elsewhere. Discreetly, of course. It doesn’t mean he’s not a loving husband and she’s not a loving wife. It’s just that men can’t be expected to do without certain things. And anyway, most men enjoy … a bit of variety, shall we say? So from our point of view, it’s not all that bad.”

The tone of these last remarks of his really surprised me, as if a cloistered monk had said something of the sort. For Gordon had always seemed to me monklike in the service of Smith’s Pumps.

“Any wife worth her salt understands these things,” he went on. “As long as there’s discretion, she knows that a marriage is based on much more substantial elements — mutual business and family interests.

“Now in your case, Harry, when you lived in Scotland, putting love on a pedestal was quite understandable. You were young and poor then — you’d nothing at stake. But now you’re a partner in a thriving business. You and Alicia have produced a son — an heir. These are the things marriage is all about. The rest isn’t really important.”

Gordon sat back and sipped his brandy. He seemed quite pleased with all he’d said on the matter of marriage. He took it for granted there would be no questions.

About that, he was right. I might have asked why he’d even raised the matter — I suspected that he and Alicia had planned it together — but I kept quiet. In fact we never spoke of it again.

6

By mid-summer, Alicia had almost totally recovered from the birth. Frank was now six months old.

I’d just come back from a five-week sales trip to some diamond and bauxite mines in northern Australia. The travelling itself had been exhausting, and so I was happy when Gordon told me to take a week away from work and “get reacquainted,” as he put it, with Alicia and Frank. Accordingly, I stayed home and he went to the office alone each day.

On one of those mornings, Alicia and I were playing with Frank in the backyard when the phone rang. The time was ten-thirty. I ran to the kitchen and picked up.

It was Jonson on the line, calling from St. Polycarp’s Hospital. Apparently, shortly after arriving at work an hour before, Gordon had slumped over at his desk. Jonson had immediately called for an ambulance. He rode in the back beside Gordon till they got him to the hospital. This was the first chance Jonson had had to phone.

Alicia and I left Frank with the nanny and drove immediately to the hospital.

THE DAY WAS ONE of those incomparable summer days in Camberloo. The sky was a flawless blue, the trees were in full leaf, and the townspeople wore bright summer clothes. The red-brick hospital itself looked at its best, with ranks of blue and yellow flowers all in blossom along the gardens at the Emergency entrance.

Jonson greeted us at the door.

“They’ve managed to contact his doctor,” he said to Alicia.

“He was out on a house call but should be here any minute.” He then led us to a little private ward on the main floor and we all went in.

Gordon was lying on the bed, his head propped on a pillow. When he saw Alicia come in, his eyes brightened and he smiled weakly. He moved his hand towards her and she held it.

“How are you feeling?” she said.

“Now that you’re here, I’m fine,” he said to her in a quiet voice. He tried to say something else, but his eyes narrowed and he looked puzzled. Then the puzzlement evaporated from his face and the light went out of his eyes. And he was dead.

HIS HEART HAD BEEN bad for a long time. So his doctor, a plump man in a polka-dot bow tie who arrived at the hospital just minutes after Gordon died, revealed to us. He was surprised Alicia didn’t know that in recent years her father had consulted a number of specialists. All of them had told him he shouldn’t be working. He’d been on a strict regimen of pills.

That night, Alicia found several bottles of these pills hidden under layers of underwear and socks at the back of a drawer in his dresser.

TWO DAYS AFTER his death, Alicia and Jonson and I sat together miserably in the chapel of the Final Gateway Crematorium. The plain wooden coffin lay on the catafalque. I had my arm round Alicia, who was weeping quietly. Gordon, in line with his dislike of public displays, had requested that his body be cremated, that only we three be present, and that there be no funeral service of any sort. It was cold in the crematorium because of the air conditioning. Outside, the day had been humid, the sky heavy with the threat of a storm.

The undertaker appeared and whispered that we might wish to take our last look at the deceased. So we went up to the coffin. The top had been lifted and we could see what had once been Gordon lying there, his eyes closed, his face like a shrivelled apple. The undertaker’s efforts to redden his lips and cheeks had failed to make him look alive.

Alicia sobbed at the sight of him. Jonson and I gripped her arms to support her.

As we were standing there, the chapel door swung open and footsteps approached the catafalque. It was Gordon’s doctor, in the polka-dot bow tie he’d been wearing the last time we saw him. He was now carrying an alligator-skin doctor’s bag.

Naturally, we wondered what he was doing here.

He was a little embarrassed that the undertaker hadn’t informed us. The fact was that Gordon, more than a year ago, had told him about his wish to be cremated. He’d commissioned him to come to the crematorium in the moments before incineration and make sure he was quite dead.

“It’s just a formality,” the doctor told us. “That is, if you’ve no objection.”

We had no objection.

Our final goodbyes to Gordon having been said, the undertaker ordered the coffin to be wheeled out of the chapel into the committal room, its last stop before the oven. The doctor, with his bag, accompanied the coffin. He’d been in the committal room for only a few minutes when he returned.

“Everything was fine,” he said to us.

Soon after that, a blue light began to flicker on and off in the chapel. That was the sign the final act was about to take place out of our sight. We could hear the ignition roar of the gas jets, followed not long after by the squeal of a conveyor belt’s rollers as the coffin slid into the oven.

The undertaker appeared again and advised us to go home. The process of incineration and preparation of the ashes would take several hours. We could pick them up that evening if we so wished.

Before we left the chapel, I went over to Gordon’s doctor and thanked him for complying with Gordon’s final request, whatever it was.

“All he wanted me to do was a simple little surgical procedure on his body,” he said. “His carotid arteries were to be severed, right there in the coffin. I did the procedure, with the undertaker as witness. We can both attest that Gordon’s blood was totally coagulated.”

He saw I was surprised to hear this.

“I can only suppose he wanted to be on the safe side,” said the doctor.

THE NEXT MORNING, we planted a young rose bush amongst his ashes in the backyard. That was my idea. In my tutor days, the natives who’d lived near one of the mines claimed that the very best orchids grew from rotting corpses. I thought if there was any truth to that, it might somehow apply to the ashes of the dead, too. So, with Alicia’s consent, I mixed Gordon’s ashes with some bags of potting soil and planted the rose bush in the midst of them.

7

Gordon’s death shocked me. I’d become very attached to him — he’d been a second father to me and seemed to care about me in that unconditional way my own parents had, though he was very different from them. Why he’d taken to me so much and chosen me as a suitable husband for Alicia, I never quite understood.

I’m not sure he himself knew. In spite of his theories, he may have let himself be guided by a feeling or an intuition— something a practical man like himself would normally have ignored. Perhaps he had an instinct that someone unlike himself might be the very man for Alicia.

Another enigma was that weird final request of his about the severing of his arteries. On the one hand, it might have been a matter of simple logic — the wish of a competent and efficient man to remain in control of his body right up to the moment of its disintegration. On the other hand, perhaps it revealed an aspect of his mind he generally kept to himself, one that was imbued with the ancient terror of being wrongly pronounced dead.

His incineration made me think yet again about the terrible deaths of my own parents in that inferno in the Tollgate. I’d never permitted myself to consider the possibility that they’d been quite aware of what was happening as the flames of their burning tenement engulfed them. The idea was still too much to bear.

ALICIA WAS DEVASTATED by her father’s death. For weeks she could barely hold back her tears. I think if it hadn’t been for little Frank, she’d have had a complete breakdown.

I tried to comfort her, but I knew the closeness of her bond with Gordon. They weren’t just father and daughter, they were each other’s confidants about everything. Or, not quite everything. He’d withheld his heart problem from her, no doubt so that she wouldn’t worry unduly.

I suggested it was only natural for a parent to try to protect his daughter in this way. But she seemed to regard it as a kind of betrayal by him, no matter how much they loved each other. It would take a while yet for her to forgive him entirely for that. Naturally, I didn’t mention the business of the severed arteries.

I MADE A FRESH discovery about her, too, a few weeks after the cremation. In the middle of the night she began fidgeting with the blankets and making whimpering sounds that woke me. In the glow of the night light, I could see she was actually still asleep. I shook her shoulder gently and she awoke, her eyes wide with fear.

I told her she’d been making noises.

“Did I disturb the baby?” she said, looking towards the door of the adjoining room where Frank slept.

I assured her he was sleeping peacefully and asked her if she’d been dreaming. I held her hand — it was very cold. I said talking about the dream might help.

“All right,” she said. Slowly she began translating whatever she’d dreamt into language.

“I was in freezing cold water,” she said. “It must have been winter and I’d somehow fallen out of some kind of boat into an ocean or a lake. It was nighttime and I couldn’t see any shore. But there were lights in the distance so I tried to swim towards them. Then my arms wouldn’t move, as though they were paralyzed. I shouted for help and I couldn’t get any words out, I could only make noises. Then you woke me up.”

I hugged her and reassured her. Her bad dream was surely related to Gordon’s death and her shock over the loss. She’d soon be having good dreams again.

“No, you’re wrong about that,” she said. “All my life that’s the only kind of dream I’ve ever had. I try not to think about them.”

I didn’t ask any more. I just kept holding her and soothing her and after a while she went back to asleep. But this revelation about her harrowing dream life disturbed me and kept me awake. Surely in some major way, this woman beside me, the mother of my son, was really a stranger.

AFTER BREAKFAST the next day when we were out in the yard playing with Frank, Alicia suddenly turned to me.

“Talking about that dream last night didn’t help at all,” she said. “In fact, putting it into words only made it seem worse.” She was looking right at me. “Not only that, I can see in your eyes that it’s got you worried, too.”

I denied that this was so, but it was unnerving to realize just how transparent I was to her.

DEATH OR NO DEATH, business had to be resumed. I was soon taking Gordon’s place behind his desk at the office, guided by two middle-aged secretaries who’d worked for him for many years and now had to get used to me. Jonson made sure the factory was back in full swing. Whatever sales trips I had to go on, I tried to make as brief as possible and was always anxious to get back to Camberloo.

But my homecomings had changed. Those sensual bedtime rituals we used to indulge in on my return didn’t occur. Eventually, when I alluded to them, Alicia (who was still as enticing to me as ever) made it clear, without being unpleasant, that they were over.

I was aware of how much the birth of Frank, physically, and the death of Gordon, emotionally, had wounded her. I assumed I was being too hasty and apologized for my thoughtlessness.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It has nothing to do with you. I just can’t. I don’t have any desire anymore.” And before I could say anything, she added: “Why don’t you find someone else to satisfy you in that area? Don’t men enjoy … a bit of variety?”

“A bit of variety”—the very phrase Gordon had used in his little talk to me not long before his death. Right away I was certain of what I’d suspected then: that they’d discussed this matter of my “needs” just as they’d discussed so much else. No doubt that was the very reason for Gordon’s heart-to-heart talk with me about what he considered the realities of marriage.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Alicia was saying. “Honestly, I wouldn’t.”

Honesty was, indeed, her trademark. At times, depending on the mood I was in, I’d wonder if this honesty of hers wasn’t so much a virtue as a lack of sufficient imagination to make up pleasing lies. For Gordon, a quality like honesty was probably a more-than-adequate alternative to true love. Whether he was right or not was something I’d have to find out.

1

In my role as Gordon’s successor at Smith’s Pumps, I spent a good part of the next number of years travelling. My itineraries brimmed with exotic-sounding names. In the East, I visited Kamchatka, Ulan Bator, Quingyang, Tanaga, Tuvalu, Banjarmasi, Port Moresby, the Tuamotus, Bangalore, Jabalpur, and Oamaru. I crossed and recrossed Africa, from Timbuktu and Addis Ababa to Nova Lisboa and back. The continent of South America, from Cochabamba, San Fernando de Atabapo, and Paysanchi to Rio Gallego in Patagonia, was part of my territory. In fact, the world was my territory.

The very sounds of these names at first had the effect on me of poetry, the way they did when I was a schoolboy, poring over an atlas and wishing I was anywhere but in the Tollgate.

But the more I travelled, the more disillusioned I became. These places with the lyrical-sounding names were now home to such unromantic realities as the modern hard-drug enterprise and its accompanying violence. The only kinds of ancient traditions the new thugs still honoured consisted in such barbarities as cutting off the hands of an enemy.

That made me feel less guilty about my own “legitimate” business.

DURING MY FREQUENT absences, Alicia had to act as both mother and father to Frank. They both looked forward to my return, especially Frank, to whom I was the bearer of gifts. At first, when he was very young, I’d bring animals of one sort or another, so that the spare bedroom became like a private zoo. A parrot from Australia would shriek “Good day, mate” to him alone whenever he brought it food. A pair of fierce-looking salamanders and a basilisk from Africa were also big successes — he was fascinated by how their apparent immobility was transformed into violent bursts of energy as they pounced on the insects that made up their dinner. The gift he loved most, however, was a three-foottall Oaxaca cactus inhabited by a colony of pygmy rats. Frank fed the rats several times a day with birdseed and spent hours trying to make friends with them. But he was so gigantic they never seemed able to conceive of him as a fellow creature.

BY THE AGE OF NINE, he became less interested in exotic animals, so I looked for other gifts that might stimulate his imagination. In a bazaar along the Malabar coast of India, I saw a trader selling some half-inch-tall, painted marble figurines from the sixteenth century. They were quite expensive and I’d no idea why anyone would have made these objects so small. But on a whim, because I knew how much Frank had enjoyed the pygmy rats, I bought the figurines for him.

When I got them home and he saw them, he immediately loved them, more than all his regular toys. With the help of a magnifying glass, he was able to transform these tiny fragments of stone into fully individualized men and women from another era.

“Look,” he said. “It’s like magic.”

And indeed, through the glass, the diminutive people seemed to leap into life in their colourful Eastern gowns and turbans, some of them wielding curved scimitars, their eyes looking directly into the observer’s. It was as though they’d been shrunk five hundred years ago and had been waiting for some shaman like Frank to restore them to their real size.

On the basis of his reaction to those figurines, I kept an eye open. When I was in Paris at a mining convention, I bought what looked like a box of matches, except that the matches were little ivory sticks made by the Inuit. The tips of the sticks were actually carvings of a variety of bears, foxes, sharks, whales, char, halibut, and cod, all done with marvellous precision. When Frank saw them he was captivated, and spent innumerable hours admiring the little creatures through his magnifying glass.

THE BIGGEST SUCCESS was a model railway. I found it in a classic toy store in Zurich, where I was overnighting on my way back from the Far East. The clockwork engine and the passenger cars were from the turn of the century and were meticulously engineered. The station buildings, the bridges and the scenery, the faces of the train crew and the passengers were detailed and convincing.

Frank, who had just turned ten, was ecstatic. For weeks he played exclusively with that train set, hour after hour. He gave names to the little people who inhabited its world, made up backgrounds for them, and talked to them. He introduced them to his figurines and to the creatures on the ivory sticks. Alicia often had difficulty persuading him to leave them so that he could eat his meals or go to bed.

