Summer, 1938

Jims didn't mean to say anything. In fact, he was struck, on arrival, by the chumminess of the rest of the family. The Ford-Anderson collection pulled up in its hired cab and there were the aunts sitting on the veranda. Specifically, Aunt Nan was on the steps, clasping her knees to her chest. Aunt Mara was beside her, having apparently commandeered one of the baby Meredith twins. Aunt Di, leaning against the railing had got the other and was cooing over it, while Faith Blythe relaxed on the swing nursing a glass of lemonade.

Jims, helping Cap with the cases, saw this out of the corner of his eye and half-watched Mum trying to inveigle her way into the knot they made on the steps. There was no room; the famous Blythe twins and Aunt Mara were sat too close. In the end, Mum settled with baby Lissy on the other side of the swing to Aunt Faith. The Kingsport cousins, what Grandfather Gil called the Kingsport Contingent, came haring round the corner of the house whooping and squealing to raise the dead, and on the other side of the car, Jims half-registered Anthony balking. Further away, under a Maple, Hector sat serene in his chair, Miss Abbey and the Arnold and Morris children arranged around him as they all played at cochannel, ably assisted by dogs Snowy, Flossie and Dulce. The dogs were mostly a dozy, drowsy canine jumble, only making occasional half-hearted bids for the cochannel discs, so Jims couldn't really fault them. He thought the children might have waved, but then they hadn't been half-raised by Madrun and the other half by Rilla Ford, and anyway, they were young. Even so, Jims took it all in with a strange, spectator feeling, and wondered if everyone felt that about some parts of their family.

So no, Jims did not mean to confess anything earth-shattering to Amanda Meredith that holiday. There was as much interweave between the cousins, so far as Jims could tell, as there was between the adults. The ones that were close were wound like cords around the hearts of each other, and the ones that were not, well God help them making ingress. But Mandy and Miri were closest to Jims in age, and that meant they got thrown together a lot, so sometimes they talked. And since Miri wasn't there that summer, their options for talking were fewer than usual.

On this particular summer afternoon they were judging a sandcastle competition. It was in celebration of the newly-returned Arnold adults from abroad, and the children were working in teams. Miss Abbey, Hector and the little Arnolds made one team. The Kingsport cousins were another, and the Cherubs, sans Jims, still another. This left little Hattie and Bea unfairly alone, which would never have done, so in the interests of fairness, Anthony had joined forces with them. This did not particularly faze Team Ford, because they had Sissy and polio-raddled hands or not she still had more aptitude for engineering a structurally sound sandcastle than most adults.

Mandy and Jims, as the oldest of the cousins had been tasked with judging the results. Presently, they were sitting on a dune, prickly grass behind and beneath them, surveying the competition. The prickly grass jabbed uncomfortably at Jims' knees, but the sand was fine, white and hot. Sugar sand, the Cherubs called it. He sunk his toes deep into it and surveying the various childish efforts said, 'We could probably have let you help the little girls.' He thought maybe, with Miri in Europe this might have been nice for Mandy and perhaps this unofficial exile to almost-adulthood was substantively less so.

'You're just worried Anthony will helm them to victory,' said Mandy with the infamous Blythe grin playing at her lips. She threw some of the sugar sand at him, playfully. It got on his clothes, and hers too because of the breeze.

Jims laughed. Threw sand back at her. He said, 'Chance would be a fine thing.'

The wind tumbled willfully across the bay, making swells in the waves and filling the air with the smell of salt and wet sand

Mandy said, 'I knew someone once who used to say that was Poseidon's horses racing.' She nodded at the churning white froth of the waves.

'Miri?' said Jims because it sounded like Miri.

'Oh no,' said Mandy. 'This was someone else – a friend we had in common. Old Jack Curlew.' Jims had always thought that once the Meredith twins had started collecting friends they had spawned different ones. Miri and Eloise Janie, who had chaperoned her to Europe, Mandy and Mick Challow. Or that was how the adults seemed to talk about it.

Jims had wondered, privately, about how much there was in it. And if it was safe to suppose Mandy had paired off with the young Mick Challow, if one could also conclude that Eloise Janie and Europe was Miri's bid at the same thing, but further away and out of the public eye. Not that one asked questions like that. And anyway, Miri was married and with a baby now, so speculation was moot.

Now Jims said experimentally, testing the water of their relationship, 'Grandpa Meredith seems to think you think quite a lot of Mick Challow.'

