So now, all misty, her wings yellow as a crocus, trailing a thousand rainbow colours that sparkled in the sunlight, Iris flew down, and hovering over Dido, she said:

As I was told to do, I take this sacred thing which belongs to the God of Death; and I release you from your body.

Then all warmth stopped at once, and her life vanished into the air.

“Why did she have to cut off a piece of the hair?” said Laura. “That Iris?”

I had no idea. “It was just a thing she had to do,” I said. “Sort of like an offering.” I’d been pleased to discover that I had the same name as a person in a story, and wasn’t just named after some flower, as I’d always thought. The botanical motif, for girls, had been strong in my mother’s family.

“It helped Dido get out of her body,” said Laura. “She didn’t want to be alive any more. It put her out of her misery, so it was the right thing to do. Wasn’t it?”

“I guess so,” I said. I wasn’t much interested in such fine ethical points. Peculiar things happened in poems. There was no point in trying to make sense of them. I did wonder though whether Dido had been a blonde; she’d seemed more like a brunette to me, in the rest of the story.

“Who is the God of Death? Why does he want the hair?”

“That’s enough about hair,” I said. “We’ve done the Latin. Now let’s finish the French. Mr. Erskine gave us too much, as usual. Now: Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.”

“How about, don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands?”

“There’s nothing about paint.”

“But that’s what it really means.”

“You know Mr. Erskine. He doesn’t care what it means.”

“I hate Mr. Erskine. I wish we had Miss Violence back.”

“So do I. I wish we had Mother back.”

“So do I.”

Mr. Erskine hadn’t thought much of this Latin translation of Laura’s. It had his red pencil slashes all over it.

How can I describe the pool of grief into which I was now falling? I can’t describe it, and so I won’t try.

I riffled through the other notebooks. History was blank, except for the photograph Laura had glued into it—herself and Alex Thomas at the button factory picnic, both of them now coloured light yellow, with my detached blue hand crawling towards them across the lawn. Geography contained nothing but a short description of Port Ticonderoga that Mr. Erskine had assigned. “This middle-sized town is situated at the junction of the Louveteau River and the Jogues River and is noted for stones and other things,” was Laura’s first sentence. French had had all the French removed from it. Instead it held the list of odd words Alex Thomas had left behind him in our attic, and that—I now discovered—Laura had not burned, after all. Anchoryne, berel, carchineal, diamite, ebonort …A foreign language, true, but one I’d learned to understand, better than I ever understood French.

Mathematics had a long column of numbers, with words opposite some of them. It took me a few minutes to realize what kinds of numbers they were. They were dates. The first date coincided with my return from Europe, the last was three months or so before Laura’s departure for Bella Vista. The words were these:

Avilion, no. No. No. Sunnyside. No. Xanadu, no. No. Queen Mary, no no. New York, no. Avilion. No at first.

Water Nixie, X. “Besotted.”

Toronto again. X.

X. X. X. X.

O.

That was the whole story. Everything was known. It had been there all along, right before my very eyes. How could I have been so blind?

Not Alex Thomas, then. Not ever Alex. Alex belonged, for Laura, in another dimension of space.

Victory comes and goes

After looking through Laura’s notebooks, I put them back into my stocking drawer. Everything was known, but nothing could be proven. That much was clear.

But there’s always more than one way to skin a cat, as Reenie used to say. If you can’t go through, go around.

I waited until after the funeral, and then I waited another week. I didn’t want to act too precipitously. Better to be safe than sorry, Reenie also used to say. A questionable axiom: so often it’s both.

Richard went off on a trip to Ottawa, an important trip to Ottawa. Men in high places might pop the question, he hinted; or if not now, then soon. I told him, and Winifred as well, that I would take this opportunity to go to Port Ticonderoga with Laura’s ashes in their silver-coloured box. I needed to sprinkle these ashes, I said, and to see to the inscription on the monumental Chase family cube. All right and proper.

“Don’t blame yourself,” said Winifred, hoping I’d do just that—if I blamed myself enough, I wouldn’t get around to blaming anyone else. “Some things don’t bear dwelling on.” We dwell on them anyway, though. We can’t help ourselves.

Having seen Richard off on his travels, I gave the help a free evening. I would hold down the fort, I said. I’d been doing more of this lately—I liked being alone in the house, with just Aimee, when she was asleep so even Mrs. Murgatroyd was not suspicious. When the coast was clear I acted quickly. I’d already done some preliminary, surreptitious packing—my jewel box, my photographs, Perennials for the Rack Garden —and now I did the rest. My clothes, though by no means all of them; some things for Aimee, though by no means all of those either. I got what I could into the steamer trunk, the same one that had once held my trousseau, and into the matching suitcase. The men from the railway arrived to collect the luggage, as I’d arranged. Then, the next day, it was easy for me to go off to Union Station in a taxi with Aimee, each of us with only an overnight case, and none the wiser.

I left a letter for Richard. I said that in view of what he’d done—what I now knew he’d done—I never wanted to see him again. In consideration of his political ambitions I would not request a divorce, although I had ample proof of his scurrilous behaviour in the form of Laura’s notebooks, which—I said untruthfully—were locked away in a safe-deposit box. If he had any ideas about getting his filthy hands on Aimee, I added, he should discard them, because I would then create a very, very large scandal, as I would also do should he fail to meet my financial requests. These were not large: all I wanted was enough money to buy a small house in Port Ticonderoga, and to assure maintenance for Aimee. My own needs I could supply in other ways.

I signed this letter Yours sincerely, and, while licking the envelope flap, wondered whether I’d spelled scurrilous correctly.

Several days before leaving Toronto, I’d sought out Callista Fitzsimmons. She’d given up sculpture, and was now a mural painter. I found her at an insurance company—the head office—where she’d landed a commission. Women’s contributions to the war effort, was the theme—outdated, now that the war was over (and, though neither of us knew it yet, soon to be painted over in a reassuringly bland shade of taupe).

They’d given her the length of one wall. Three women factory workers, in overalls and brave smiles, turning out the bombs; a girl driving an ambulance; two farm helpers with hoes and a basket of tomatoes; a woman in uniform, wielding a typewriter; down in the corner, shoved to one side, a mother in an apron removing a loaf of bread from the oven, with two approving children looking on.

Callie was surprised to see me. I hadn’t given her any warning of my visit: I had no wish to be evaded. She was supervising the painters, with her hair up in a bandanna, wearing khaki slacks and tennis shoes, and striding around with her hands in her pockets and a cigarette stuck to her lower lip.

She’d heard of Laura’s death, she’d read about it in the papers—such a lovely girl, so unusual as a child, such a shame. After these preliminaries, I explained what Laura had told me, and asked if it were true.