FRANK WAS ALWAYS curious about how and where I’d acquired these gifts. For him, this seemed to be a vital part of the pleasure in having them. Mainly I told the straightforward truth, but I’d sometimes embroider the facts just to make the story a little more dramatic. On retelling it, I’d worry about forgetting some of the invented details.

It was those ivory sticks that led to a revelation.

One day, Frank was examining them at the table in the library while I was poring over the manual for one of our latest pumps. Out of the blue, he asked me once again for the story of how I’d got hold of the sticks. Almost without thinking, for my mind was so taken up with the technical jargon of the manual, I slipped up and told him the truth: that I’d seen the sticks in the window of a jewellery store near my hotel in Paris and bought them for him.

“But what about that old gypsy on crutches, begging at a street corner near Notre Dame, who told you about them?” Frank said. “You gave him a twenty-franc note and he was so grateful he took you to a secret shop that had the ivory sticks. It was up a dark side street at the top of a long set of stairs and you’d never have found it if he hadn’t hobbled alongside you to show you where it was.”

Having been caught out, I thought it best to confess that I’d invented the old man, and his crutches, and the secret store. That I sometimes made up stories around the gifts, to add to the fun. In other words, the stories weren’t the absolute truth.

Frank looked at me without blinking.

“I know that.” The abrupt way he said it sounded like a reprimand.

I was very surprised, and I promised to continue as before. But I knew I no longer needed to be anxious about forgetting some detail. He, of course, no longer had to pretend he didn’t know truth from fiction.

MINIATURE BOOKS were soon to become Frank’s great passion.

I’d been passing through Athens on one of my trips and had gone for a stroll in the Monastiraki area, near the Acropolis, looking for something for his upcoming twelfth birthday. A bookstore I went into specialized in rare books, including miniatures, some of which weren’t much bigger than postage stamps. I examined a number of them on a lectern that had a magnifier to assist the reader. All were beautifully printed, often with coloured illustrations that seemed as exact as in any book of regular size.

One tiny leather-bound book in particular caught my attention: The Book of Seasons, printed in Brussels in 1450. It was a three-hundred-page prayer book of some sort, with beautifully ornate capital letters at the beginning of each prayer. It wasn’t the Latin prayers or the ornate lettering that won me but the fifty pages that contained meticulously lifelike illustrations of medieval people and their activities. The book was expensive, but I’d a feeling Frank would like it, so I got it for him.

My instinct was good. From the moment he looked at it through a magnifying glass, he was enthralled. The very notion of an entire book in miniature, with all the attributes of a fullsized volume, astonished him just as much as it had me. Those illustrations, most of all, fascinated him.

One evening in the library he’d been studying them for a long time.

“Come and see this,” he said, sounding quite excited.

I went to the desk and he handed me the magnifying glass. Through it the tiny painting he’d been examining immediately became as large and clear as anything you might find in a gallery. The subject matter was religious: a saintly figure complete with halo was riding on horseback alongside a river that ran through a mountain pass, perhaps in the Alps. The mountains, the swirling currents of the river, the horse’s gear and its bulging muscles, the details of the rider’s medieval clothing, his somewhat pious but determined face as he looked upriver — all were rendered realistically and convincingly.

“Look more closely over there,” said Frank, drawing my attention to a particular area of the painting.

So I did look carefully. Holding the magnifying glass at a different angle, I could make out different species of birds in a variety of different types of trees. Farther up the riverbank were cottages with smocked peasants working in gardens. In one of the cottages, I could even see a figure looking out of a casement window down towards the distant rider, as though in expectation of his coming.

“But look at the boat,” Frank said.

I hadn’t seen any boat. But once again, adjusting the magnifying glass, I discovered that what had seemed like a tiny mark far up the river was actually a rowboat with three men in it, their features and clothing quite distinct. Two were concentrated on the work of rowing, straining against the current.

“Look at the other man,” Frank said. “See what he has in his hand?”

I fiddled with the magnifying glass a little more. This third man did indeed seem to have something in his fingers which he was staring at. I manoeuvred the glass again and the object in his hand wavered into focus for a moment. There was no doubt. The object in the man’s hand was a book.

“Do you think it’s this book he’s reading?” Frank said.

I was quite startled that Frank should have even thought of such a thing, for it was a dizzying idea to me. For the first time I think I understood something of the spell these miniatures might cast with their suggestion of microscopic worlds within worlds, and we ourselves as giants looking down on them, observing. Or even that our own world might be nothing more than a tiny speck in an infinite universe being observed by infinitely larger giants.

Of course, I certainly didn’t mention that last thought to Frank. I worried that such ideas might drive the fragile mind of a young boy to madness. Yet, young as he was, I never knew quite what to make of him. He often seemed to me to be made of tougher stuff than his father.

2

For the next six years, as Frank was proceeding through high school, I regularly brought home miniature books for him. Some of them were reputed to be classics of the genre: Portraits of the Town of Madrid, 1741, Le Petit Poucet, 1800, Customs of the Hindu Kush, 1834, and The English Bijou Calendar Poetically Illustrated, 1841. They were all famous for their brilliant illustrations.

I also found a miniature bookcase built with little shelves that would accommodate Frank’s collection. He fell in love with the bookcase, too.

TO MARK HIS eighteenth birthday as well as his acceptance into university, I searched for a special miniature book for him. While I was on business at a mine near Erzurum, in Eastern Turkey, I borrowed a car and drove to the ancient village of Gez, where I’d heard there was a fine bookstore. I found it halfway along the village’s axle-threatening, cobblestoned main street.

The store was full of leather-bound books of all shapes and sizes and ages, as well as glass cases displaying dozens of beautiful old quill pens and inkwells. But even after looking around for almost an hour, I could see no miniature books.

I then spoke to the owner, a sophisticated Istanbul Turk who spoke English. He told me that, as a matter of fact, he did have a miniature — only one. It wasn’t on display because it was too expensive to leave out. He took me to his office, opened a squat safe, and lifted out a cardboard box. He took the lid off the box and gave me a little book to examine.

It was about two inches tall and one and a half inches wide, with a leather cover and a silver latch that seemed smooth with use. The owner said it was a fourteenth-century Turkish edition of the erotic classic, the Kama Sutra. I undid the latch and skimmed through it. The book contained sixty-four tiny, full-colour illustrations of the famous intimate positions — at least, I presumed that’s what they were; they were too small to see.

The owner offered to find me a magnifying glass to convince me of their lifelikeness, but I told him that wouldn’t be necessary. I’d already decided this might be the perfect eighteenth-birthday gift for Frank and was soon engaged in the customary haggling over price. In the end, I paid more than I wanted but left the store with the book in my pocket.

WHEN I ARRIVED back in Camberloo from Turkey, Frank wasn’t home. He was apartment hunting in Toronto, where he’d be attending university. I was glad of his absence, for I wasn’t so sure any longer about giving him the little book. I’d had a good look at the illustrations now through the magnifying glass, and I wondered if it was a proper kind of gift from a father to a son, even though the book was a classic.

I told Alicia about my doubts and she said she’d have to have a look at it. She began examining the illustrations through the glass and was soon laughing out loud, something she rarely did.

“Good gracious! Would you look at that!” she said over and over. In the end, she’d no doubt. “Of course you must give it to him. What a great gift for anyone his age. What fun!”

So when Frank came back from Toronto, I did give it to him and he seemed delighted with it. But we never talked about its subject matter — I wouldn’t have known what to say. Nor did he point out to me any interesting features of the illustrations, as he usually did. But I did see him and Alicia looking through them together and laughing.

That September, he went off to Toronto for his first semester. He left the other miniatures at home, but he took his Kama Sutra with him.

Alicia really missed him and I did, too, but not as much as she did — though, of course, I didn’t tell her that. The fact was, since he’d grown up, he’d become more and more a mystery to me. Unlike my relationship with my own father, which had been based on an unquestioning warmth and love, there was a certain distance between me and Frank. I feared he could see right into me and found some characteristic he couldn’t tolerate. I was so aware of that, it was impossible for me to be spontaneously loving towards him, as a father would like to be with his son. Even in our conversations, I was never quite sure what he wanted from me. Perhaps he needed me to be something I wasn’t capable of being. Accordingly, he withheld himself from me in return.

AS FOR THE KAMA SUTRA, Alicia’s response to the book was typical of her attitude to all things sexual. She regarded them in the same common-sense way she’d always done. I knew she felt bad about our own lack of activity in that area since the birth of Frank.

Every so often, she’d ask sympathetically if I was “doing all right,” and I’d reassure her.

In spite of her natural bent for truth in most things, she didn’t mind deceiving others when it came to the public image of our marriage. Whenever, for example, we had dinner guests— an infrequent occurrence — we’d behave like the ideal couple. Indeed, we both took a certain pleasure in giving convincing performances, as perhaps many other couples do.

Mainly these dinner guests were men — mine representatives who were in Camberloo for a day or two to inspect machinery at the factory — and I could see they envied me. If they happened to have their wives with them, Alicia would put on an even better show.

THE MATTER OF Lew Jonson was similar, in a way. His wife had died years before I’d arrived in Camberloo. They’d been childless and Lew had come to regard Alicia almost as a daughter. When I was away from home on business, he’d worry she might be lonely and would phone her. Often this would end up in her inviting him to dinner.

Alicia told me about the curious rituals that took place at these dinners with Jonson. He was an opera lover and, since she was on the symphony board, he naturally thought it would be a treat for both of them to listen to some of his records after dinner. He’d no idea how much she dreaded that. Like her father, she really wasn’t all that fond of music.

I once asked her why she didn’t just tell him straight out and be done with it.

She shook her head vigorously.

“A dislike for music’s not something I care to admit to,” she said. That was as near as she ever came to acknowledging it might be a defect.

So, when Jonson brought his records along, she’d make an effort to maintain a polite interest in them. But the ecstasies of the divas and tenors that so delighted him were pure agony to her. Jonson’s image of father — daughter musical soirées was as much a charade as the perfect marriage she and I presented to the world.

I’D FREQUENTLY CATCH myself thinking how wonderful it might have been if I’d married Miriam Galt. But those moments of wishful imagining were a kind of sadism, one part of my mind tormenting another. I’d immediately try to make myself think about something else, and if that effort of will didn’t work I’d head out into the garden and mow the lawn or hack at the weeds. As a last resort, I’d even go up to the library and force myself to concentrate on some very technical article in the latest International Journal of Pumps.

On such occasions, I convinced myself that my self-discipline was necessary to avoiding madness. But I couldn’t stave off the doubts — that perhaps the real madness was my ongoing attempt to forget such an important episode from my past.

Anyway, I had no defence against my dreams. In one of the most persistent of them, I’d be tramping the purple hills of Duncairn on my way to Miriam’s house, my heart pounding in anticipation.

To awake from that dream, pounding heart and all, to my present reality was a refined form of torture.

1

In early March of Frank’s first year at university, I had to leave the snows of Camberloo behind and head for the southern hemisphere on business. Gordon had had to go there often, and had told me about the rigours of getting to Fiji in the old days — it involved, amongst other things, an arduous sea voyage of several weeks and the likelihood of spells of very rough weather. But for me now it was just a case of catching a trans-Pacific flight and emerging a few hours later into warm air scented with frangipani and who knows what other perfumes.

The major business of this particular trip was done in Suva, the capital of the main island, Viti Levu. I attended numerous meetings and sold six new pumps and a variety of parts to Consolidated Minerals, the biggest mining organization on the island. We’d been trying for years without success to interest them in our pumps, so all in all it was a very satisfying piece of work.

But I didn’t head home right away.

Some weeks before I left Camberloo, Jonson had received a letter from the manager of a phosphate company on Bird Island, one of the islands of the Oluban chain in the vicinity of Fiji. The gist of the letter was that Gordon, twenty-five years ago, had sold the company two pumps used in the phosphate-extraction process. The pumps were now wearing out. Records of the sale had been found by the present manager at Bird Island and he’d decided to get in touch with Smith’s Pumps and inquire about possible replacements or repairs.

Jonson had shown me the letter and we’d decided I should make a side trip from Fiji. The Bird Island manager and his engineer agreed to come and meet me on the main island, Oluba.

So, after the Fijian business was settled, I set out on an inter-island schooner headed southwards for the Oluban Archipelago, a scattering of volcanic islands and coral atolls spread across three hundred miles of ocean. On the map, the chain of islands looked like some half-immersed monster, with the main island — Oluba itself — being the monster’s head. I remembered how Gordon had mentioned the island to me several times, and remarked on how kind the people had been to him.

During the long day and overnight sail on the inter-island schooner, I once more suffered from the curse of seasickness. At dawn, I couldn’t stand the nausea anymore and stumbled out of my cabin onto the deck to gulp in the fresh air. I noticed that what had been a smudge on the horizon the night before had turned itself into an island.

I managed, without vomiting, to ask a sailor who was coiling a line near me on deck if we were near our destination.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s Oluba, the main island, off the bow. The women there have tattoos and strong legs.”

That was a curious remark. But I was feeling too sorry for myself to ask what he meant.

OLUBA WASN’T QUITE as near as it had seemed at dawn. In fact, my watch showed four-thirty in the afternoon as the schooner hurtled through the narrow opening in the reef into the smooth waters of the lagoon. At the same time, magically, I lost my desire to vomit and even took enough interest in my surroundings to notice a few dozen sailing ships at anchor as well as some freighters. A luxurious-looking motor yacht was moored at the same dock where our schooner tied up. Several islanders began helping our crew with the discharging of various crates and other cargo.

Dusk was already falling as I set out, bag in hand, for my hotel. I was a happy man to be on dry land again.

From what I could see, Oluba was a typical native village along a beach. It consisted of one main street and a sizable dock that protruded into the lagoon. There were the usual structures — a church, several stores with colourful signs above them, and a post office — all of them built with bamboo and other local woods. The houses had grass roofs and walls flimsy enough to let the fresh air blow through. Toilet facilities for the most part consisted of dilapidated outhouses perched over the tidal waters.

At the end of the street, I came to a hotel with an especially large sign—The Mango Tree Hotel. According to Gordon’s records, this was where he’d always stayed when he was here. The sandy compound contained a number of bamboo huts, dominated by a main building with a woven grass roof. I made my way inside it.

Behind the check-in desk sat a woman in a blue smock with long sleeves. In the light of the overhead lamps — the hotel obviously had its own generator — the skin of her face and neck looked so damaged I thought at first she’d been in some awful accident. Then I realized the blemishes were, in fact, ornate tattoos of grasses and flowers and vines.

That brought to mind the comment of the sailor on deck, earlier that morning, about the women here. I’d never seen anyone, in all my travels, tattooed to this extent. The camouflage effect made it hard to tell her age accurately, though I guessed she was in her twenties. She had a friendly demeanour but spoke no English, not even pidgin, so we communicated in sign language. Finally she gave me a little card with the number of the hut that had been allocated to me. Written on it in several languages was the information that dinner would be served at seven. I wrote my name and business in the register and headed for my hut.

