Already my childhood seemed far away—a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn’t think so.

Laura didn’t stay inside. She rambled around the town, the way we used to do. She wore a yellow cotton dress of mine from the summer before, and the hat that went with it. Seeing her from behind gave me a peculiar sensation, as if I were watching myself.

Winifred made no secret of the fact that she was bored stiff. She went swimming every day, from the small private beach beside the boathouse, though she never went in over her depth: mostly she just splashed around, wearing a giant magenta coolie hat. She wanted Laura and me to join her, but we declined. Neither of us could swim very well, and also we knew what sorts of things used to be dumped into the river, and possibly still were. When she wasn’t swimming or sunbathing, Winifred wandered around the house making notes and sketches, and lists of imperfections—the wallpaper in the front hall really had to be replaced, there was dry rot under the stairs—or else she took naps in her room. Avilion seemed to drain her energy. It was reassuring to know that something could.

Richard talked on the telephone a lot, long distance; or else he’d go into Toronto for the day. The rest of the time he diddled around with the Water Nixie, supervising the repairs. It was his goal to get the thing floated, he said, before we had to leave.

He had the papers delivered every morning. “Civil war in Spain,” he said one day at lunch. “Well, it’s been a long time coming.”

“That’s unpleasant,” said Winifred.

“Not for us,” said Richard. “As long as we keep out of it. Let the Commies and the Nazis kill each other off—they’ll both jump into the fray soon enough.”

Laura had skipped lunch. She was down on the dock, by herself, with only a cup of coffee. She was frequently down there: it made me nervous. She would he on the dock, trailing one arm in the water, gazing into the river as if she’d dropped something and was looking for it down at the bottom. The water was too dark though. You couldn’t see much. Only the occasional clutch of silvery minnows, flitting about like a pickpocket’s fingers.

“Still,” said Winifred. “I wish they wouldn’t. It’s very disagreeable.”

“We could use a good war,” said Richard. “Maybe it will pep things up—put paid to the Depression. I know a few fellows who are counting on it. Some folks are going to make a lot of money.” I was never told anything about Richard’s financial position, but I’d come to believe lately—from various hints and indications—that he didn’t have as much money as I’d once thought. Or he no longer had it. The restoration of Avilion had been halted—postponed —because Richard had been unwilling to spend any more. That was according to Reenie.

“Why will they make money?” I said. I knew the answer perfectly well, but I’d drifted into the habit of asking naive questions just to see what Richard and Winifred would say. The sliding moral scale they applied to almost every area of life had not yet ceased to hold my attention.

“Because that’s the way things are,” said Winifred shortly. “By the by, your pal got arrested.”

“What pal?” I said, too quickly.

“That Callista woman. Your father’s old light o’love. The one who thinks of herself as an artist.”

I resented her tone, but didn’t know how to counter it. “She was awfully good to us when we were kids,” I said.

“Of course she would have been, wouldn’t she?”

“I liked her,” I said.

“No doubt. She got hold of me a couple of months ago—tried to get me to buy some dreadful painting or mural or something—a bunch of ugly women in overalls. Not anyone’s first choice for the dining room.”

“Why would they arrest her?”

“The Red Squad, some roundup or other at a pinko party. She called here—she was quite frantic. She wanted to speak to you. I didn’t see why you should be involved, so Richard went all the way into town and bailed her out.”

“Why would he do that?” I said. “He hardly knows her.”

“Oh, just out of the goodness of his heart,” said Winifred, smiling sweetly. “Though he’s always said those people are more trouble in jail than out of it, haven’t you, Richard? They howl their heads off, in the press. Justice this, justice that. Maybe he was doing the prime minister a favour.”

“Is there any more coffee?” said Richard.

This meant Winifred should drop the subject, but she went on. “Or maybe he felt he owed it to your family. I suppose you might consider her a sort of family heirloom, like some old crock that gets passed down from hand to hand.”

“I think I’ll join Laura on the dock,” I said. “It’s such a beautiful day.”

Richard had been reading the paper all through my conversation with Winifred, but now he looked up quickly. “No,” he said, “stay here. You encourage her too much. Leave her alone and she’ll get over it.”

“Over what?” I said.

“Whatever’s eating her,” said Richard. He’d turned his head to look at her out the window, and I noticed for the first time that there was a thinning spot at the back of his head, a round of pink scalp showing through his brown hair. Soon he would have a tonsure.

“Next summer we’ll go to Muskoka,” said Winifred. “I can’t say this little vacation experiment has been a raging success.”

Towards the end of our stay I decided to visit the attic. I waited until Richard was occupied on the telephone and Winifred was lying in a deck chair on our little strip of sand with a damp washcloth across her eyes. Then I opened the door to the attic stairs, closing it behind me, and went up as quietly as I could.

Laura was already there, sitting on one of the cedar chests. She’d got the window open, which was a mercy: otherwise the place would have been stifling. There was a musky scent of old cloth and mouse droppings.

She turned her head, not quickly. I hadn’t startled her. “Hello,” she said. “There’s bats living up here.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. There was a large paper grocery bag beside her. “What’ve you got there?”

She began to take things out—various bits and pieces, bric-à-brac. The silver teapot that was my grandmother’s, and three china cups and saucers, hand-painted, from Dresden. A few monogrammed spoons. The nutcracker shaped like an alligator, a lone mother-of pearl cuff link, a tortoiseshell comb with missing teeth, a broken silver lighter, a cruet stand minus the vinegar.

“What’re you doing with these things?” I said. “You can’t take them back to Toronto!”

“I’m hiding them. They can’t lay waste to everything.”

“Who can’t?”

“Richard and Winifred. They’d just throw these things out anyway; I’ve heard them talking about worthless junk. They’ll make a clean sweep, sooner or later. So I’m saving a few things, for us. I’ll leave them up here in one of the trunks. That way they’ll be safe, and we’ll know where they are.”

“What if they notice?” I said.

“They won’t notice. There’s nothing really valuable. Look,” she said, “I found our old school exercise books. They were still here, in the same place we left them. Remember when we brought them up here? For him?”

Alex Thomas never needed a name, for Laura: he was always he, him, his. I’d thought for a while that she’d given him up, or given up the idea of him, but it was obvious now that she hadn’t.

“It’s hard to believe we did it,” I said. “That we hid him up here, that we weren’t found out.”

“We were careful,” said Laura. She thought for a moment, then smiled. “You never really believed me, about Mr. Erskine,” she said. “Did you?”

I suppose I should have lied outright. Instead I compromised. “I didn’t like him. He was horrible,” I said.

“Reenie believed me, though. Where do you think he is?”