June 1929

In the aftermath of Rilla and baby Sissy's return from hospital, the little boys and Jims were sent to St George St. This was improbable, given the confines of St George St, but some unsuspecting parent – Ken possibly – had made the question of the little Fords' destination a democratic one and they had opted for St George, so on St George St they were. It was respite for Rilla from them as much as them from the baby, Persis supposed, and that being the case she found it hard to grudge anyone the expedition.

This accounted for why they were sitting in the St George St spare bedroom – what in the usual order of things was taken by visitors to be Cass's domain – when the question came up for the first time. This being Cass's supposed environs it smelled of all those things pertaining to Cass; ink and indexes, a hint of forget-me-not. A strange place to shift three young boys overnight, but then it was Cass's would-be room or the sitting room, and that was presently too swamped in academic clutter to be good for anything but index proofing. To that end they had made up a pillow warren on the floor – the boys' idea – for bedding down in. It seemed the more comfortable option next to the well-made bed with its high headboard and stiff mattress. And besides, Persis thought,she and Cass had indexed any number of practices that made cushion-warrens look both the height of modernity and civilisation.

Anyway, the boys adored it. They were piled on top of one another like so many spaniels, a mass of tangled, tumbled limbs amidst the pillows, pink-cheeked with sleep and giggling at the novelty. Hera sat on the sparse dresser and looked down her nose in disapproval as only a tortoiseshell cat could do. Probably, thought Persis, the cat was wary lest the children would usurp what was actually Hera's bed. Needless to say that amidst all this jumble it was a surprise when Liam broke off his crepuscular wrestle with Anthony – or was it Jims? – and said, 'How did you and Cass meet, Aunt Persis?'

'Oh, that's hardly a story, darling,' said Cass quickly. Persis wondered now, in the sleep-warm room the boys were to share that it should never have come up before. She'd always supposed that it owed to none of them having put the pieces together, and yet they were clever children. Frequently too clever. As now. From the mouths of babes ad infants, and all that.

'Is!' said Anthony, hauling himself upright. 'Is Is! Is!'

Liam nodded and struggled upright with dignity worthy of Hera. 'We know all the other stories already,' he said. 'They're old hat. We know Grandma and Grandpa Ford, and how Grandma was married to someone else – or thought she was – when they met – and Granny Anne cracked a slate over Grandad's head but then was sad when he nearly died…'Liam began to tick these narratives off on his fingers as he went. Persis was trying very hard not to laugh. This was monumentally difficult, seeing as Liam's next words were, 'Mum and Dad, obviously, we know. Dad danced on a broken ankle and Susan Baker told everyone about spankings. We've heard that one lots,' and he shrugged as if to say that was no great thing. 'Oh! And about Mrs Cornelia and Marshall Eliot, and how she married him because he had no beard and even,' with deep incredulity, 'about how Whiskers-on-the-Moon tried to propose to Susan!' He gave this the derisory emphasis he felt was its due. 'But you've never said.'

Well no, thought Persis. One didn't. And while she expected there were quite a few things Maple St could forgive, namely Jims' library excursions, the boys' penchant for tearing off to St George St without so much as a by-your-leave, and even their culinary preference for Cass's exotic culinary dishes, it seemed a safe bet that The story of Persis and Cass and actually telling it to the children didn't nearly make the list. Which meant that in this moment what she was supposed to say was that it wasn't like that at all darling, and spawn some nonsense about the shortage of men post-war and how it was more economical to share the flat. The trouble being that since she had never got into the habit of actively lying to Jims or his siblings, doing so now felt insurmountably difficult.

What she said instead was, 'Whiskers-on-the-Moon and Susan makes a much better story, don't you think?' She directed this chiefly at Jims.

But it was obviously dawning on Jims too that the thing had never come up because he said, 'I'm with the cherubs on this one. How did that happen? More to the point, why don't we know?'

The cherubs, naturally, was Toronto-speak for the little boys. Persis forgot now how Cass had come up with it, only that it was Cass who had come up with it. Persis remembered saying 'Chance would be a fine thing' and of Cass and the cherubs laughing, but the name had stuck, anyway.