It turned out to be at the rear of the main building and had a lagoon view. The bamboo walls were painted white and the floor was covered by a rattan carpet. There was a large bed, a desk and chair, and a wardrobe. I was most pleased by the fact that the hut also had a shower and an indoor toilet.

The bedside lamp highlighted an odd feature of the room. Running above the whole length of the bed was a rounded, hardwood beam supported by posts. A flimsy mosquito net hung from that beam, which seemed to me somewhat excessive for the purpose.

After a shower to wash the salt of the voyage off my body, I put on fresh clothes and went back to the main building. To get to the dining room I had to pass through a well-stocked bar, where I ordered a scotch from the bartender, a slow-moving, bald man of about sixty. He wasn’t an islander, though he did wear the traditional waist cloth. A plain white shirt bulged over his sizable belly.

As I sat at the bar with my drink, he talked to me about himself and the hotel. His name was Joe; he was an American with a slow drawl that no doubt suited the pace of life in Oluba. He’d been a soldier down here during the Second World War and had liked the place so much he came back permanently when the fighting was over.

“The hotel belongs to Anata,” he said. “She’s in the kitchen cooking tonight’s dinner.”

He was also very interested to hear about my connection to Smith’s Pumps.

“I know Smith’s Pumps,” he said. “Gordon Smith used to come down here. We haven’t seen him now in maybe twenty years.”

I told him that Gordon had actually been dead for eighteen years.

“Gordon’s dead?” He seemed shocked. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

He turned and called out into the dining room in the local language. A grey-haired island woman emerged from inside and joined us.

This was Anata, the owner of the Mango Tree Hotel, and she certainly made an interesting first impression. She had long grey hair, and her face and bare shoulders and arms were completely covered in tattoos of what appeared to be vines, lianas, and tropical plants. These tattooed plants seemed to be wilting with age, like Anata herself. She wore a kind of sarong that was slit from ankle to thigh, so I could see that her legs were also tattooed with vegetation. Those legs looked remarkably muscular for a woman past the prime of life.

Joe spoke quietly to her in the local language. Gordon’s name was mentioned several times.

She looked shocked at what he’d said. She turned to me and began to talk quickly in her own language. What with the tattoos all over her face, it was almost as if she was talking from behind a potted plant. Of course, I couldn’t understand what she was saying, though again I heard Gordon’s name.

When she’d finished, Joe gave me the very briefest of translations.

“She’s very upset to hear about Gordon,” he said. “He was very generous to her.”

He would have said more but just then a half-dozen or so other diners appeared — apparently, sailors from one of the freighters anchored off shore. Joe had to turn his attention to bartender duties for the new guests and Anata had to get back to her cooking.

THE DINNER CONSISTED of fresh fish from the lagoon, washed down with palm wine. The latter was surprisingly pleasant tasting, and I had a little bit too much. The sailors at the other tables were drinking it, and getting quite rowdy, so I went back to my room. I was tired after my sleepless night on the voyage, so I thought I’d read for a while then get to bed early.

Before I could even open my book, though, the lamp had attracted mosquitoes and the little biting insects they called nonos in Fiji. So I undressed and got into bed under the mosquito net with the book, Unveiling the Islands. I’d found it in a bookstore in Suva and was attracted to it because the cover mentioned that it dealt with Oluba and was written by one of the first Western travellers there, an anthropologist named Ireneus Fludd.

In the first chapter, Fludd talks about the pervasive use of tattoos, especially amongst the Oluban women. He attributes the practice to a vegetation and fertility cult that was widespread in the region. He also makes particular mention of the women’s legs:

Muscular legs are regarded as most desirable attributes amongst the Oluban women. As I walked along the beach on my first days on the island, I observed the male islanders mending their fishing nets and the woven sails of their outrigger canoes. But much more fascinating was to see the women of all ages doing vigorous knee bends and other leg exercises. Upon my inquiry, one of the Oluban chiefs explained that the exercise was for the rite of

paratac

, a word unfamiliar to me at that time.

Fludd was soon to discover both the meaning of that word and the purpose of those leg-strengthening routines.

He’d been invited by the Oluban chief to attend a banquet. When the festivities were over, the chief, following an Oluban custom to help make strangers feel at home, presented him with one of his daughters as a temporary gift.

The chief’s daughter took him to a nearby dwelling place. Inside, about five feet above the floor, a thick wooden beam had been erected in the manner of a horizontal training bar used in gymnastics.

Fludd faithfully records what happened there:

She divested herself of her sarong and, with an acrobatic move, she hooked her legs over that heavy beam and hung there upside down, her black hair dangling to the floor. She held out her arms to me, then slowly lifted me up by the waist, her own great legs taking the combined weight of us both, and turned me upside down till we were face to face. In this position, she inserted me into her and clung to me.

“Paratac,”

she said.

She began gently to swing back and forth, back and forth, causing me to move, by the law of gravity, up and down, up and down.

Soon she was gasping and howling words in her own language. I felt I ought to participate so I began shouting appropriate words in English. My vocal participation seemed to rouse her even more, which, I feel I must confess, aroused me still more.

After a brief frenzy, we dangled silently. Then she slowly turned me upright again, lowered me to the ground, and unhooked herself. I understood that

paratac

was finished.

I looked from the book up to that beam over my bed. Surely it must have been put there originally for the purposes of paratac. The whole exercise, as described by Fludd, sounded anything but enticing.

I went back to my reading. The next chapters in Fludd’s book consisted of rather technical analyses of the complex system of totems espoused by the Olubans. That acrobatic sex act of paratac, for example, was itself totemic: it mimicked the behaviour of fruit bats, which Fludd said he himself thereafter observed propagating upside down in the heights of coconut palms.

These technical chapters were, no doubt, the kinds of things an anthropologist might savour. But for me, lying there sweating under the mosquito net, exhausted from my journey, drowsy both from the palm wine and the effort of trying to keep my eyes open, they were too much. I gave up the effort, switched off the lamp, and fell asleep.

2

The next morning, I showered and dressed for the business that had brought me here: my meeting with representatives of Bird Island Phosphates. The island was actually a hundred miles south of Oluba itself, but to spare me another sea voyage, the manager and the chief engineer had come to Oluba’s harbour. We were to conduct our business on the company vessel before they caught the noon tide back to Bird Island.

I strolled down to the harbour and realized that the company boat was none other than that expensive-looking motor yacht I’d noticed tied up at dock. The manager of Bird Island Phosphates and his engineer welcomed me aboard. Both were Englishmen of about my own age and appeared to be good friends. Our meeting was held under the deck awning.

That morning it was low tide and the lagoon was shallow, with weeds and corals protruding. The air was full of the strong smell of rotting vegetation as well as whatever other dead things lay exposed to the sun. In the distance we could see the surf breaking on the reef against a backdrop of the endless dark blue of the ocean.

The engineer had brought photographs of the two pumps Gordon had sold the phosphate company so long ago. They were an early model and the cylinder blocks and valve plates were very worn, which meant the pistons were no longer able to function with much efficiency.

From the engineer’s comments it was clear that he was hoping the old pumps couldn’t be repaired. He devoted much of his time on Bird Island trying to keep them running but felt it was now becoming a losing battle. He’d seen our recent catalogue and was keen on buying new pumps. Either way, a decision had to be made quickly. The pumps were vital because much of the phosphate was beneath sea level and the diggings were prone to flooding.

The manager obviously sympathized with his friend, but his job was to consider finances. He wondered if by replacing the worn parts he would save money and also have pumps that again ran efficiently.

I could see they’d had this debate often before. Indeed, I’d often heard it in similar situations.

“Sure, we could buy new parts,” said the engineer. “But they’d just reveal other weaknesses in the pumps. Then we’d have to buy even more new parts. It’s a vicious circle.” He looked to me for support. “We might end up replacing so many parts that it would be like buying new pumps at ten times the expense, isn’t that so?”

I couldn’t have made a better sales pitch myself. Diplomatically, however, I told the manager he was right that it might be possible to repair the pumps. But that his engineer was right, too, about the problems that might result from putting new parts in old machines.

Now I played the card I’d discussed with Jonson before leaving Camberloo. Because of Bird Island Phosphates’ loyalty to Smith’s, I’d offer a substantial discount on two new pumps as well as free delivery and a ten-year warranty.

After hearing the details, the manager was won over. His friend, the engineer, was delighted. A deal was signed.

“Let’s drink to it,” the manager said.

SITTING THERE SWEATING under the deck awning, we drank several glasses of scotch and we talked. I learned that their brand of phosphate was in demand throughout the world for agricultural fertilizer. The workers who extracted it were brought in from other islands. These two Englishmen, like all their predecessors, were hired on three-year contracts. They made it clear they’d stay for that exact time and not a day more.

“No one could live on Bird Island for longer than three years without going mad,” said the engineer. “It isn’t a fit place for human beings. It shouldn’t even be called an island. It’s just thousands of years of bird droppings heaped up on a coral reef. The flies are so bad that when you approach from the sea, you’d swear they were clouds of smoke from a volcano.”

We laughed at his description. I remembered such pillars of flies over the battlefield near Dupont’s hospital in Africa.

“Thankfully, by the time the new pumps are installed, our stint will be just about finished,” the manager said. They’d go back to England for six months’ rest and recuperation, then they’d be assigned to some other remote place. It certainly couldn’t be any worse than Bird Island.

I could see in their faces signs of the ravages of malaria and isolation. So I was curious to know, in view of what they’d told me, why any man would willingly spend part of his life in a place like Bird Island.

The engineer looked at me for a moment, sizing me up.

“There’s a Bird Island in everyone’s life,” he said.

We all laughed at that, probably because of the scotch.

3

After dinner that night, my last night in the Mango Tree Hotel, I went to the verandah of the main hut and settled down in a deep rattan couch that looked out over the lagoon. I’d brought along my glass and the remains of a jug of the palm wine.

It was one of those idyllic South Sea Island moments, only slightly spoiled by the angry whine of mosquitoes that couldn’t make up their minds between the verandah lantern and my neck. On the beach below, palm trees creaked and sighed in the warm night wind. The lagoon was dotted with outriggers from which Oluban fishermen dangled lanterns to mesmerize the fish. In the skies far above, an oversized moon hung amidst endless clusters of stars.

AFTER ONLY FIVE minutes or so, I heard a squeaking of floorboards and a rustling of clothing. I looked round.

At the entranceway to the verandah was the woman who’d signed me in at the reception desk upon my arrival. She stood there, watching me through the foliage of tattooed vegetation covering her face. She was wearing a red sarong and carrying a little woven purse. Her hair was long and black, with a white orchid over her left ear.

Since she spoke no English, I gestured to a rattan chair beside the couch and waved an invitation to her to come and sit. But instead of sitting on the chair, she came and sat down beside me on the couch with her woven purse in her lap. Her skin glistened with some sort of perfumed oil. What with that and the plant tattoos, she was like a scented garden.

I pointed at myself.

“Harry,” I said.

She pointed at herself.

“Maratawi.”

The word sounded to me like a song.

“Would you like some wine, Maratawi?” I said, holding up my glass.

She nodded.

In my drunken state, I easily imagined that the old custom in Fludd’s Unveiling the Islands was still in effect and that this beautiful woman had been sent to me, a stranger, to make me feel at home.

And indeed, one thing led to another — or, one glass of wine led to another. And soon enough Maratami was in my hut, my clothes strewn over the floor and her red sarong beside them. On the bed, we massaged each other with a little phial of oil she’d taken from that woven purse. Her thighs didn’t look at all muscular, but I couldn’t help being aware of the heavy wooden beam that supported the mosquito net above us. I prepared myself mentally for the delicious ordeal ahead.

There was no need.

What we proceeded to do was done in bed in the good old-fashioned way, a bit noisy but most satisfying. Afterwards, we both fell asleep. About two in the morning I awoke and saw that she was gone. I didn’t stay awake long. Owing to the combined effects of the palm liquor and my exertions, I fell back into a deep sleep.

THE NEXT MORNING I awoke with a splitting headache and a great deal of remorse over my activities of the night before. On my way to the dining room for breakfast I had to pass the reception area and was relieved to see that Maratawi wasn’t there. Joe, the bartender, brought me breadfruit rolls and coffee right away.

“You look tired,” he said. “No wonder. You and Maratawi had quite a time last night. Our room’s at the other end of the hotel and we could hear you. We thought we’d never get to sleep.”

Clearly, a hotel made of grass wasn’t the best place to keep secrets. I didn’t answer him but he stayed by the table, wanting to talk.

“Maratawi won’t be in today,” he said. “She’s home with her husband and her two children.”

That unwanted information made me feel much worse. But more was to come.

“You’ve heard of paratac?” he said.

I nodded, not knowing quite what to expect.

“Gordon and Anata used to do it together,” Joe said. “That was in the days when the women still did it. The last few times he was here, he said he was too old to do it anymore and felt bad about that. After paratac, I guess it was hard for him to go back to the usual thing.”

I was speechless. Gordon used to indulge in athletic sex with that tattooed Oluban woman! Again, it wasn’t quite the image of the business-monk I’d usually associated with him.

Joe, the bartender, wasn’t finished with his revelations.

“Maratawi’s their daughter,” he said. “That was one of the reasons he kept on coming down here — to see how she was getting on.”

Now I was really shocked. If what he said was true, I, who was legally married to one of Gordon’s daughters, had just slept with another whose existence he’d never mentioned.

“You can thank Anata for sending Maratawi to you last night to keep you company,” Joe said. “It’s no big deal down here so long as you both had fun.”

At that moment, the tattooed Anata came shuffling in like a plant with legs.

It was hard enough for me to comprehend how a mother could have done such a thing to her daughter. What would she think if she knew I was married to another of Gordon’s daughters — or would she even mind?

“When Gordon found out Anata was pregnant with Maratawi, he gave her the money to buy this hotel and make it what it is,” Joe was saying. “He wanted them to be comfortable for the rest of their lives. With Gordon’s blessing, Anata took me for a husband and we really cleaned this place up. Businessmen and sea captains usually stay here when they’re in town. We hope you’ll do the same any time you’re here. Maratawi will always be happy to come and keep you company.”

AROUND FIVE THAT afternoon, I was on the deck of the inter-island schooner looking back at Oluba. Anata and Joe waved to me from the dock and I waved to them. We navigated the opening in the reef successfully and entered the open ocean, heading for Fiji. The wind was fair and the blue sky was pocked with tiny clouds.

The figures on the beach were now becoming quite small. I borrowed a pair of binoculars from the first mate and focused them. Anata and Joe were waving, and they’d been joined by a third figure — Maratawi. I waved back, though I doubted they could see me any longer. But they stayed there waving, tinier and tinier, and I, out of courtesy, waved back till at six o’clock darkness fell like an axe.