Mandy laughed a bright, giddy thing like crystal decanter ringing. For good measure she sprinkled Jims with more sand. Jims tried to brush it off, but it was no good. It only transferred grains to his hands, while still others shifted and migrated from beneath him to the backs of his legs and up under his rolled-up cuffs.

'Grandpa Meredith can be silly,' Mandy said and tossed her fiery red head. It was a very grand gesture, and it didn't quite land, what with the sand throwing. It was less the heartfelt declaration of the resolutely convinced, Jims thought, and more like Aunt Cass when trying to be cavalier about something and failing. But Grandpa Meredith could be silly, so Jims hummed to signify that he did not consider this an invalid sentiment. He thumbed the smooth inside of a giant cockle and nudged Mandy's elbow.

'Bet you've got a picture, though,' he said.

'Probably,' said Mandy, with what was actually impressive diffidence considering she had disregarded the family gossip as inconsequential nonsense mere seconds earlier. Jims watched her fish in her pocket and come up with a slip of a photograph, battered at the corners.

'You need a frame for that,' he said.

'So that I can perch it on my night-table and give the aunts more gossip?' she asked, which made Jims smile.

'They'd never,' he said, not meaning it. Another glorious ruddy-haired sweep of Mandy's head followed.

'Bet they would,' she said. 'Aunt Di goes round dusting entirely too often. She'd notice faster than a hot knife goes through butter. And Grandmother Rosemary's just the same. You'd think,' this with terrific dignity and audible capital letters, 'a Minister's Wife wouldn't approve of gossip, but if you catch her at it she says she's human first and married to a minister second.'

Jims wanted to concede the point, game set and match, with grace, to this fiery, ethereal cousin, but it was difficult because it was funny and he was fighting fits of laughter. So instead he graciously accepted Mandy's offer of the photo and squinted at it. It was soft with wear, and really did need a frame. Jims could never afterwards have said what he expected but Mandy with baby Bea in her arms while Hattie sat astride the shoulders of a handsome, brown-haired youth and pulled at said youth's ears was not it. They were presumably posed in front of Mandy's Struan home, and the dog at the boy's feet Jims took to be his rather than the girls'. They were dressed…well it was hard to tell, because of the coats. In the tinting, which was rendered hard to see by the sun, Mandy's coat was sleek, green and belted, with what Jims presumed to be slash pockets and a broad collar down the front. Her scarf, gloves and tam were knitted in the same oblique stitch and infilled with blue, and if Jims looked, he could just see her shoe bag peeking out from under one of Bea's stray feet. Also visible; a coil red hair that had fought free of Mandy's hat, and Jims would have bet good money that but for being encumbered with little Hattie's safety, the boy in the photo would have wound it around a finger or tucked it back behind Mandy's ear just for the closeness of it. It was a lovely photo. Easy, intimate, casual.

'That's Mick,' said Mandy, and tapped the photographed forehead of the long-suffering gentleman in what might generously have been called a much-battered overcoat. Because of the way he was balancing Hattie on his shoulders, Jims could see the patches on the elbows of the coat, a detail that did not appear to faze Mandy. It didn't much faze Jims either, all told.

'Very good taste,' said Jims, not thinking, and then went cold, then hot, then cold again. For a moment Jims thought he'd forgotten how to breathe. And all the while the wind whipped Mandy's autumnal hair about like so many fiery leaves and the Cherubs and company went on with their sand castles. Danger! screamed the wheeling gulls overhead. Chaos! Disaster!

The world had just ended on a monumental scale, and still Poseidon's frothy horses galloped in to shore and the sand of their dune grew ever hotter, the grass still more prickly, under Jims' feet. He dug them deeper into the sand and willed it to swallow him whole. The gulls went on screaming. Little spears of prickly grass jabbed painfully at his toes but otherwise nothing happened. He thought, if he listened, he could pick out the chatter of the young Arnolds with their exotic talk of Singapore, but he hadn't the heart for it. Didn't dare look away from the catastrophe of this sand dune and the scrutiny of Amanda Meredith.

'You think so?' said Mandy so naturally that Jims really did stop breathing this time. It was just for a second. Just one elastic moment of incredulity so impossible that Jims felt the weight of it on his chest, loosening and lightening because no one, not even the aunts had prepared him for the possibility that not everyone would be hostile. So Jims sat on the dune, the grass tickling and prickling his knees through his rolled up trousers and stared at Mandy in search of her undisclosed second head, or third eye, or whatever it was that had earmarked her as so far from normal as to be unfazed by Jims' slip. But there was only a quiet, secretive sort of smile at the corner of her mouth and Jims thought it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with his approving of her choice in person.