Persis still had no good, ready-made answer for Jims and his exasperatingly pertinent question. At least, not one anyone could reasonably unpack there in the spare room of St George St, nominally Cass's territory with its smell of ink, bookishness and that hint of forget-me-not. Worse, she couldn't think of a neutral answer. Only fraught, caustic little things like You don't know because it cannot be talked about or Because no one wants to look too closely at us. But that wasn't fair; Jims and the cherubs loved their family in its entirety. Persis was not going to systematically shred that trust in the name of a bedtime story.

'Please,' said Anthony, wriggling under his blankets.

'Please,' echoed Liam.

Persis looked dubiously in the direction the window overlooking St George, whence drifted the usual harmony of rattling tram and evening strollers; here a pair of soft-spoken lovers, there a family returning home from the park. Jims got up from the jumble of cushions and without a word, pulled the sash on the window. He did it with firmness, so that the wood settled in place with a satisfying clunk. On the dresser Hera looked askance.

'Please,' he said, very quiet. Persis almost didn't hear him. But she saw him, saw the look Jims was wearing; saw his wary, guarded curiosity. This was not gawpng, gawking circus spectator speculation on his part. No, it ran deeper than that, the look on Jims' face, as if to say, how does it work? Davy Keith, Persis recalled Aunt Anne saying, had been used to say I want to know. This was different. Persis looked at Jims, and Jims looked back and the set of his mouth said I need to know. Persis, seeing it, looked to Cass to see if she, too, had seen. To see if it had decided her, too.

Clearly it had. Cass raised two darkly elegant eyebrows. Cherubs or not there's no way out of this one. She wasn't wrong. The children went on looking, wide-eyed and pleading at their cherubic best. Persis shrugged. All yours my dear, it said and Cass dropped down onto the cushion burrow and took the cue.

'It really isn't much of a story,' she said, which, actually, wasn't dissembling when you stopped to think of it. There was fundamentally no way to narrativize their introduction by way of the pompous Dr Digby, who wanted their combined help on an index he was compiling for his book.

'What,' said Liam, who was not, God help everyone, the son of a notable journalist for nothing, 'was the index on?'

'Kinship tables,' said Cass. Simultaneously Persis said, 'Religious tribal practices in Northern Africa'

Liam frowned. 'Which was it?'

Cass laughed; so did Persis. 'Remember it well, do you?' said Cass.

'As well as you do, anyway,' Persis said. Liam rolled his eyes, and Jims shot him the sort of older-brother look that patently said well, you did ask; Persis knew it well. She was pretty sure Ken had invented said look.

'You,' said Cass to Persis, ignoring the cherubs, 'were in brown crepe. You can wear that sort of colour, of course. I can't.'

'And you were in red,' said Persis.

'That one's easy,' said Jims, who was sitting at a diminutive desk, the chair tilted backwards at a physics-defying, or possibly only gravity-defying angle. 'Aunt Cass is always in red.'

More laughter, the cherubs catching it off of Cass this time. To Jims Persis said, 'Whose side of this are you on, anyway?'

'Oh, I'm just enjoying the story,' he said and grinned what was unmistakably the Blythe grin at her. 'Or I would be if someone was telling it.'

'Swat him for me, can you?' said Cass from where she knelt on the floor, when she had recovered laughing. 'You're nearer.'

Persis obliged, or tried to. Jims rucked the chair sideways, ducked out from under it as it succumbed to gravity and effectively dodged her. Hera leaped off the dresser in magnificent annoyance at such an unsolicited acrobatic display. Liam folded his arms and hastened to point out that an introduction was not a story and would they get on with it. Where had all this happened?

'Knox,' said Persis and Cass together. Said Liam, cherub-aspirant with terrific impishness, 'So, you agree on that?'

Cass swatted him herself for that, playfully tickling his neck, but lightly, to minimise squealing lest it further ruffle Hera, who was bristling still with all the righteous indignation of an offended feline.

'In the library, wasn't it?' said Cass.

'I was going to say the reading room,' said Persis.