ON THAT RETURN voyage to Fiji, when I didn’t feel too seasick, I went over again and again the significance of my Oluban experience.

I’d had my night of pleasure with Maratawi in an updated version of an ancient Oluban custom. But the more I thought about it, the more I flinched at the idea of having been to bed with another of Gordon’s daughters. Technically, it may not have been incest. But if I’d known before the act took place, no amount of palm liquor would have enticed me into it. I did know now, even if no one else ever would, so I’d have to live with it.

I also pondered the stunning discovery I’d made about Gordon Smith’s exploits on Oluba. Once again I realized that though I’d been close to him, I’d barely known him. Which should, of course, have been no surprise. When we take such care to disguise our true feelings from others, why would we expect them to be an open book to us?

These things filled my mind for that entire journey. By the time the schooner sailed into the harbour at Nani the next day, I’d made up my mind on one thing at least: Oluba would never see me again.

4

A bitterly cold northeaster, precursor of a late March blizzard, was scouring the streets of Camberloo on the morning of my return. But Alicia’s greeting was unusually warm. With me away and Frank at university in Toronto, she’d felt lonely. She’d adopted a cat to keep her company, which surprised me. Both she and Gordon had never seemed fond of pets — cats especially, perhaps for their unpredictability.

I went to bed at noon and slept for several hours to make up for the disruption caused by the change in time zones. When I woke I felt much better. At six o’clock, Alicia and I had dinner together then went into the library for coffee and brandy. I sat in the armchair near the blazing fire. Alicia sat opposite on the sofa. On her knee was her cat, Miss Sophie, a little ivory Siamese who already seemed very much at home.

As ever, I couldn’t help admiring Alicia, sitting there. How beautiful and mysterious she looked, with her dark eyes and her long hair partly covering her face. She was in an unusually talkative mood and asked more questions about my trip than she normally did. I told her that after Fiji I’d spent a couple of days on an island called Oluba.

“Oluba?” she said, suddenly very interested. “I didn’t know you were going there.”

I explained it had been a last-minute addition to my plans. “Please tell me more about Oluba,” she said. “Gordon used to love it there.”

I went on at length about the coral reefs, white beaches, and palm trees, then about my interesting meeting with the two men from Bird Island and the horrors of their situation.

“Is the Mango Tree Hotel still there?” she said.

Her familiarity with that name surprised me. I admitted that was where I’d stayed.

“Gordon used to talk a lot about it,” she said. “That was where he always stayed, too. The owner back then was a woman called Anata. I don’t suppose you met her?”

I was cautious now, for Gordon’s sake as well as my own. Yes, as a matter of fact, Anata still owned the hotel. She was an elderly woman.

“Gordon said she was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever met,” said Alicia. “He gave her the money to buy the hotel — apparently it had a lot of potential.”

I didn’t like the way this was going.

“In a way, it was repayment for services rendered,” she said.

I put on a puzzled face.

“Oh, yes,” Alicia said. “She was quite an athlete in bed — at least in those days. Paratac, or something like that, I think he called it.”

To hear her use that word and to realize Gordon had actually told her about his bedroom activities in Oluba shouldn’t have surprised me, but once more it did. What an unorthodox father— daughter relationship they’d had.

More was to come.

“Anata didn’t mention they’d had a little daughter together?” she said.

A daughter? I put on a surprised look and explained I’d barely seen Anata, and anyway she spoke no English.

“Maratawi was the name they gave the little girl,” said Alicia. “Isn’t that a delightful name? I was six when she was born. ‘You have a little half-sister at the other end of the world,’ Gordon used to say. She must be quite grown up by now.” She was looking right into me. “You’re sure you didn’t meet someone called Maratawi?”

Of course, I denied it.

She was in so many ways a complete mystery to me, I often felt quite out of my depth with her. How would she react if I told her everything, including my drunken fling with her half-sister? Would she be upset? Or would she be amused? Of course, I just kept quiet.

“If you ever go back to Oluba,” she said, “make a point of looking up Maratawi. After all, she is your sister-in-law.”

I assured her I would do as she said, though I did wonder why she herself had never shown any great interest in meeting her half-sister. She was looking at me quite skeptically, still not satisfied with my account of the trip.

“You should know by now you can tell me the truth,” she said. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s not being told the truth.”

I changed the subject and asked her if she’d ever told Frank about her half-sister in Oluba. After all, Maratawi was his aunt or half-aunt.

Alicia fell for the diversion.

“No, I haven’t yet,” she said. “Please don’t mention it to him. I’m saving it as a big surprise for him someday soon.”

IN THE END, I promised her I’d look up Maratawi next time I was in Oluba. I felt no need to tell her I’d already resolved never to go back there again.

1

Frank graduated with a degree in fine arts that had allowed him to make a special study of old furniture as well as rare books. He was by now a young-looking twenty-two and had the dark brown hair and eyes of his mother. In fact, physically he was like her in many ways. A stranger might have thought it ironic that the genes of a woman who tended to avoid society could be so domineering when it came to stamping their image on our son. The only noteworthy thing he took from me was his nose, which had a slight leftwards hook to it.

So I was always puzzled when Alicia would say, as she often did, “Frank’s more like you than you think.” I presumed she must mean in temperament, or personality, and was surprised she should think so.

After graduating he came back to live in Camberloo, but not with us. He wanted his own place, a natural thing for a young man to do. Alicia was, of course, disappointed at that but arranged an apartment for him in the building beside the park where I myself had lived on first coming to Camberloo. When I helped Frank move in his things I felt quite nostalgic, thinking back to that period in my own life.

AS TO WHAT FRANK might make of himself, Alicia and I had assumed that in the course of time he’d take his place in the family business, though he’d never shown much interest in pumps. But it turned out he had his own ideas about his future.

He joined us for dinner one night not long after he’d moved into his apartment and presented us with a plan he’d clearly been thinking about for some time. It was this: he wanted to open a store that specialized in rare objects, particularly furniture and books. He’d done his homework and felt that such a store would be unique to Camberloo and the area around it.

“Those gifts you used to bring me when I was growing up— you know how much I always loved them,” he said to me. “When I got to university, I began to think: wouldn’t it be great to own a place that stocked things like that? It was at the back of my mind all through my degree.”

That surprised me. I wasn’t quite sure what I felt at being told I was the root cause of this unexpected announcement. Alicia — not surprisingly, for she always indulged him — didn’t seem to mind too much that he’d no desire to join me at Smith’s Pumps. And I suppose I didn’t really mind much either, though for different reasons — I’d often worried that we might not work well together, and that when he fully understood those ethical compromises I’d made, he’d think even less of me.

We began discussing in a general way how he might put his plan into action by finding a suitable store for lease and stocking it with suitable items — naturally, we expected to play a major role in financial matters. We all agreed that a downtown location would be best, and encouraged him to make further explorations.

AFTER FRANK LEFT that night, Alicia and I talked about his scheme. We were both realistic about its lack of realism: the kind of store he had in mind probably wouldn’t do much business. But we wanted him to be happy, above all.

That was when our talk took a quite unexpected turn.

“If anything ever happens to me, will you promise to look after him and make sure he doesn’t mess up his life?” said Alicia.

I scoffed at the notion of anything ever happening to her— she’d outlive me by decades. But she was in a serious mood, so I promised her I’d always be there to advise him. Not that I really believed sons are inclined to take their fathers’ advice in these matters — especially a son with whom the father had never really been at ease.

My promise seemed to alleviate whatever fears she had. “Thank you for that.” She smiled. “And don’t worry. I fully expect to outlive you, too.”

IN THE FALL, Frank leased a moderately sized old store — it had formerly sold shoes — on the corner of King and Delta near the City Hall. Much of the building looked as though it was unchanged since the 1920s, with crumbling brick walls and creaky plank flooring. Frank was especially charmed that it still had an ancient pneumatic-tube system: from the front counter, orders and cash would whiz overhead through a brass tube to the business office at the rear.

He himself was on the road quite a bit at this time, acquiring items for his store, but he also directed its renovations. Though that was hardly the right word. Frank’s notion of renovation was actually more like a restoration of the building to its primal state, revealing the interior brick behind the plaster and uncovering the pipes of its antique heating system. If there had been some way to restore even the unique odours the store must have had in its heyday, he’d have been very pleased.

2

In November, Smith’s Emporium opened for business without much fanfare. The use of the family name pleased Alicia a great deal. The night before the opening, while Alicia was attending one of her board meetings, Frank called and asked me if I’d like to come and have a preview of his collection.

“I’d like to hear your opinion of it,” he said.

I must admit I was delighted at the invitation. Perhaps this was a sign of a positive development in our relationship. So I met him at the store for a guided tour.

EVEN THOUGH THE Emporium wasn’t all that big, he’d split it into two distinctive areas, or “galleries” as he named them. The Furniture Gallery began just inside the front door and was guarded by four tenth-century Chinese temple lions. To fill this area, Frank had purchased almost the entire stock of a New York antiquities firm that had gone bankrupt. Included was an array of items from various centuries — armoires, walnut buffets, uncomfortable stool chairs, and heavy oak tables, as well as the four lions. All the acquisitions on display had little cards beside them to indicate their origins.

Some of the pieces were quite remarkable. Taking pride of place was an early Renaissance clothes trunk with inlaid panels that showed daily life in a ducal palace. Not far behind was a seventeenth-century French vaisselier containing porcelain serving plates, many of them broken and carefully glued together, depicting pastoral scenes.

A special section of the Furniture Gallery contained Frank’s own personal favourites. Protruding from the wall above them was an armless female nude figurehead from a Spanish galleon found off the coast of Florida. A worn-looking black walnut credence table from Peru had been used by the servants of conquistador Hernán Cortés to check his food for poison— several of them had, as a result, died in agony. An elaborate Florentine commode was from the bedroom of Maddalena de’ Medici, who’d been married to a son of the most depraved of pontiffs, the murderous Pope Innocent VIII. Near the commode were some folding military chairs from the American Civil War. A stain on the faded yellowish cushion of one of them had been identified as the blood of a Confederate officer at the Battle of Chickamauga.

THE FURNITURE GALLERY overflowed into the Book Gallery, which took up the rest of the store. It was mainly a repository of old leather-bound books in Latin. Their subjects weren’t all that enticing — treatises on horticulture, collections of prayers and pious meditations — but it was an extreme pleasure for a book lover just to caress them, skim through their ancient pages, and even inhale their ancient dust.

Some of the books in the “erotica” section were certainly eye-catching for other reasons. These were privately printed and hard to obtain. Amongst them were such titles as The Fair Concubine, Venus the Flagellant, The Discreet Copulator, and The Dildoad — An Epic. The authors of these books had wisely chosen to remain anonymous, for the most part.

FOR ME, the most fascinating part of the Book Gallery was a glass case near the back, with a sign over it: Four of the Great Lost Books of the West. The four books on display in the case had printed cards beside them with information on the books themselves as well as on the reputable European dealerships from which Frank had acquired them.

The books were aligned in chronological order.

The first was a tattered-looking volume entitled Inventio Infortunata. This was an anonymous, fourteenth-century eyewitness account of the seemingly impossible: a visit to the Arctic. The book had been mentioned by various scholars in subsequent centuries, but no other copy of it had ever been found.

The second book was a stained, cloth-bound work, Les Journées de Florbelle. Apparently this was volume nine of an erotic epic handwritten by the Marquis de Sade while in the lunatic asylum where he spent much of his life. Scholars had formerly believed that the entire work was destroyed by de Sade’s son after its author died in the asylum.

The third of the books was really just a smoke- and firedamaged writing tablet with the title, My Secret Love, scrawled on the cover. This was a pen-and-ink account, by Robert Louis Stevenson, of his affair with a Samoan woman. His wife, Fanny Osbourne, had found it in his bedside drawer after his death and thrown it into the fire. It was later retrieved by a servant.

The fourth wasn’t a published book either, but a hefty manuscript in a peculiar, leathery-looking binder. Typed on it were the title and the author’s name:

The Poor Man and the Lady by

Thomas Hardy

This was a draft of Hardy’s first novel, the only one not published. He’d held on to the manuscript nevertheless, and used parts of it in other of his works. Upon Hardy’s death, according to his biographers, his heart was surgically removed from his chest to be buried in his wife’s grave. The excised heart was left momentarily in a biscuit tin on his kitchen table. When no one was looking, Hardy’s favourite cat crept in through an open window, knocked the lid off the tin, and devoured part of his master’s heart. The leathery-looking binder holding this manuscript was actually made from the skin of that cat.

THAT FIRST TIME I looked into the glass case containing Four of the Great Lost Books of the West and read the accompanying notes, I asked Frank if these literary works really were authentic.

“Well, in their day, they were considered genuine by some experts and were included in authoritative bibliographies,” Frank said. “But now scholars using the latest scientific research tools have discredited them. There’s no doubt about it. They’re all definitely forgeries.”

I wondered in that case why he’d acquired them. I couldn’t believe anyone would want to read or collect such frauds.

“The truth is they seem so genuine you’d like to think they were the real thing,” Frank said. “Collectors are willing to pay a lot for fakes of this high calibre. Even when you already know they’re fakes, you can’t help admiring what perfectionists the forgers were and the sweat that must have gone into the work. First of all they had to master the exact mannerisms and styles of the authors — even their handwriting. Then the paper, the bindings, and the inks had to be so authentic looking that even experts would be taken in. I really believe the authors they were copying would have been flattered.”

I was skeptical about this downplaying of the difference between the fake and the genuine.

“You’re entitled to your point of view,” said Frank. “But I’d argue that some fake books, just like some fake paintings, are actually better than the artists they imitate. In fact, they’re too good — and that’s how they give themselves away.”

He offered to let me read the four books whenever I had time, and see for myself. The very idea made me uneasy.

RIGHT AT THE BACK of the Book Gallery, in a corner by his office, Frank kept his miniatures in an illuminated bookcase with glass doors. All of those I’d given him through the years were there, along with others he’d since bought. His latest acquisition was a nineteenth-century Complete Works of Shakespeare handwritten on the backs of seven hundred Victorian Penny Black stamps.

This masterpiece of crazed devotion was apparently produced in a penal colony in Australia by an Englishman — an actor who was serving twenty-five years for a botched bank robbery. The robbery was undertaken in London to help finance a travelling performance of The Tempest with himself playing Prospero. He was sentenced to deportation to Van Diemen’s Land for twenty-five years. He worked on his miniature Shakespeare for exactly that length of time, finished it, and promptly died.

“He copied it all out with strands of his own hair,” Frank told me. “You need a triple-strength magnifying glass to read it.”

HE WAS ESPECIALLY proud of the desk in his small office. One entire wall and most of the floor space were taken up by it. It was a labyrinthine Georgian bureau, five feet tall and four feet wide, checkered with drawers and cubbyholes and sliding panels. The bureau was made to be assembled in any location the buyer wanted. It could be taken to pieces and reassembled if it ever needed to be moved.

