We stopped in front of the house Richard had bought for us by telegram. He’d picked it up for a song, he said, after the previous owner had managed to bankrupt himself. Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.

The house was dark on the outside, festooned with ivy, its tall, narrow windows turned inward. The key was under the mat, the front hall smelled of chemicals. Winifred had been redecorating during our absence, and the work was not quite finished: there were painters’ cloths down still in the front rooms, where they’d stripped off the old Victorian wallpaper. The new colours were pearly, pale—the colours of luxurious indifference, of cool detachment. Cirrus clouds tinged by a faint sunset, drifting high above the vulgar intensities of birds and flowers and such. This was the setting proposed for me, the rarefied air I was to waft around in.

Reenie would be scornful of this interior—of its gleaming emptiness, its pallor. This whole place looks like a bathroom. But at the same time she’d be frightened by it, as I was. I called up Grandmother Adelia: she’d know what to do. She’d recognize the new-money attempt to make an impression; she’d be polite, but dismissive. My, it’s certainly modern, she might say. She’d make short work of Winifred, I thought, but it brought me no solace: I was now of the tribe of Winifred myself. Or I was partly.

And Laura? Laura would smuggle in her coloured pencils, her tubes of pigment. She’d spill something on this house, break something, deface at least a small corner of it. She’d make her mark.

A note from Winifred was propped against the telephone in the front hall. “Hi kids! Welcome home! I got them to finish the bedroom first! I hope you love it—so snazzy! Freddie.”

“I didn’t know Winifred was doing this,” I said.

“We wanted it to be a surprise,” said Richard. “We didn’t want you to get bogged down in details.” Not for the first time, I felt like a child excluded by its parents. Genial, brutal parents, up to their necks in collusion, determined on the rightness of their choices, in everything. I could tell already that my birthday presents from Richard would always be something I didn’t want.

I went upstairs to freshen up, at Richard’s suggestion. I must have looked as if I needed it. Certainly I felt sticky and wilted. (“Dew’s off the rose,” was his comment.) My hat was a wreck; I flung it onto the vanity. I splashed my face with water, and blotted it on one of the white monogrammed towels Winifred had set out. The bedroom looked out over the back garden, where nothing had been done. I kicked off my shoes, threw myself down on the endless cream-coloured bed. It had a canopy, with muslin draped around as if on safari. This, then, was where I was to grin and bear it—the bed I hadn’t quite made, but now must lie in. And this was the ceiling I would be staring up at from now on, through the muslin fog, while earthly matters went on below my throat.

The telephone beside the bed was white. It rang. I picked it up. It was Laura, in tears. “Where have you been?” she sobbed. “Why didn’t you come back?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “This is when we were supposed to come back! Calm down, I can’t hear you.”

“You never answered!” she wailed.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Father’s dead! He’s dead, he’s dead—we sent five telegrams! Reenie sent them!”

“Just a minute. Slow down. When did this happen?”

“A week after you left. We tried to phone, we phoned all the hotels. They said they’d tell you, they promised! Didn’t they tell you?”

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said. “I didn’t know. Nobody told me anything. I didn’t get any telegrams. I never got them.”

I couldn’t take it in. What had happened, what had gone wrong, why had Father died, why hadn’t I been notified? I found myself on the floor, on the bone-grey carpet, crouching down over the telephone, curled around it as if it were something precious and fragile. I thought of my postcards from Europe, arriving at Avilion with their cheerful, trivial messages. They were probably still on the table in the front hall. I hope you are in good health.

“But it was in the papers!” Laura said.

“Not where I was,” I said. “Not those papers.” I didn’t add that I’d never bothered with the papers anyway. I’d been too stupefied.

It was Richard who’d collected the telegrams, on the ship and at all our hotels. I could see his meticulous fingers, opening the envelopes, reading, folding the telegrams into quarters, stowing them away. I couldn’t accuse him of lying—he’d never said anything about them, these telegrams—but it was the same as lying. Wasn’t it?

He must have told them at the hotels not to put through any calls. Not to me, and not while I was there. He’d been keeping me in the dark, deliberately.

I thought I might be sick, but I wasn’t. After a time I went downstairs. Lose your temper and you lose the fight, Reenie used to say. Richard was sitting on the back verandah with a gin and tonic. So thoughtful of Winifred to lay in a supply of gin, he’d already said, twice. Another gin was poured ready, waiting for me on the low white glass-topped wrought-iron table. I picked it up. Ice chimed against the crystal. That was how my voice needed to sound.

“Good lord,” said Richard, looking at me. “I thought you were freshening up. What happened to your eyes?” They must have been red.

“Father’s dead,” I said. “They sent five telegrams. You didn’t tell me.”

“ Mea culpa,” said Richard. “I know I ought to have, but I wanted to spare you the worry, darling. There was nothing to be done, and no way we could get back in time for the funeral, and I didn’t want things to be ruined for you. I guess I was selfish, too—I wanted you all to myself, if only for a little while. Now sit down and buck up, and have your drink, and forgive me. We’ll deal with all this in the morning.”

The heat was dizzying; where the sun hit the lawn it was a blinding green. The shadows under the trees were thick as tar. Richard’s voice came through to me in staccato bursts, like Morse code: I heard only certain words.

Worry. Time. Ruined. Selfish. Forgive me.

What could I say to that?

The eggshell hat

Christmas has come and gone. I tried not to notice it. Myra, however, would not be denied. She gave me a little plum pudding she’d boiled herself, made of molasses and caulking compound and decorated with halved maraschino rubber cherries, bright red, like the pasties on an old-style stripper, and a two-dimensional painted wooden cat with a halo and angel wings. She said these cats had been all the rage at The Gingerbread House, and she thought they were pretty cute, and she had one left over, and it was just a hairline crack that you could hardly see at all, and it would sure look nice on the wall over my stove.

Good position, I told her. Angel above, and a carnivorous angel too—high time they came clean on that subject! Oven below, as in all the most reliable accounts. Then there’s the rest of us in between, stuck in Middle Earth, on the level of the frying pan. Poor Myra was baffled, as she always is by theological discourse. She likes her God plain—plain and raw, like a radish.

The winter we’d been waiting for arrived on New Year’s Eve—a hard freeze, followed by an enormous fall of snow the next day. Outside the window it swirled down, bucket after bucket of it, as if God were dumping laundry flakes in the finale of a children’s pageant. I turned on the weather channel to get the full panorama—roads closed, cars buried, power lines down, merchandising brought to a standstill, workmen in bulky suits waddling around like outsized children bundled up for play. Throughout their presentation of what they euphemistically termed “current conditions,” the young anchorfolk kept their perky optimism, as they habitually do through every disaster imaginable. They have the footloose insouciance of troubadours or fun-fair gypsies, or insurance salesmen, or stock-market gurus—making overblown predictions in the full knowledge that none of what they’re telling us may actually come true.