Liam frowned again. He looked strikingly like Ken when he did this, dark-haired and bright eyed, and with more stubbornness in the set of his mouth than the average mule had in its left forepaw. 'Aren't those the same?' he demanded, now.

'Not at all,' said Cass. Liam's eyebrows converged in perplexity. He said, 'Mum and Dad don't tell it the same, either. How they met, I mean.'

'But they do generally,' said Jims, who had resurrected the gravity-defying desk chair and was once again lounging in it, 'agree on the broad strokes. Where they were, what was said, and who said it. That sort of thing.'

'There is a doctor of philosophy,' said Cass serenely, 'who believes memory to be about as malleable as one of Madrun's Shapes.'

'This is Gregson at St Michael's?' said Persis.

'No,' said Cass, but could not elaborate because here Anthony prodded her ribs with a stout four-year-old finger to protest this conversational rabbit warren.

So they talked about that first meeting. How Digby appropriated Persis' arm and effectively frog-marched her over to Cass, who was standing in the alcove of a grand piano, looking underwhelmed. This owed to the grand piano being both out of tune and in the process of being tormented by an academic with delusions of musicality. Whereas Cass, who actually was musical, declined to do more than lean against the exposed back of the instrument.

'Someone,' Cass had said to Digby by way of greeting, 'needs to put that poor instrument out of its misery and shell out for something not half-dead.'

Digby grimaced, because this was what Digby did when confronted with mentions of money as it related to anything and everything besides to the grants to write up his books. But then he recovered, released Persis from his vice-grip, and having introduced her and Cass, explained about the index he wanted them to collaborate on. He then promptly stranded them.

The way Persis remembered it, she seized upon the tunelessness of the piano to fill the conversational void before them. It was that or stand there like a lemming, and she had been drafted into attendance at entirely too many functions as novelist Owen Ford's daughter to comfortably opt for the lemming impression. From the dying piano they segued into gossip over various colleagues; would the wife of the newly-elected head of the Anthropological Society take a more active role than her predecessor, or would she too would fall asleep mid-seminar, her knitting going idle? Would that new paper of Dr. Appleby's be all that it was rumoured to be; had the former librarian to the School of Anthropology really been sacked or only retired? There had been nothing to distinguish it from any other function hosted by the School of Anthropology. The waiters, as ever, had overlooked two women talking against the backdrop of an ornamental piano, whence came the dying, mutilated strains of Three o'Clock in the Morning.The waiters were always overlooking women talking together at these academic functions, because they were probably only the wives of thus-and-such or so-and-so. Anything else would never have dawned on them. Add to this that the refreshments table had been inaccessible, and they were not yet at the stage of friendship – much less anything else – where they could converse easily and it was a long, stilted conversation.

In the St George St bedroom, Cass shook her head, half-amused, half-negation of this reconstructed memory. To hear her tell it, they had talked speculatively about the index, and commiserated about Dr Digby's general ineptitude before segueing on to what sounded like an entirely more relaxed conversation. They had been standing proximate to one of the bookshelves, if one trusted to Cass's memory, and well away from the piano. (She did agree about the piano being out of tune.) Someone, Cass rather thought Persis, had used it to turn the conversation on to previous publications and then outward to books in general.

'That,' said Persis as the sun set on St George leaving the sky a faded, bleeding blood orange, 'sounds entirely too well-constructed to have been my conversational manoeuvre, considering I couldn't think of a thing to say to you at the time.'

'It must have been you,' said Cass, 'because at that time I wasn't reading much that wasn't work-related or intended for publication.'

'It couldn't have been Digby, could it?' asked Jims, so that they both laughed.

'God, no,' said Persis.

'Certainly not,' said Cass. 'I doubt he's heard of books written out of his discipline.'

'His indexes would strongly suggest not,' Persis said.

Liam said, 'That's not a story. That's only the beginning of one. What came next?'

Persis joined them on the floor among the cushions. She tucked her knees under her person and said, 'We worked on the index for Digby. It was shockingly dull, I'm afraid.'

'And he needed indexers,' said Cass. 'The man wouldn't have known how to organise notes if a filing system had up and bit him on the nose.'