“We discovered that it’s a few days’ work to put it together, but it’s well worth the trouble,” said Frank. “I bought it from an Irish dealer who thought it was possibly the very desk where Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels.” He opened one of the drawers and handed me what looked like a pair of eyeglasses. “The dealer found these in it. Try them on.”

I did try them on: the right eye magnified objects and the left minimized them. Frank was either a giant or a tiny puppet depending on which eye I closed. I started to feel quite nauseated and quickly took the things off.

“Glasses like these really were used in the Middle Ages by students of ancient philosophy,” Frank said. “They were fascinated by the idea of proportion in nature and in the universe in general. So that dealer who sold me the desk could have been right about Swift having owned it. You remember in Gulliver’s Travels the little people from Lilliput and the giants from Brobdingnag? Swift may have worn this very pair of glasses as part of his research.”

He saw I was impressed and smiled.

“On the other hand, Irish antiquity dealers are notorious for their far-fetched sales pitches, so he probably put the glasses in the drawer himself,” he said. “Anyway, Swift or no Swift, I love the idea and I’ve no intention of ever selling this desk.”

Another of his acquisitions was on display above the desk — a weird-looking wall clock. The preserved skeleton of a hare was stretched out in full flight, with an old-fashioned clock mechanism set into its ribcage. The clock’s ponderous tick-tock, tick-tock was quite at odds with the suggestion of the hare’s breakneck speed.

Frank could see how the clock delighted me.

“I hate to disappoint you, but it’s not for sale either,” he said.

I was beginning to get the feeling that he wouldn’t care if no one bought anything from Smith’s Emporium — it was more his private museum than a commercial enterprise.

From that night onwards, something changed in the way Frank and I got along. He couldn’t hide his satisfaction that I’d been so clearly impressed by his collection. That very fact, in turn, was gratifying to me, too, for till then I hadn’t been sure my reactions would have been of much importance to him.

Alicia had occasionally worried that this collecting obsession of his was a substitute for “real living,” and in the past I’d tended to agree with her. But after that night of the guided tour, I tried to persuade her that, even though his collecting might not seem practical and useful in the sense of a normal business such as Smith’s Pumps, perhaps it was a much more fulfilling and sane occupation for a human being — especially one we loved. Much as she did indeed love Frank, I could see she wasn’t quite sure what I meant by my defence of his choice of work, for she was still Gordon’s daughter.

3

Frank certainly did love his work, and would often stay at the store long after six o’clock, its official closing time. Occasionally, if I happened to be driving past and saw his office light still on, I’d ask the chauffeur to drop me off and go on home. Then I’d rap on the store window to get Frank’s attention. He seemed to enjoy my visits, and that pleased me immensely. Besides which, I liked to have a look at his latest acquisitions — his reasons for having chosen them might perhaps give me some deeper insight into Frank himself.

He even displayed a sense of humour to me now, something he’d rarely done before.

One particular night when I knocked on the store window, he came and opened the front door just as a man passed by with two dogs on leashes, out for their evening walk. One of the dogs was big and slow moving, with a melancholy hound’s face. The other was a tiny bright-eyed terrier, snarling and snapping at the big dog’s legs.

“Just like a married couple, eh?” Frank said.

Laughing together, the way a father and son should, we went inside the store. There he showed me an ancient Egyptian cube he’d just bought. It was made of marble, about six inches tall, with hieroglyphs sculpted out on all four sides. Egyptologists had apparently been unable to decipher their meaning.

I speculated that, in time, someone would surely figure it out.

“I hope not,” said Frank. “There’s something very appealing about the idea of a mystery that never explains itself — just like our own minds.” He looked at me as though that might apply to us, and the fact that we didn’t really understand each other might not be such a bad thing.

HE HAD A GIRLFRIEND at that time who was a reporter for The Camberloo Record. By pulling some strings she arranged for an article on the store to appear in the newspaper’s weekend edition, together with a photo of Frank sitting at his big Georgian desk. The headline read: The Emperor in His Emporium.

For a few weeks, as a result of that publicity, quite a number of townspeople dropped by just to see what all the fuss was about. Naturally, the bulk of them found the pieces on display either too expensive or too odd for their tastes, or both.

It was hard to imagine, for instance, that many customers could envisage on their living-room tables one of Frank’s very latest acquisitions — a yellowing glass laboratory bottle found in the south of Tierra del Fuego. It contained the pickled genitals of a Russian explorer who’d participated in one of those doomed expeditions to Antarctica at the end of the nineteenth century. The card beside the bottle explained that the contents were all that was left of his body. Apparently the survivors of the expedition had cannibalized the rest of him.

At any rate, after the early interest roused by the newspaper article, the flow of visitors to the store began to dwindle. Frank clearly didn’t mind. As I’d already come to suspect, for the most part the Emporium was really his private collection, masquerading as a place of business.

4

Almost a year of relative tranquility followed the opening of the Emporium. I was in my office on a Friday afternoon in the fall discussing some business matter with Jonson, who was about to leave for home. He was putting on his raincoat and looking out the window over Camberloo Square at the big trees, already changing colour.

I couldn’t help remarking on how beautiful they were.

“That depends on your perspective,” said Jonson. “From a scientific standpoint, this changing of colour is a kind of strangulation. The mottling of the leaves is the effect of the deprivation of sunlight. To say it’s beautiful is like saying a man who’s being suffocated turns a beautiful colour.”

I didn’t make any comment. I was just thankful I was no scientist. Jonson had barely shut the door behind him when the phone rang.

It was Frank, and his voice was anxious.

“I dropped by the house for a cup of coffee with Mother,” he said. “She’s here, but something’s wrong. Please, come quickly.”

A VERY WORRIED-LOOKING Frank opened the front door for me when I arrived.

“She’s in the bathroom and she won’t answer,” he said. “I can’t get the door open and I didn’t know what to do.”

We were both aware that Alicia’s midday bath was one of her indispensable rituals. But it was after three o’clock now. She should have finished long ago.

We went upstairs to the main bathroom. The cat, Miss Sophie, was prowling outside the door. I knocked and called Alicia’s name. Just as Frank had, I tried the handle but it was locked on the inside. So I put my shoulder to the door, it burst open, and I went in.

Miss Sophie ran past me, jumped onto the ledge around the tub, and saw what I saw.

ALICIA WAS LYING on her back in the almost-full bathtub. The marble ledge held a half-dozen candles, two of them guttering, near burnt out, giving off an incense fragrance. The water was very clear, and she looked quite beautiful and peaceful, her breasts and her arms slightly afloat. Her eyes were open, looking up at me, her lips slightly apart, showing her teeth. You might have thought she was alive and well but for the fact that those eyes were under an inch or two of water. I bent over and touched her shoulder. It was cold and the water was cold.

Frank was still outside in the hallway.

“What’s wrong?” he called to me.

I told him his mother had drowned.

“Oh, no,” he said.

I thought it just as well that he shouldn’t see her dead and naked. So I told him to go downstairs and call the police. Meantime, I sat on the toilet seat. Miss Sophie, disappointed at Alicia’s lack of responsiveness, jumped on my knee to be petted.

There was something comforting about the whole scene: the candles still burning, the cat purring, Alicia half floating in her tub, quite relaxed looking, as if meditating. You might even have thought she had a little trace of a smile on her face, except that the water was cold, which I knew she wouldn’t have liked one bit.

THE POLICE QUICKLY ruled out foul play: the bathroom door and the window could only be locked from the inside. When the coroner arrived not long after and let the water out of the tub to examine her, he found a bad bruise on the back of her head. That enabled him to rule out suicide. In his view, she’d most likely slipped getting into the tub and been knocked unconscious when her head hit the marble or the faucet. Nor were her lungs full of water, so the combination of the blow to the head and the rapid blocking of the nasal passage probably caused her death.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said to Frank and me when he eventually came downstairs. He was an elderly man with a sad, lined face and had the air of someone who’d seen many awful things but retained his humanity. “It’s always distressing for the loved ones when the death’s so unexpected,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I can tell you the way she went was just about as pleasant as any of us could ever hope for.”

I thanked him. Then he and his assistants left with the body.

Frank sat on the living-room couch sobbing quietly. He was in the kind of shock I’d once experienced myself. This, his first real experience of death, was the death of the person who’d adored him.

FOR MYSELF, I was deeply affected by Alicia’s death, indeed much more than I’d ever have guessed. All these years, I’d convinced myself that whatever my relationship with her had been, it wasn’t a union of soul mates, the kind that ends with broken hearts— the kind I’d had with Miriam.

But now I was beginning to grasp that, while Miriam had become a ghost, receding more and more into the corners of my memory, Alicia had been my unfailing best friend and ally. She’d loved me totally in her own way. Without realizing it, little by little, I’d come to love her too.

I thought of what the coroner had said — that it wasn’t a bad way for her to go. The image of her sliding unconscious into the warm water, her last breaths scented with spices from her candles, was somehow consoling. If I’d died like that, she’d probably have felt much the same way.

THREE DAYS LATER, we cremated Alicia. An unexpected guest, Gordon’s doctor — twenty years older now, but still wearing a polka-dot bow tie — showed up for the occasion. I was taken aback to learn from him that both Alicia and Gordon had requested their carotids be slashed before being wheeled into the incinerator.

That reminded me of how, one night not long after Gordon’s death, I’d picked up the illustrated History of Scotland he often read. The corner of a page was turned down at a section on premature burial, which was relatively common right up to the nineteenth century. To avoid this unpleasant possibility, some of the dying would ask that after being pronounced dead, their carotid arteries be cut. They didn’t want to wake up and find themselves underground in a coffin — or even worse, in the hell of a crematorium furnace.

I’d torn that page out of the book and destroyed it, thinking it might distress Alicia if she came across it. But all these years, she’d kept their pact secret, knowing it would distress me.

LATER THAT DAY, in a light rain, Frank, Jonson, and I buried her ashes under the very rose bush where Gordon’s ashes had been intermingled with the earth decades before. The bush had always looked healthy enough but had produced no roses, despite Alicia’s loving care for it.

Afterwards in the house, over drinks, Jonson asked me about the derivation of our little burial service. I told him about the South American tribes who believed that the best orchids grew on top of corpses, beauty springing out of tragedy.

“Ah” was all he said. He wasn’t the sentimental type.

But I liked the idea of the ritual, even if only as a symbol.

Surely there was no harm in wishing that out of the dust of Gordon and Alicia, two people who’d done so much for me— loved me — something beautiful might arise.

5

A year had passed since Alicia’s death. I hadn’t realized how much I’d miss her, and tried to immerse myself in work to keep my mind occupied. Notice arrived that the Annual Mining Convention of the Americas was scheduled to take place in La Verdad. I’d attended most AMCA conventions over the years and, this time, had actually been invited to give a presentation on our latest pumps. I had no intention of going, however. Frank and I had become much closer in the aftermath of his mother’s death and I didn’t like the idea of leaving him on his own. But when he heard about the AMCA meeting, he insisted that I go — a week in Mexico would be good for me.

So I went to La Verdad reluctantly. Indeed, I would have adjudged the entire trip to be a waste of time. Till that few minutes sheltering from a storm in a shabby bookstore where I discovered a book—The Obsidian Cloud.

When I brought it home, I lent it to Frank to find out what he thought.

He was excited — it was just the kind of oddity he loved. I’d mentioned to him my own Duncairn connection, but only in the most general way. That was one of the reasons why I’d spent a considerable amount of my spare time at the university library, doing whatever research I could on the book’s origins and its author. Without the slightest success.

Frank wasn’t surprised.

“Look,” he said. “I know from experience, this isn’t the kind of thing an amateur can do. You need to give the book to an expert, then you might get results.”

I thought he meant himself, for his collection of oddities included rare books. He’d already hinted he wouldn’t mind putting The Obsidian Cloud in his collection at the Emporium— not for sale, of course, but just to show it off.

In fact, of course, he had in mind the curator of rare books at the National Cultural Centre in Glasgow.

“I haven’t met him,” he said. “But I’ve read articles by him in various journals. He really knows his stuff.”

So I did what he suggested, and the curator eventually became enthusiastic about the task. While his research was underway, another important figure from my past reappeared.

1

It was a Friday, and I was in my office later than usual preparing for an important meeting on Monday morning with the representatives of a consortium of mining companies. The phone rang and I picked up, expecting it to be Jonson. He’d gone over to the factory earlier to check on machinery parts and said he’d call if there were any shortages.

“Harry, is that you?”

The voice wasn’t Jonson’s.

“This is Charles Dupont.”

My mind was full of the upcoming Monday meeting, so the name didn’t quite register at first.

“You know — Dr. Dupont. We were together in Africa, more than twenty years ago?”

Dupont! I was surprised and delighted. I told him I’d often thought about him over the years and wondered what had become of him. He was one of those who’d been kind to me when I badly needed a friend.

“Well, it’s nice to hear I haven’t been forgotten,” said Dupont. “I’ve often wondered what became of you.”

I gave him a brief account of my life since we’d last met, and he did the same. After leaving Africa he’d gone on to various postings in other foreign parts. Most recently, in fact for the last three years, he’d been director of surgery in an institute of some sort in Upper New York State, near the Canadian border.

“Which is how I came to hear about you,” he said.

Apparently, a technician from Canada had been brought in to repair a defective magneto in one of the generators that ran the institute’s labs. He’d finished the job just that very day, and before heading back over the border had reported to Dupont. This technician happened to mention that he’d learned some elements of his trade at Smith’s Pumps in Camberloo, and my name came up. Dupont asked a few questions and realized it must be the same Harry Steen he’d known so long ago in Africa.

“You can imagine what a surprise that was,” Dupont said. “But it was also such a coincidence, for I’d just been thinking about you. It happens that this very weekend I’ve a visitor coming who spent some time in that little mining town in Scotland you were always talking about. Duncairn, wasn’t it?”

I was even more surprised to hear that name yet again, so soon after the discovery in La Verdad, and that Dupont had even remembered it from so many years ago.

“Well, you talked about it often enough back in those days — that and your broken heart,” he said. “Anyway, as soon as that technician left my office I found the Smith’s Pumps phone number, and I’m so glad I caught you. Here’s what I want to ask: I know I’m not giving you much notice, but is there any chance you could come down here this weekend? The two of us could catch up and you can meet my friend and hear all about Duncairn, too.”

How could I refuse such a tempting invitation? Of course I’d drive down and see him on Saturday. But I’d have to leave again early on Sunday to get back to Camberloo for an important early-morning meeting on Monday. Was there a hotel near his institute where I could stay on Saturday night?

“Don’t even think about a hotel,” said Dupont. “I have my own living quarters at the institute and I’ll put you up in the guest room overnight. Now let me tell you the best way to get here. We’re a bit off the beaten track.”

2

I set out early on Saturday morning, but with the roads so busy with weekend traffic, the drive took longer than I’d hoped.

Eventually, after seven weary hours, I turned off the interstate at the junction Dupont had indicated. For the next hour I found myself driving through forests of spruce and maple on roads that got narrower and narrower until there was hardly room for two cars to pass. At times I startled families of browsing deer and even one tall, scraggy wolf. It was standing in the middle of the road, driven mad perhaps by the mosquitoes that were thick in the shady bush at this time of year.

Around three in the afternoon, the road dead-ended at what looked like an army barracks: a cluster of long huts with semicircular, corrugated roofs in an area the size of several football fields. It was surrounded by a high mesh fence topped with razor wire. The gables of the huts were a faded khaki colour. The windows and doors looked in need of some paint. The tin roofs were rusted. All in all, the place wasn’t very impressive, though it blended well with the surrounding forest.

I parked alongside several official-looking vehicles in a small lot and got out of the car into the hot sun. The buzz of insects was the only sound. I began to wonder if perhaps I’d made an error and taken a wrong turning.

But no, attached to a big iron gate in the fence was a sign:

FEDERAL INSTITUTE 77

NO TRESPASSING

That was the name and number Dupont had told me to remember in case I got lost. I couldn’t see any bell, so I tried twisting the handle of the gate. Immediately, the door of the nearest hut opened. A young man in a soldier’s uniform accompanied by an elderly man in a white labcoat came down a cinder pathway towards me. The soldier unlocked the gate and motioned me in. The other man, who wore narrow sunglasses, held out his hand to me.

“Harry,” he said. “How good to see you again.”

It was Dr. Dupont.

I’d never have known him, he looked so much older and thinner. His hair was short and grey and he was clean-shaven— the twin beards I always associated with him in my memory were gone. With his white labcoat and striped tie, he looked the epitome of a government scientist. Then he took off his sunglasses and I recognized those green eyes with their amused gleam.

THE SOLDIER GOT my bag out of the car and we walked over to the hut they’d come from. Going into it was like entering a huge barrel that had been cut down the middle and was lying on its side. The hut contained several well-worn tables and a hatch opening into a kitchen. Apparently this was both meeting place and dining room for the institute, but it wasn’t busy, since this was a weekend.

Dupont and I sat at a table and were soon drinking strong coffee and talking, quite at ease, as though decades hadn’t passed. I told him in more detail now about my experiences after our parting in Africa. How I’d sailed across the Atlantic, tutored in South America, met Gordon Smith of Smith’s Pumps, eventually married his daughter Alicia, and together we had a son. Sadly, Alicia had died last year.

Dupont listened quietly, nodding at appropriate moments.

Then I asked him about his own last days in Africa. I remembered only too well my final glimpse of him and Clara from the window of the plane.

“I remember that, too,” he said. “We envied you flying away from it all, but we had to wrap up things at the hospital. Then, the day before the rebels were to arrive, we managed to find places on a truck headed for the coast. We were afraid they’d come after us and I was determined we wouldn’t be captured. I didn’t tell Clara, but I brought along two cyanide pills for us to take, just in case. You saw the kinds of things they did to anyone they caught.

“The roads were worse than usual, and it was such a slow journey that the truck had to stop overnight and park amongst some trees for camouflage. Clara and I slept in the truck bed. Just before dawn, a snake of some kind dropped from a branch overhead and bit her. The venom spread all through her body in minutes. I’d never seen anything like it. After an hour, she was half paralyzed and could hardly breathe. I just watched her swell up and die in agony.

“I had those cyanide pills, and could have given her one to put her out of her misery. If she’d been a stranger I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But because I loved her, I kept waiting and hoping.”

I could see the pain in Dupont’s eyes.

“It was selfishness on my part to let her die that way,” he said.

“I’ve never been able to forgive myself for that.”

To comfort him I suggested that what he’d done was quite understandable, but he obviously didn’t agree.

AFTER A WHILE, he began telling me about the work he’d gone on to do in various other parts of the world, some of them also dangerous. Eventually, age took its toll and he was no longer able to put up with the rigours of such a life. He looked for something a little safer, but still challenging, and was offered this position as director of Institute 77. It called on his anthropological as much as his surgical expertise.

“When I say the job here’s safer, I mean in a relative way. It has its risks, too — but mainly for my patients,” he said.

He looked at his watch: we’d been talking for more than an hour.

“Time to go.” He stood up. “I’ll show you where your room is, then we’ll head for Waterville. It’s a town about an hour’s drive from here. That friend I told you about — the one who knows Duncairn — will be joining us there for dinner.”

SEVERAL OF THE HUTS served as shared living quarters for the staff of the institute. Dupont, being director of surgery, had an entire hut to himself. It had a fairly large living room with a carpeted floor and comfortable couches and chairs.

When we first went in, a white cat with enormous green eyes jumped from a couch where it had been sleeping and ran towards Dupont with little excited squeals. It leapt onto his shoulder, purring noisily and rubbing itself against his face. He stroked its coat in return. His affection for animals was one of the things I’d liked about him.

Now this white cat, from its lofty perch on his shoulder, was examining me with a superior air.

“She’s called Prissy,” Dupont said. “She makes sure mice don’t get to be too much of a pest, at least inside this hut. The whole institute’s full of them, especially when winter comes.”

With the cat still on his shoulder, he showed me where the bedrooms were at the back of the living area. The guest bedroom where I would stay for the night was plainly furnished with an iron bedstead and a deal table with a lamp. A private bathroom was attached.

I took the opportunity to wash my face and put on a fresh shirt. By the time I’d rejoined Dupont in the living room, he’d exchanged his labcoat for a regular suit jacket. Prissy had settled down again on the couch.

“I need to look in on my patient before we head for Waterville,” he said. “It’ll only take a few minutes. Would you like to come with me? You might find it interesting.”

3

We passed several huts, some of them with pathways full of weeds.

“These huts haven’t been used since the last days of the war, when this place was an active military base,” Dupont said.

The next building was a modern-looking brick structure with an air-conditioning system rumbling by its side wall. I assumed we were headed in there.

“No,” said Dupont. “That’s our operating theatre. It’s very up to date, but it’s not what I want you to see.”

Our destination turned out to be another of those army huts, one that looked proportionately much larger than any of the others we’d passed and was in better condition on the outside. The paint on the gables was fresh and the corrugated roof seemed to have been de-rusted recently. Glistening black iron bars protected all the windows.

“This is the recovery room,” said Dupont. “There’s always a guard on duty.”

He knocked on the door and we heard the sound of bolts sliding. A thick-set soldier with an ammunition belt and a hand gun in a holster opened the door.

“Come on in, Doctor,” he said.

“I have a guest, too,” said Dupont.

The soldier gave me a quick look-over.

“No problem,” he said. He let us in and bolted the door behind us.

A corridor ran all along the left side of the hut, narrowed a little because of the rounded roof. The soldier led us down past a number of doors on the right. The last had a peephole in it. He stopped there and used a key to turn the lock, but didn’t open the door. He stepped to one side and stood with his arms folded.

Dupont looked through the peephole in the door, knocked softly, and listened. No sound came from inside. He turned the door handle and motioned to me to follow him into the room. The soldier shut the door behind us.

Dupont and I were alone in a spacious room whose walls were painted a light blue. A faint odour, perhaps of ammonia, permeated the air. The only sound came from some flies loudly buzzing at the barred window in one corner, above a sink and toilet. An unmade bed, a chair, and a desk were the sole furniture. The floor was littered with newspapers.

All at once, I realized we weren’t alone in the room. A thin woman was sitting at the bottom of the bed. Even though her blue dress was much the same colour as the walls, I wondered how I could possibly have missed seeing her. She seemed to be fortyish, with close-cropped grey brown hair and grey eyes. Her face was heart-shaped and her skin quite pale. On the left side of her forehead, a livid scar about three inches long ran from her hairline to her eyebrow.

The woman was certainly aware of our presence. She smiled a wan, grey smile at Dupont and he smiled back.

“Good evening, Griffin,” he said. “Just a quick visit. I hope you’re feeling well.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I was just resting. I’m so tired these days.”

I had to strain my ears, she had such a soft voice and what might have been a slight foreign accent.

Dupont gestured towards me.

“This is my old friend, Harry,” he said.

I was going to reach my hand out to shake hers, but Dupont put his hand on my arm to stop me.

Griffin was looking me over, up and down, head to toe. Her grey eyes had brightened and she was even, I thought, sniffing the air a little in my direction.

“I just wanted to check and see if you needed anything to help you sleep tonight,” Dupont said.

“No,” she said. “Not at night.”

“Good,” Dupont said. “That’s all I wanted to know. I’ll be back to see you in the morning for our usual session.”

We left without another word. I glanced back as we went out the door and saw that she was still watching me. The soldier locked the door behind us.

EVEN THOUGH IT WAS only a short walk to the parking lot, in those few minutes darkness seemed to have grown like a mushroom. Dupont chose an institute van and we got in and headed towards Waterville. By the time he’d driven a mile, the first stars were making their appearance.

“We’ll be there in about an hour,” he said as we sped along the tree-lined road.

I’d been thinking about only one thing: why hadn’t I seen that woman, Griffin, when we went into the room? Was there a secret compartment, or somewhere she might have been hiding? Dupont laughed at my question.

“I understand just how you feel — it can be disconcerting,” he said. “But let me assure you, Griffin was there in plain view when we went into her room, though you didn’t see her at first. Why not? Well, as has been observed over and over again by scientists and philosophers, our eyes aren’t all that reliable in many things. Those stars you see up there?” He pointed at the night sky through the windshield. “Our eyes tell us they’re there, but we know from astronomers that many of them don’t even exist anymore.

“Or, take the movie screen. Our minds grasp a single image, but a film actually consists of thousands of them strung together and we can’t see the joins, they move so fast. Then again, even the slowest movement isn’t visible to us either — for instance, the minute-by-minute growth of a tree.

“Or, closer to home, what about you and me, Harry? You must have noticed I’m quite elderly now, just as I noticed how you’d aged, too — though not quite as badly! But if we’d been in contact daily over the years, we’d barely have noticed the ravages of time on us.

“Anyway, you know the kind of thing I’m getting at. For example, you recognize someone at a party and go over and speak to them, only to discover your eyes were mistaken. Or you see your cat asleep in the corner and it turns out to be a pair of socks rolled together. And so on.

“Now, in the case of Griffin, it’s not quite the same thing, but similar. You know that sensation everyone sometimes experiences: you’re looking for something — say, your car keys — and you just can’t find them. When you’re about ready to give up in frustration, suddenly you spot them more or less where they ought to be and you can’t believe you could possibly have missed them.

“Well, Griffin’s had something of that characteristic since she was very young — of being almost undetectable at times, even though she’s right in front of you. A lot of animals have that gift, like the chameleon in the way it changes colour to blend in with the terrain. And there are birds that are so adept at fitting into their backgrounds, even trained birdwatchers have difficulty spotting them.”

I suddenly remembered that time on the truck in Africa when he’d pointed out the nightjars. I reminded Dupont of how surprised I’d been that those great black birds were almost invisible even though they were sitting on tree stumps in broad daylight.

“I remember them, too,” he said. “But in Griffin’s case, unlike the nightjars, she wasn’t born with her gift — she had to develop it. Her family situation was probably at the root of it. Her mother died young and she was left to be brought up by a deeply religious father who should never have been a father in the first place.

“He was a man congenitally unable to imagine the devastating effects of his words on a small child. Whenever Griffin did something he disapproved of, he’d tell her she’d die in agony as a result of her sins, or that her flesh would be devoured by fire in perpetual darkness.

“For a certain type of child these were terrible things to hear, especially coming from the voice of authority.

“Griffin’s aptitude for disguise, if that’s the word, seems to have developed as a response. She tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, first of all to her father, and afterwards to the world at large. By the time she was in high school, she’d become so adept she could be amongst other students and they’d barely notice her.

“Sometimes her near-invisibility didn’t really protect her — in fact it often brought her even more grief. After she left school, for example, she managed to get a job in a typing pool. Her co-workers used to gossip about how unsociable and weird she was, not realizing she was right there in the room, listening to them. In the end, situations like that became too much for her. She had a breakdown and was hospitalized.

“That was when she came to our attention,” Dupont said. “We’re always on the lookout for people who might be suitable for our research.”

BY NOW WE WERE approaching the main highway and a full moon made everything almost as clear as in daylight. This seemed the perfect moment to ask Dupont outright what exactly the purpose of Institute 77 was and what his function was within it. So I did.

He didn’t begin answering till we were on the main highway.

“Look, Harry, what’s going on at the institute is all very hushhush. We sign nondisclosure agreements when we agree to work there. But you’re not a scientist and we’re old friends, so I trust you to keep to yourself what I tell you. Okay?” he said.

I was gratified by his faith in me.

“It’s not a simple matter to explain, but I’ll do the best I can,” he said. “The institute is the base for a collaboration between the government and experts in the fields of medicine and anthropology. I’m in charge of the surgical side of an experimental procedure that deals with those areas of the brain that distinguish human beings from the other primates. Our patients — we prefer to call them volunteers — are individuals who’ve suffered from severe kinds of recurrent psychological problems that have ruined their lives. We ask them if they’re willing to act as subjects for a certain type of brain research we do. They all have to be clear-headed enough to understand what our program is about, and to participate of their own free will. Griffin’s a good example.” He glanced at me. “Following me so far?”

More or less.

Dupont now launched into a little lecture on the makeup of the primate brain and the various components of its two hemispheres. I tried to follow him as best I could, but the bevy of technical terms — ventromedial cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes, amygdala— soon overwhelmed me.

Eventually, Dupont put the matter more simply. Research had demonstrated that the brains of all primates contained the elements he’d mentioned. But in the homo sapiens brain alone, some subtle variant in the linking mechanism between the parts had led to the emergence of reason and morality, which in turn produced what we might call conscience.

This was the focus of the institute’s investigations. By careful, progressive pruning of the connective tissues in volunteers’ brains, experimenters hoped they might eventually understand precisely how the link functioned.

At first, non-surgical methods were used. The volunteers were plied with various drugs aimed specifically at modifying the linking tissues. But the drugs were too diffuse and numbed the surrounding areas of the brain, too. When their effects wore off, the patients had no recollection of whatever altered perceptions of the world the drugs might have induced.

A more precise, if irreversible, route was indicated — surgery. A research program was launched to find a procedure for targeting little parts of the brain for destruction while leaving its other functions intact. Dupont’s predecessors had tried the approved methods of the day — inserting electrodes or ice picks through the eye sockets into the designated target areas of the brain and gently stirring them around. Predictably, such a chopping method was still too random. Some of the volunteers died and others lost their sight, or sense of taste, or motor function, or control of the bowels.

Dupont shook his head. All in all, the results had been very disappointing for the experimenters.