'Probably not even if it had,' said Persis. The little boys laughed. Jims snorted. Hera, perched safe atop the bed, scoffed.

It was over the index, Persis thought, things began to shift. Nothing dramatic, and certainly not so that an outsider would have noticed. Occasionally she'd pause in her efforts to parse Digby's notes to watch Cass, who was also trying and failing to interpret Digby, and ask mute, You too? Or they'd be going down the stairs and Cass would linger at the landing to look backwards, and there would appear in her mouth a sort of quirk of the corners – Dare I risk it? But then Persis would catch her up and they'd take the next turning together, chatting about how impossible Digby's handwriting was. None of this seemed communicable to the cherubs on the bedroom floor. Cass obviously agreed, because she'd lapsed into silence herself. Jims said, to prod them, 'So it went on for ages, the index?' He then tilted his head so it aligned with the crosswise chair. Definitely mining for information, that one, Persis thought. But then, Jims had always done that.

'No,' she and Cass said in what was, apparently, unexpected unison, because it occasioned delighted squeals from the listening cherubs.

Persis tried to remember. She had a slew of memories of the sun-baked anthropology library intermingled with the spangled stained glass of the Knox college library. Both prominently featured seas of unravelling notes and eye-straining hours of cross-referencing as they tried to bludgeon Digby's research into something resembling order. In all of them it was stifling and sunny, so the thing all told must have spanned a summer at least.

Here Cass interjected to say no, that couldn't be right, Mrs Minnick had taken over before they got the thing finished, didn't Persis remember? Which, actually, Persis did, because she wasn't sure which of them had been more relieved to be shot of Digby's unreadable handwriting.

They'd kept in touch though; it wasn't often one ran across a fellow indexer that one worked as well with as they had together. There were other Anthropological Society functions to chat at, further opportunities to commiserate over the tunelessness of the piano. Other indexes, too.

'Still,' said Jims, 'it's a far cry from there to there to here, though, and not as if some cosmic wire gets tripped, or a bell sounds, is it?'

'It was a bit like that,' said Cass, but with a raise to the cadence so that as she looked to Persis it became a question. Was it like that for you, too?

Persis shrugged uncertain. She said, 'I don't know. There's a difference I think – that was the first time we met, that evening at Knox. It wasn't the first time I noticed you. That would have been ages before Dr Digby ever threw us together.'

Really? said the tilt to Cass's head, the quirk of her mouth in involuntary smile. I had no idea. Why not?

The little boys were growing restless. Jims said, 'that still doesn't explain how.'

Persis and Cass took a child apiece on their knees and traded looks of mutual incomprehension as to the best way to explain romantic cues to Jims in the presence of the Maple St cherubs. Or even in their absence, come to that. Suppose for a fleeting, wildly inventive moment that their own particular history could be candidly laid before him. Even then, how did one even begin explaining, when certain things actively defied words? The bedroom was beginning to grow stuffy with the windows closed. Persis set Anthony back among the pillows and went to prise it open. Immediately the trams could be heard rattling by once more.

'Madrun says we'll catch a chill with the window open,' said Liam.

'And Susan reckons the noise is unhealthy,' said Jims.

Well, Madrun and Susan had never been sat in this particular bedroom trying to communicate the incommunicable, thought Persis. And anyway, as streets went, St George was dead quiet for Toronto, especially when you compared it to Ken and Rilla's first house under the railway. Hera leaped onto Anthony's young feet; Anthony giggled, then squealed. Hera decided she needed to wrestle the feet. More squealing by Anthony as he kicked playfully and Hera redoubled her wrestling.

'Well?' said Jims, expectant.

Cass hummed, a noise that might have meant anything.

'Well, obviously,' said Persis, grappling, 'There were other indexes.'

'Yes,' said Cass, 'Your aunt was very good at them anyway.'

'We both are,' said Persis. 'That was sort of Digby's point at the time.'

'And,' said Cass, ignoring the interruption, 'we outclassed the others together. Everyone seemed to want us collaborating on things that term. So we really needn't have worried, that afternoon when Mrs M took Digby's pet project over.' Then, to Persis, she said, 'Your Religious Practices index would have been next.'

Persis snorted. She said, 'Hardly mine. And wasn't the use of masks in South America next?'

'No,' said Cass, 'because…'and proceeded good-naturedly to make her case. Persis was only half-listening.

Jims rolled his eyes for effect. 'Obviously,' he said, 'there were other indexes.' But he said it good-naturedly, as if to say that while he did not care about the subject-matter of various collaborative indices, he did not mind this somewhat pointless digression. Now he said, 'It's sort of a leap from indexes and occasional lecture attendance to the talking-without-talking thing you do, though.'

Here Cass raised her eyebrows, and Persis must have mutely parsed the gesture because the boys shrieked and pointed and said, 'Like that! Just like that!'

Persis folded Anthony's fingers into hers and murmured something about not pointing, because while probably she was not supposed – strictly speaking – to enlighten the children as to life at St George, she was supposed to occasionally take their manners in hand. She did it now because it was mundane, reflexive and reassuring.

And anyway, she categorically could not tell the cherubs about the evenings dancing. That came much later in the narrative, anyway. Persis thought of the music from a piano in much better nick, Masculine Woman, Feminine Man segueing into The Man I Love while Cass's mouth quirked at the irony and then moved on into Lady Be Good by some musical machination that Persis missed for listening. The rooms were dark and they tended to smell of smoke and proximity, and they had kissed there for the first time,in such a place Persis remembered. The light dim and the music good, the company sympathetic, and anyway too preoccupied with their own risks to observe this one. But it wouldn't do for cherubs liable to tell the stories of their adults so glibly to interested parties.

What Persis said, none of this being admissible, was 'You had tickets to something after that, didn't you? Some opera, maybe?'

'The Mendelsohn Choir,' said Cass.

'That's right. The Creation? Last Words of Christ?'

'Messiah,' said Cass. 'Handel. Entirely different composer.' There was laughter from the children. Anthony got out from under the covers and climbed onto Persis's lap to better take in the story, displacing Hera in the process. 'I bet it was The Creation,' he whispered loyally. Hera only cried indignation.

'No,' said Cass, but she was smiling. 'That came later. Incredibly dull for anyone not a soprano, incidentally. No, it was Messiah first because your aunt wanted out of some Christmas function – who was it with? Not Knox, clearly, because I wasn't beholden to it.'

It had been one of Persis' mother's dos; now Cass had time-stamped the thing to Christmas it all came back to Persis. Almost certainly the matriarch of the house on Castle Frank had meant it as a way for Persis to meet people, not that that warranted saying. ('Meet people' here being Leslie Ford for men, but that didn't warrant saying, either.)

'Mum's idea,' she said instead of the party she had eschewed. She saw immediately that Cass understood what was not being said, if the cherubs did not. She thought Jims did though; there was that flash of understanding across his face again. It was darting, like a fish that sees a lure, recognises it for a trap, and retreats.

There was no need to dwell on this, though. Persis said instead, lightly, 'Anyway the concert was the superior option.'

'Of course,' said Cass. 'I said I had a ticket going spare.'

'Hadn't you?' asked Jims. He leaned forward, suddenly interested, so that his chair remembered gravity and clunked heavily to the floor.

'Well, I knew one of the contraltos,' said Cass with a shrug, 'which came to the same thing.' Persis, who knew the contralto now but not the subterfuge then, laughed.

The cherubs wanting in on the joke, and the memory of it being vivid, Persis launched agreeably into this story. It felt safe. Probably if Liam or Anthony did go trotting back to Rilla with talk of that time the aunts went to hear The Messiah at Massey Hall it would not be catastrophic. Anyone might go and hear The Messiah. It was a Christmas staple in Toronto. Certainly that had been the case that year because the choir had sold more tickets than was probably reasonable, 'Probably,' she said to Cass now, 'because of your contralto.'

'You are twisting my words,' said Cass, but she never actually denied anything.