I was appalled to hear him say this. Surely the disappointment of the experimenters was trivial compared to the horrors inflicted on the volunteers. But I kept my opinion to myself.

THE BIG BREAKTHROUGH occurred at the very time Dupont became head of the surgical team at Institute 77. The team began using the latest diamond-bladed skull saw to make an opening in the forehead, through which the most up-to-date lobotomizing instruments could be inserted robotically. These could be directed to slice out minuscule segments of the brain — just a cell or two, here and there. The method was found to be almost one hundred percent effective. Successful operations had now been performed on several volunteers.

“Preliminary analyses of the outcomes are still being done,” Dupont said. “These things take time, but everything looks very promising.”

I wondered exactly what “outcomes” he was looking for. He chose his words carefully.

“First of all, you have to understand this, Harry,” he said. “The purpose behind our work at Institute 77 diverges quite radically from traditional neurosurgery. The normal aim of brain procedures is to turn badly impaired patients back into mentally sound human beings, if possible.”

He hesitated again, making me even more curious. I really wanted to understand this research that Dupont was so involved in.

“In fact, our goal is the exact opposite of the traditional one,” he said. “Our volunteers are indeed significantly impaired when we accept them into the program. But what we try to do here is to transform them into mentally sound pre-human beings.” He paused to let that sink in. “We believe that if we succeed in eliminating from their brains the dominance of such traits as morality and reason — the very traits that signal mental health in human beings — they stand a good chance of becoming perfectly normal representatives of the primate class before conscience developed in it — in other words, the way our species used to be. Take the case of Griffin, for example. When she came to us she suffered from a debilitating guilt complex. After the procedure, she was ‘cured,’ in the traditional sense, for she no longer had a conscience to make her feel guilty — she was essentially what we’d call a sociopath. But there was much more to it than that.”

He saw how startled I was and became more passionate.

“Imagine what it must be like, Harry,” he said. “A modern human being, at last able to experience the world through the eyes of a not-yet-human primate! That’s the gift we’ve given Griffin and the other volunteers. Just think of the gifts they’ll be able to give us in return, for they still have language and will be able to articulate their primeval perceptions and sensations. What extraordinary contributions individuals like Griffin will be able to make to our understanding of exactly how our ancestors thought and behaved. Anthropology, above all, will be revolutionized.

“Already, even in the early stages of the experiment, we’ve made some strange discoveries. For example, we’re able to use only female volunteers for our procedure. It isn’t that we’ve had any scarcity of male volunteers. On the contrary — we’ve had hundreds of them. But X-rays of the male brain indicate that those parts of the brain we need to excise are already of negligible size. It’s a rather puzzling finding, but valuable, too. I’m sure it’ll become an important research topic in the future.”

While I was thinking about the implications of that, Dupont went on to talk about other fascinating and challenging findings. The fact that Griffin used words at all seemed to contradict the long-established view that language and conscience were interdependent. Though I must have noticed she now spoke with a strange accent — as did each of the other volunteers so far who’d undergone the procedure. They’d all been native speakers of English, but no longer seemed to use it quite as spontaneously. They spoke with deliberation, as if trying to remember the vocabulary of a foreign language.

This trait was so noteworthy that Dupont’s team planned, in the near future, to perform the procedure on a volunteer whose native language was French. A linguistic specialist from the Sorbonne would be on hand to study the after-effects, particularly whether the volunteer’s French accent would now sound like a foreigner’s.

Griffin also seemed quite unaware she’d had part of her brain removed. The team had tried showing her the scar on her forehead in a mirror. But as with the other candidates, she didn’t identify with the mirror image any more than a dog or a cat would. Even when she was shown her consent form and other documentation she’d signed before the operation, she still didn’t accept that any procedure had actually been done.

This inability of recruits to grasp that they’d had the brain surgery was actually quite fortunate. Dupont’s team, as yet, knew no way of reversing the procedure if certain things went wrong — as they were bound to do in an area so new. While it was now relatively simple to take the designated bit of brain out, it was quite impossible to stuff it back in and reconnect it to the tissue in exactly the right place and start the conscience up again. But even after the procedure, the team was curious to find out if, perhaps, another part of the brain might eventually take over the functions of conscience, morality, and related matters. Only time would tell.

Another peculiar result of the procedure was that the volunteers no longer responded to their actual names. Griffin’s real name was Winifred Burke, but now she wouldn’t answer to that. She insisted on being called “Griffin” because that was the name of the hero in H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, which she’d read in high school. Experience with the other volunteers, however, suggested that she wouldn’t stick long with that first choice. They tended to change their names as frequently as once a month. The team thought this fickleness might mean that the volunteers had lost any overwhelming sense of themselves as unique individuals.

The phenomena of the odd smell and the torn newspapers in Griffin’s room were also common to all those who’d undergone the procedure. If the janitorial staff tidied up their rooms or sprayed deodorant around, the volunteers became very unhappy, like animals whose dens or natural smells are tampered with.

Griffin herself had become violent with a janitor who tried to clean her room, to the extent that the guard had to rush in and restrain her — and remember, Dupont pointed out, she’s a sociopath, so who knows what she might be capable of? In the end, the cleaning effort had to be abandoned and more newspapers were made available to her. She immediately began tearing them up and spreading them around. As for the smell, she preferred fresh water for grooming but absolutely refused to use soap.

One last noteworthy characteristic of the volunteers was their preference for staying awake at night. The research team at first thought this might be insomnia brought on by the surgery. Now it was believed that the operation somehow released a primitive hunting instinct and turned the volunteers into night creatures. Like the others, Griffin would prowl restlessly around her room in the darkness, but sleep on and off during the day, just like a cat.

4

The institute’s van was negotiating a series of small hills and curves. Dupont had to pay attention and was silent for a moment. Then he went on with his description of the Griffin case.

“When she leaves us, she’ll be sent to one of our facilities in the South,” he said. “There, in addition to daily interrogations by a number of distinguished anthropologists, she’ll be put through a rigorous program to correct her little post-surgical eccentricities. Naturally, someone who tears up newspaper to make a den and won’t use soap will have trouble fitting into society again, which is our hope. Indeed, with her gift of virtual invisibility, she’ll be an ideal observer of how our society appears to a pre-human primate — in a way, she’ll be an anthropologist in reverse. Her reports should be groundbreaking in the field.

“Isn’t it curious that, if she can be taught just to act like a normal human being, no one will be able to tell the difference between her and the rest of the world? We can only judge other people by what they say and what they do. We’ve absolutely no certainty about what’s going on in their heads — even the people who are closest to us don’t know that. Fortunately, in the case of Griffin, we’re well aware she’s a manufactured sociopath, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on her for the first few years at least, just in case something goes badly wrong.”

DUPONT COULD TELL that I was taken aback by all these revelations. He began to defend himself before I could ask any questions.

“Now, Harry, you’re probably surprised that this is the kind of work I do,” he said. “For some people, it doesn’t quite fit with the ethics of the medical profession. For that very reason, our team from academia and industry had to be chosen very carefully— hence the secrecy agreement in advance, for we knew some of them might be reluctant to be involved in research of this nature and might even try to have it stopped.

“Let me assure you, we always adhere strictly to protocol regarding the volunteers who are about to undergo the procedure. I make doubly and even triply sure they do so willingly and with full knowledge of the consequences. It’s an odd thing, but without exception they don’t mind at all the prospect of having part of their brains excised. Some of them, like Griffin, have suffered so much in their lives they’re actually keen on having the procedure done on them for their own sakes — and for the advancement of science.

“In that I believe they’re right,” Dupont said, in conclusion. “Our procedure isn’t just revolutionary in terms of surgical and anthropological research. In my opinion, philosophy and psychology will also be its major beneficiaries. Because of what we’re doing at Institute 77, for the first time in recorded history researchers will be on a scientific path to finding out what actually leads to the development of the human mind.”

OUR VAN HAD BEEN labouring up what seemed like an endless hill as Dupont offered this defence of his work. His claim — that he was advancing knowledge by deliberately dehumanizing others — was the traditional argument used to support questionable scientific experiments. Ironically, the more he tried to make it sound rational and logical, the more immoral it seemed. Claiming human superiority over other life forms, while using one of our great intellectual achievements — advanced science— in such a perverted way, was patently absurd. Surely that was evident to him.

But I kept silent. I couldn’t help wondering: was it possible that after witnessing so much cruelty and inhumanity in the course of his work in some of the most unstable and brutal areas of the world, he’d become infected by them — had himself become a monster? When I first knew him he’d never pretended to be a great humanitarian, even though he’d imperilled his life practising his profession in those dangerous places. His efforts back then just happened to have a more benevolent purpose. But he’d made no bones about his love of adventure and the exotic.

Indeed, in my eyes at that time, the very fact that he didn’t pass himself off as some kind of saint made him all the more human and likable. Also, he’d been a friend to me — a good, reliable one at that.

Even now, after telling me about this dubious scientific experiment, he still seemed essentially no different from the Dupont of old. And anyway, who was I to judge anyone else? What did I have to brag about on the matter of ethics? I’d married for reasons that had little or nothing to do with love. I’d profited for more than twenty years from industries that wreaked havoc on the earth and damaged the lives of countless innocent people. Whereas at least Dupont’s victims had “volunteered” to be damaged.

SO I WAS ON THE brink of reassuring him, for I sensed he was trying too hard to persuade me — and maybe himself — that his work was ethical. I was about to tell him that I and probably most other human beings were guilty in some way or other of some awful self-betrayal.

But just then our van surmounted that final hill and the lights of a substantial town were spread out below.

“Waterville, dead ahead!” said Dupont in a quite cheerful voice. “I hope my friend’s there by now.”

5

Our destination turned out to be Ye Olde Mill, a nineteenth-century ruin turned into an upscale hotel, restaurant, and bar on the edge of Waterville. A plaque on the fieldstone wall of the lobby informed us that a hundred years ago the place had been a “manufactory.”

“That’s the fancy word for ‘factory,’ which is yet another fancy word for ‘sweatshop,’” said Dupont as we went inside. He seemed to be in good form, maybe relieved at having made his confession to me or maybe because he didn’t think of it that way at all.

The maître d’ led us to our table. There a striking woman with long blond hair rose to greet us. She was dressed in some kind of silken gown that fell to her ankles and had a loose, open weave that was pleasing to the eye.

Dupont kissed her lightly on the lips then introduced her. “This is Marsha Woods,” he said to me with a little wink. All along, he’d let me assume we were to meet a male friend and not a breathtaking woman.

“This is the Harry Steen I mentioned — the man from Duncairn,” he said to her.

I shook her extended fingers and we all sat down.

“I just arrived a few minutes ago,” she said. “I left my suitcase at the front desk. I haven’t even had time to order a drink.”

Now that my eyes were becoming accustomed to the dim restaurant lighting, I realized she was older than I’d first thought — in fact she must have been much my own age. Her makeup didn’t quite mask the tiny wrinkles around her eyes.

“Marsha flies to Washington at noon tomorrow,” Dupont said to me. “She’ll be staying with us overnight at the institute and we’ll have breakfast together. One of my staff will drive her back to the airport in time for her plane.”

DUPONT ORDERED A bottle of wine and we sipped and talked till dinner was served. Marsha, I discovered, worked for the United Nations. She and Dupont had met only a few months ago. He’d amused her with stories about his various postings around the world and the strange customs he’d encountered.

“One thing led to another,” she said, glancing at Dupont affectionately.

“Including the bedroom,” Dupont added. They both laughed at that.

The more wine I drank, the more I liked the look of her. She was really quite the opposite of Dupont’s long-dead lover, Clara, who’d been aged prematurely by the African sun and made no attempt to disguise it. Marsha was in fact middle-aged but, by artifice, tried to appear younger. She didn’t smile much and I wondered if even that was an attempt to discourage the wrinkles.

WE WERE ALL HUNGRY, so while we ate the main course, talking was minimal. But as we relaxed awaiting dessert we began to talk more. Remembering that Dupont had spent some time in the Pacific, I told them about my trip to Oluba and seeing the tattooed women there. I mentioned that in recent years the fertility cults associated with full-body tattooing had disappeared, but it was still a form of female ornamentation.

“How interesting,” said Marsha.

I liked how she looked cool and curious at the same time.

“Well now, Harry,” said Dupont. “You say the women’s tattooing was full body, eh? How did you find out?”

We all laughed.

“Still, the fact that tattoos don’t have a ritualistic significance in Oluba any more might be taken as a sign of progress,” said Dupont. “Some of the other island chains used to cling hard to old customs, and that interfered with any efforts to bring them into the modern world.” He began to reminisce about his years on Manua, which was a long way south of Oluba. He remembered especially his attempt to set up a clinic there and coming up against traditional beliefs — a story he’d told me back when we first met. The Manuans had a complex belief system centred on reincarnation. They wouldn’t take his medicine for they didn’t want to be cured of any illnesses they suffered in this life. If they did, they were convinced they’d be smitten even more painfully in their next incarnation.

“So how did you get them to use your medicine?” said Marsha.

“I didn’t,” said Dupont. “I tried every way to persuade them, with no success. It was actually quite humbling, as a man with a scientific background, to be completely baffled by a view of the world that hadn’t changed since the Stone Age. Part of the problem was that we didn’t share any common ground for arguing the point.

“For example, their head shaman couldn’t even grasp what I was getting at when I tried to explain the basic concept of two and two adding up to four. He showed me how wrong I was. He took two pieces of string and tied two knots in each of them. Then he said to me: Look, you can’t join them without another knot! See? He tied the two strings together and pointed out that now there were five knots. After that, he treated me like one of their pre-adolescent children.”

We were amused at such perversity.

“Couldn’t you have claimed that your knowledge came from the gods, just as a shaman’s did?” Marsha said.

Dupont shook his head.

“The power of rational thinking is the one thing a scientist must believe in. It’s more important than life itself,” he said, not in a pompous way but as though he really meant it — and didn’t work at an institute where he cut out parts of people’s brains in the name of scientific research.

From the way Marsha looked at him it was obvious she was impressed. Oddly enough, in spite of what I knew about his work, I envied him his conviction, at least to an extent. Long ago, it seemed to me, I’d lost sight of any principle worth more than life.

AFTER DESSERT, we left the restaurant and went to the barroom with its great stone walls and fireplace. We found a quiet table where we could sit and enjoy our brandies. I told them about my recent trip to La Verdad, my finding of The Obsidian Cloud, and its description of a fantastic occurrence over the skies of Duncairn back in the nineteenth century.

“Duncairn!” said Dupont. “Well, well. I’ve already told Marsha you lived there years ago.”

She’d been listening to my account with great interest.

“Yes, he did tell me you’d been there,” she said to me. “I’m afraid the days of fantastic happenings are gone now, from Duncairn and everywhere else in the Scottish Uplands. I know that only too well, for my department’s concern is with depopulation in various parts of the world. We try to determine its causes and possible remedies for it, if remedies are called for.