They were crowded, all these people in their fine clothes, elbow to elbow and ankle to ankle in the seats. It was worse than church at Christmas. The soprano's rendering of How Beautiful are the Feet made this last particularly ironic, not least because when Persis looked, they were both shod for snow and winter cold. Everyone was. Persis glossed right over these details on the basis they probably shouldn't find their way back to Ken and Rilla, all things considered. Even accidentally. She omitted too to mention that the ticket was tucked neatly into an envelope in her dresser drawer. There were a whole ream of residual ticket stubs of that ilk.

'It went on for ages,' she said reminiscently, and it was Cass's turn to laugh.

'Only because the conductor was moronic. Rejoice Greatly was practically a dirge. That poor soprano had to breathe in the middle of words and phrases, it was so sluggish. Not that anyone got off lightly. Remember how belaboured O Thou That Tellest was?'

Persis shook her head. It was all much of a muchness when it came to the actual music. Cass, undeterred said, 'Well, it was about the solemnest glad tidings anyone brought to Zion, and that's a fact. When you've got a choir of your own, Anthony, you must never do anything so ludicrous.'

Anthony promised faithfully that he would not. Hera circled herself into a disgruntled ball atop Anthony's abandoned pillow. No one, obviously, was giving her the attention befitting her godly station.

'There were other indexes after that,' said Persis. 'Other concerts too. I always took it as read you had a subscription. I take it that wasn't actually the case?'

'That would be telling,' said Cass.

Jim's smiled; the cherubs, though, were still young enough to squirm uneasily over it and dive for their covers. Sensing an end to the story, began to make efforts towards sleep. This included Anthony's game attempt to reclaim his pillow without displacing the cat. No luck. Hera stretched a lazily territorial paw across it in warning. Cass was almost succeeding in not laughing.

Presently the little boys subsided, tucked up to their chins and nestled snuggly for the night. Hera bedded down on Anthony's head in an effort to reclaim her rightful territory, namely the pillow he had so wrongfully appropriated. Persis got up from the floor and Cass followed; mission accomplished.

The scraping of a chair against the floor alerted them to Jims who had risen and was even now padding after them into the sitting room.

'I'll see they don't go writing that one up as a school essay or anything,' he said.

Persis squeezed his shoulder. Cass put music quietly on the gramophone, as much for them as for the cherubs reluctantly bound for the Land of Nod, then padded into the kitchen and began to fuss with kettles and mugs.

'I'll make us something hot,' she said. 'Tea? Chocolate? What's your preference, Jims?' Jims shrugged and shuffled a pile of papers gingerly from armchair to side-table. He settled in the vacant space and closed his eyes.

It made him look strikingly young again; made his face open and childish as in sleep. If Persis watched him like that she saw him as he had been over tea in various cafes or gazing adoringly through the glass casing of a museum exhibition, little nose misting the glass. But why is the moon round, Aunt Persis, and how do they know the mummies are dead? Wouldn't it be just awful if they were only slightly dead, and couldn't say anything but all the time the mummy-makers went on and on with the bandages?Or later, ankles swinging casually atop the St George St kitchen counter, You have got to teach me to cook…She supposed Cass saw that in him, too.

The gramophone began to croon Charleston, presumably in testament to those first, tentative evenings dancing amidst the smoke and the good piano, like-minded people, and the care everyone took not to be found out. Cass with her hair dressed and her touch of forget-me-not over the usual smell of books and ink, Persis beside her, her arm under Cass's gloved hand, suit buttoned. Persis couldn't have said whether she or Jims was the more surprised by the selection.

Jims frowned slightly, from his nest on the chair as if in concentration, as if this story, such as it was, of indices and concerts were one of his jigsaws with a missing piece.

'So it was kinship tables after all,' he said, thoughtful, 'and music. I can see how – I mean you're always so thick in both at once. What I don't quite grasp is how…' Jims bit his lip, thoughtful.

'What I mean,' he said, 'is that – well, Mum has friends she goes to concerts with, you know? Only sometimes because of all the committee work, but she does. Mrs Grant, obviously, if it's the right kind of music, or Betty Meade – Morris, I mean – if she's up visiting. But you'd never confuse that with…' he trailed off, pink as one of Sissy's crocheted blankets and embarrassed.

'What made it different?' he asked, retreading the question. 'Was it really just – '

'Kinship tables and music?' said Persis for him. Jims nodded at her gratefully.

'Not really,' she said. 'Nothing is ever as uncomplicated as it is in stories. Why do you think we're always taking those trips with the academics?'

'Because of the indexes,' said Jims, 'and them needing you to write them up.' Then he grimaced and nodded and said, 'It's more than that, isn't it? If you're there with them – you're not here.'

'Something like that,' said Persis.

'I sort of hoped you wouldn't say that,' Jims said. From where she leaned against hte back of his chair, Persis squeazed his shoulder. She had sort of wished it needn't be said.

There was so much, Persis thought, rubbing circles lazily into Jims' shoulder, that they ought to try and say, but not now. The Jims before her on the chair was still feeling out the edges of his own existence and to rush in with advice and cautions before even he had got there himself, to go where even angels feared to tread seemed an invasion. Be careful was part of it - a large part of it - but I love you, always was more, perhaps the foremost thing. At least she could say that for any occasion. Persis said it now, as Cass rustled through the kitchen and Jims frowned sleepily in his char. He sounded very small as he said from the depths of the chair, 'Does not being here – is that easier?'

Persis carded a hand through his golden hair. He looked more than ever like one of the cherubs of Cass's moniker.

'In some things,' she said. 'It helps sometimes. But we miss you.'

Cass reappeared with a tray of mugs brimful of rich, dark chocolate. She began to distribute it and Persis and Jims took their mugs gratefully.

Jims sipped at his thoughtfully; Persis watched the chocolate bloom over his mouth. 'But surely,' he said, voice sticky with chocolate, 'some people just fit. Obviously they do. Mum and Cap do – even when they were arguing I could see that about them. So do the grandparents and the aunts and uncles. There's lots of examples. And you.' He nodded at them, little chocolate buds drifting from lips to fingers, to the trouser leg he smeared them on. 'I suppose what I mean is how do you know the other person fits you. Because,' as he turned pinker than ever, 'people are made differently, aren't they? Obviously they are.'

But he was smiling waveringly at them, so it wasn't an indictment this, more research expedition. And Persis had absolutely no idea what to say or how to describe the click of recognition when it came, the encoded looks, the half- and quarter-glances that preceded it. She thought, walking mentally through the beginning of her and Cass that they must have always done a version of what Jims called the talking-without-talking thing. She thought possibly she always had done. Probably so had Cass.

Jims went on looking at her, intent and curious. They owed him something, and ideally something more than I love you.

Cass came and perched on the arm of the chair Jims had appropriated. She cradled her cocoa close and said, 'I think it's sort of like music.'

Jims looked nonplussed by this bit of simile, so looked to Persis for the practical equivalent, but Persis still had nothing concrete and Cass seemed to have an idea of somethingto say, anyway. Besides, Cass obviously sensed Jims' underwhelmed assessment of this assessment because she said, 'It's all right. I haven't confused you with Anthony, promise. You're much too big for that now, and anyway, you always sing flat.' She offered Jims a smile. 'But,' said Cass, 'you know a little about it. I mean you have your likes and dislikes – Thais. Think of the soprano. There's a moment, when she reaches for those high notes, where she has to sort of anticipate them to land on them. I'm not saying this very well. But by the time she's done the mental calculus to work out the howof getting there, judged the distance from where she is to where she must go, she's late. She's missed the beat. So instead she takes a massive leap into space and trusts the note will be there when she lands. She has to be all raw, exposed nerve to do it, but she does it anyway. Do you see?'

Jims did see. Persis watched understanding flicker tremulously across his face, the return of that wary, curious look.

'But that sounds terrifying,' he said.

Persis smiled against Blue Elephant Wedgewood. 'Quite,' she said.

'Unquestionably so,' said Cass. 'But like music too, in that when you come to ground, if you're exceptionally lucky – if the landing sticks – it's worth the risk in getting there.'