“About five years ago, I was assigned to study the situation in the Uplands because of the steady exodus of its people. I drove from one end of the region to the other interviewing as many of the remaining inhabitants I could find, as well as occasional visitors such as hunters and anglers.

“As for Duncairn specifically … well, the town isn’t really there anymore. At least, not as you’d remember it. That entire area doesn’t have many permanent inhabitants now, except for the occasional shepherd.”

MARSHA NOW LAUNCHED into a devastating history of the decline of the region during the decades since I’d left it. The main cause was that the coal mines, which had employed most of the male population, were shut down — either because they’d run out of coal or because changing economic and political times made it an unpopular form of energy. Towns like Cumner, Rossmark, Lannick, Taymire, and Gatbridge — which had all existed in some form since at least the Middle Ages — were now abandoned.

“It’s almost as though the land was cursed,” said Marsha.

Hearing her use the word “cursed” reminded me of how Miriam, long ago, had described some of those strange happenings in various Upland towns: Stroven, with its sinkhole into which the entire town was gradually sliding, and Muirton, with its regiment of one-legged men. Then there was Carrick — strangest of all — its population smitten with the mysterious and deadly talking plague. They had indeed sounded like towns that were cursed.

“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of those cases,” Marsha said. “But when I visited Duncairn, the mine had been shut down for ten years. That was really the end for the town. Today there are only a few inhabitants, and the buildings are falling into decay. Though there’s still an old hotel, mainly for passing tourists and hunters.”

THIS NEWS OF Duncairn’s fate was a blow to me. Like most people who’ve left their native land and not returned for many years, I’d preserved it in my mind just as it had been when I lived there. That image of Duncairn defied all such common-sense notions as the passing of time. The same applied especially to Miriam Galt — for me, she must be as young and beautiful as ever. If the more practical side of my mind ever intruded to point out that this simply couldn’t be so, I’d push it away.

And so to hear this objective, eyewitness account of the depopulation of the Uplands and the decline of Duncairn upset me deeply. It was as though some vital component of myself as a human being was likewise erased. The idea that there was once a young man who’d lived for a few short months in Duncairn, full of hope, was all-important to me. The common-sense view— that in the course of our lives we’re many people, some less pleasing to us than others, that the young man who’d spent time in Duncairn was only one character in the long story that makes up a person — was at times very hard for me to accept.

DUPONT GUESSED something of what was going on in my mind.

“I didn’t tell you that when Harry was a young man in Duncairn, he loved a girl there who broke his heart,” he said to Marsha. “That was why he left and never went back. Isn’t that so, Harry?”

That was all the encouragement I needed. Influenced by the wine, I told Marsha all about my love for Miriam Galt, and how it had come to a devastating end. Thinking of it brought everything back, and telling it was so like reliving it that I was moved by my own words.

By the time I’d finished, Marsha was looking at me with new interest.

“How very sad,” she said. “But why don’t you go back and pay a visit before there’s no one at all left there? For all you know she’s one of those people still living in Duncairn. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see her again? Wouldn’t it be very romantic? The Upland roads are all in good condition for driving. And I imagine the hotel’s still there — the Bracken Inn, I think it was called.”

Her eyes were warmer when she looked at me now, or perhaps the brandy made them seem that way to me.

“So she really broke your heart? How marvellous to have been so much in love,” she said. “Even once.”

It sounded to me as though Marsha believed in true love. It also sounded as though she’d never experienced it.

AROUND ELEVEN, it was time for us to head back to the institute. Dupont took Marsha’s claim check to the front desk to pick up her suitcase. Then we got into the van and set out along the now deserted roads. Visibility was excellent under a bright moon. For some reason the term “hunter’s moon” came into my mind, but Dupont assured me it was much too early in the year for that.

We were all in the big front seat of the van, with Marsha in the middle. She talked a little more about other places where she’d worked but I found it hard to concentrate, being so conscious of her presence beside me and the smell of her perfume. When the van would round a bend, she’d lean against me and once even put her hand on my thigh for support, leaving it there for a while after the road had straightened out again.

I didn’t know what to think.

6

We pulled into the institute at about midnight. When we got to Dupont’s hut, he insisted we sit at the table and have another glass of wine as a nightcap. His white cat, Prissy, usually so friendly, stood by the window and meowed noisily.

“She wants out,” said Dupont. He went to the window and opened it, murmuring fondly to the cat. Marsha, at the same time, kept looking at me in a meaningful way, slowly blinking her eyes.

“She’ll come back during the night, so I’ll leave the window ajar for her,” Dupont said, returning to the table. “She just likes to prowl around for a while, frightening the doves out of their sleep.”

After the glass of wine, I stood up and made my excuses, for it had been a long day. We arranged to meet for breakfast in the dining hut at seven the next morning. Then I’d have to start back on the long drive to Camberloo. Before I went to my room, Dupont shook my hand warmly, saying what a pleasure it was to see me again. I kissed Marsha on the cheek, avoiding her eyes.

In the guest bedroom, I undressed, set my watch alarm, switched off the light, and stretched out on the bed. The only sound was from the direction of the window — the occasional rustling of doves’ wings, scared out of their nests by Prissy, perhaps.

I couldn’t help thinking about how Marsha had acted. Even if I’d interpreted the signs correctly, how would she be able to get out of Dupont’s bed during the night and come to my room without disturbing him? Any movement made these old floorboards creak and even squeal in the night stillness of the northern woods.

I MUST HAVE FALLEN fast asleep, for I didn’t hear her come into the room. I just felt her slide under the covers and press her naked body against me.

“Ssshhh!” she whispered.

I didn’t need the warning, for Dupont’s room was only a few yards off. But that final glass of wine must have knocked him out and she’d managed to slip away.

The blinds were drawn so there was no hint of light in my room. But in the utter darkness, our exertions were a kind of Braille that required no training. We made virtually no noise but for involuntary gasps and sighs, the bedsprings groaning an accompaniment. In the end, we both lay back with an incomparable sense of contentment and completion.

Shortly afterwards she left, opening and closing the door soundlessly. Those suspect floorboards gave off no alarm as she made her way back to Dupont’s room. Even as I was straining to listen, I fell asleep again.

7

The alarm woke me around seven. I was quite hung over, so it took me a few moments even to remember what had happened during the night. When I did, I felt awful. What a shameful thing to have done to an old friend. I could only hope Dupont had slept too deeply to notice. As for Marsha, she would surely understand that our little fling was only the result of too much wine, certainly on my part.

After showering and dressing, I steeled myself and went out into the main area of the hut. Dupont’s door was still closed and I couldn’t hear any sounds coming from inside. Either they were still asleep or they’d already gone over to the dining hut for breakfast.

I stepped into the glare of the morning sun and walked towards the dining hut, breathing the fresh air deeply into my lungs. Then I noticed something going on in the grassy alleyway between two of the other huts. Three men were bent over, as though examining the ground. Two of them wore uniforms, the other the same suit and tie as the night before.

It was Dupont.

He signalled me to join them. He seemed quite agitated.

“Look,” he said.

There, in the short grass, was something horrific — a mess of white fur with blood and intestines scattered around.

“It’s poor old Prissy,” said Dupont. “They found her here this morning.”

“Most likely she was attacked by one of those big weasels they call ‘fishers’ around here,” said the soldier next to me. “They come in from the woods — fences can’t keep them out. They prey on small animals, and that includes cats.”

“It was my own fault for letting her out at nights,” said Dupont. “I was warned about the fishers, but she was always so insistent.”

THE SOLDIERS SHOVELLED the remains of Prissy into a garbage bag and, though we’d no appetite, Dupont and I went to the dining hut for coffee and bagels. I was relieved to see that Marsha wasn’t there. With any luck, I’d be on the road back to Camberloo by the time she got out of bed.

“What a way to start a day,” said Dupont as we ate half-heartedly. “I was already exhausted. I barely got a wink of sleep last night.”

At those words, I tensed up. If he hadn’t slept well, he must surely be aware that for part of the night Marsha wasn’t in bed with him but in the room next door with me.

But in fact, he wasn’t aware of it. When he told me the reason for his sleepless night, I felt even sicker.

AFTER DINNER the night before, when we’d been leaving Ye Olde Mill, Dupont had picked up Marsha’s suitcase at the front desk. Or so he thought. Actually it was the wrong suitcase, full of men’s clothing. It wasn’t till they were getting ready for bed at the institute that they noticed. Marsha was very upset for she’d left her passport and other confidential documents in her suitcase.

Dupont immediately phoned the Mill and discovered that one of their guests had taken the wrong suitcase and brought it back. So at least the mix-up was now resolved.

Marsha persuaded Dupont that they absolutely must go back to Waterville right away or she’d never sleep. Since she hadn’t had nearly as much wine as Dupont, she’d do the driving. They got to the Mill well after two in the morning and the suitcases were exchanged, to everyone’s relief. Marsha and Dupont were in no mood for the return drive to the institute and took a room at the Mill for the night. The concierge would arrange for the Mill’s limo to take her to the airport for her noon flight.

“SO I WAS ON the road by myself at the crack of dawn this morning,” said Dupont. “I wanted to make sure I was in time for breakfast with you before you left. I have a general staff meeting scheduled right afterwards, too. I hope I can stay awake.

“I got here about half an hour ago and the guard told me they’d found what was left of little Prissy. I’m glad Marsha didn’t come back with me and see that. By the way, she’s sorry she didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to you. She really enjoyed meeting you and hopes we’ll all get together again sometime soon.”

As he told me all this, the sun was shining through the hut window directly on him, giving his face a golden sheen that was rather eerie and unsettling. My bagel had turned into sawdust. Not Marsha? Marsha wasn’t the woman who’d been with me in bed in the pitch darkness? Then who was it?

“Well, I know you need to get on the road,” said Dupont, and we both stood up and shook hands.

“It was great to see you again,” he said. “It’s hard to believe so much time has passed since we met. I always feel I can really talk to you. Next time, we’ll make sure we’re not in such a rush.”

We promised each other we’d keep in touch. He went off to his meeting and I returned to the hut to pack my bag.

MINUTES LATER I was just about ready to go to my car when Dupont, quite out of breath, rushed into the hut.

“I’m glad I caught you,” he said. He was looking at me with great curiosity. “I just found out it was Griffin who killed Prissy. I thought you ought to know that.” Apparently, on his way to his meeting, Griffin’s guard had called him over. He’d just seen bloodstains on the door handle of her room. Dupont went with him and saw the blood for himself.

The guard opened her door for him.

Griffin was sitting quietly on her bed. She wasn’t quite as hard to spot as usual because of the blood smeared all over her dress. She admitted it was the blood of a cat she’d killed.

“It seems,” Dupont told me, “she slipped out last night when the guard left the door ajar to pick up her dinner tray. He didn’t notice she was gone because he’s so used to not noticing her.”

He was watching me now in that inquisitive way, but I tried to look as unperturbed as possible.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” said Dupont. “She told me she was with you, Harry. And that from the moment she saw you, she felt very attracted to you. When we came back from Waterville she was already in the guest room, waiting for you. She was watching you while you undressed. Of course, you wouldn’t have seen her even when your light was on.”

But I had heard something — that sound I’d taken to be doves’ wings disturbed by Prissy outside the window. It must have been Griffin, watching me, excited at what was about to happen.

“She asked me if you’d be there again tonight,” said Dupont. “She wants you again. You might say you’re her idea of love at first sight.”

My stomach was upset. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

“Believe me, Harry, I’m telling you the truth,” said Dupont. “It was after leaving you, on her way back to her room, that she killed Prissy. She just picked her up and ripped her to pieces. I asked her why, and she said why not? Of course, when she said that, I knew the procedure must have turned her into a predator as well as a sociopath. Maybe the sliver of her brain we removed had something in it that would have blocked the violent impulse. If so, that’s another valuable finding for us — there may be some way of reversing the problem by more snipping in that area of her brain.”

I was shocked but Dupont was looking at me with admiration, or perhaps envy.

“Well, well, Harry,” he said. “You do realize she might just as easily have killed you, too? She was the most dangerous lover you’ve ever had.”

I didn’t know what to say. I could see he thought I’d been well aware it was Griffin who was in bed with me. I couldn’t protest that I’d actually believed it was his lover, Marsha.

Dupont now tried to coax further information out of me. What kind of sexual activities did Griffin prefer? Was her role in them of the dominant sort? Were there any notably bestial aspects to her methods?

I refused to answer.

“I know it’s embarrassing to be asked about such intimate things,” Dupont said. “But this is just the kind of insight that’s invaluable to our research. In the past, we’ve always had to deal in speculation and not hard facts in these matters.” He then made a quite surprising admission. “That’s why, at one point, I even considered having the procedure done on my own brain. If a trained scientist like me could communicate how the world appears to a pre-human primate, what a contribution to knowledge it would be.” Dupont shook his head. “But what if the surgery destroyed the very part of the brain that values such knowledge? Until we find that out, we can’t risk operating on an expert.”

I was shocked to hear he’d even thought about such a crazy thing.

“You know, Harry, you might be a good candidate, too,” he said. “I mean, especially after your antics with Griffin last night. Like a lot of Canadians, you’re actually a very strange person disguised as someone very ordinary!” His eyes lit up and he laughed. “Don’t look so worried. I’m only kidding.”

With that, we shook hands again and he hurried off to his meeting.

I headed to the parking area, bag in hand. The guard unlocked the gate for me and I went to my car. The parking area was covered in leaves, as if from a big wind during the night. But when I stepped onto those leaves they took flight and I realized they were, in fact, copper-winged butterflies, dozing in the morning sun. A moment later, I turned the key in the ignition and the entire remaining surface of the parking lot seemed to ascend. The mass of butterflies, like a flying carpet, swooped away magically into the air, blocked out the sun for a moment, then disappeared over the treetops to the south.

DURING THE EARLY stages of my long drive back to Camberloo that day, I was tormented by Dupont’s assumption that I was the kind of man who’d knowingly go to bed with someone like Griffin.

Of course I might have told him straight out that I’d thought it was Marsha who was in bed with me. But rather than admit to that conscienceless act against my host and old friend, I’d preferred to let him go on believing that I knew it was Griffin, herself a being without a conscience. Morally speaking, I suppose I got what I deserved.

Suddenly, a foolish thought hit me. I pulled off the road, parked, and adjusted the rear-view mirror so that it focused on my forehead. I examined my brow up to the hairline from every angle, this way and that, probing it gently with my fingertips.

Nothing. No pain, no sign of any post-operative scar. Nor did I feel any different from when I’d arrived at the institute, except for being a little hung over. Of course, Dupont had said not feeling any different was the common reaction to the procedure.

Still, there was no scar.

MY MOMENT OF extreme paranoia over, I started up the car and drove on northwards. But I didn’t begin to feel more completely at ease with myself till several hours later, when I crossed the border into Canada once more.