The gulls screamed warning. Jims studied that secret, half-drawn smile and ignored them.

'Yeah,' said Jims cautiously. 'I do think so. But I didn't tell you and you never heard me.'

Mandy's fingers darted sunkissed and quick across her lips as if zipping them. Gingerly Jims eased his feet out from under their mountain of sugar sand and allowed himself to breathe long and deep. He squinted into the sun, then looked back to Mandy, who had slipped down onto her stomach, and now, with her feet swinging behind her and her head on her hands, appeared to be fascinated by some small, sandy insect or other. Jims quirked both eyebrows.

'Just here,' said Mandy and nodded her head at the sand. Jims, who could not see anything, set the photo carefully between them and joined her on his stomach. He couldn't see anything that way, either.

'I think it's just me,' he said while she tracked the progress of whatever it was.

'No,' said Mandy. 'Definitely not.'

Whatever Jims had expected, it wasn't that. Again impetuous, nut-brown Miri flashed through his mind's eye, but it wasn't a question one asked. Jims didn't ask it. He watched Mandy tracking her insect, which was obviously sand-coloured and probably microscopic, rolling onto his side the better to watch her. The sand came with him, sun-warm and powdery, sticking ticklishly to all the awkward parts of his clothes, seams and pockets and collar. It itched. He scarcely registered it.

Probably, Jims thought, watching Mandy among the sand, it was foolish, even dangerous to say more. But she was there, and she was listening, and so far the apocalypse hadn't arrived. The photo still lay between them, a little, tinted wisp of a thing there in the sand, and Jims thumbed the figures without really thinking about it, beyond how nice it must be to pose for photos without the dread of exposure and discovery.

'People talk,' said Mandy, not looking at him. 'Not on purpose…not even all that to the point, sometimes. I think they think I spend so much time up in my trees sketching I don't actually hear. Sort of like the goose girl crying into the stove. You hear quite a lot that way.'

Jims said nothing, so Mandy went on, but playful now, 'I take it you haven't got a picture to show me?'

Jims didn't know if he should grimace or grin.

'After what you've just disclosed about our relatives' appetite for gossip?'

Mandy grimaced for him. Overhead gulls wheeled and shrieked in cacophonous harmony. Danger, they said, warning! But when Jims looked there was only the Cherubs and the younger cousins down below, diligently building their sandcastles.

'What about a name? As long as we're not talking about this pictureless person?'

Definitely dangerous, screamed the gulls. On the other hand, no one else was likely ever going to ask, what with the aunts already knowing. And the idea of talking about it to someone who was neither older than he was nor writing up a condemnatory dossier made Jims' stomach thrill.

'Not a word to Uncle Jem,' he said. Mandy looked horrified and shook her head with such terrifying rapidity that her hair tangled and tossed around her, quite obscuring her face.

'Good lord, no. Nor Grandpa Gil.'

Danger, screamed the gulls. Abort! Desist!

For a fraction of a second Jims hesitated. How did this work? Did he invent a name for safety's sake? Risk the universe for the sake of…but then he looked across again and there was only Mandy Meredith smiling serenely at him. Jims thought of Aunt Cass all those years ago, the sticky-sweet taste of cocoa and the clutter of St George St, and dared to leap into space.

'Tom,' said Jims, eyes fixed firmly on the horizon, heart going onetwothreefour, onetwothreefour in treble time way up in his lungs. They squeezed in consternation because now this was real and exposed, a raw nerve for Mandy to do whatever she liked with.

'Also an engineer, I guess?' she said and then Jims was laughing, which was difficult because his lungs were still two sizes too small, so he was sort of rasping and gasping. Mandy reached over and swatted at him with a sandy hand, thus ensuring even more of the gritty, ticklish stuff got onto and under his clothes.

'Sure,' said Jims. 'And I bet Mick Challow draws up all sorts of creepy crawly things too, does he?'

'Not on your life,' said Mandy. She gave him a crooked smile worthy of any nursery rhyme about stiles and sixpence.

Jims returned it, and stretched long on the hot, white sand, said, 'Tell me about it?'

So Mandy did. The waves courted the shore and a sandpiper scuttled across their dune, and Amanda Meredith told Jims about Mick Challow and the otters.

It was summer, 1936, hot and humid. The air was like soup when Mick bobbed up with all the exuberance of the zealot and said to Mandy, sketching the baby Merediths there on the sun-deck, 'You'll want to see this.'

'Oh?' said Mandy, still sketching. 'See what?'

'That'd spoil the surprise,' he said and leaned back, tall, lanky and unreasonably relaxed in the hot, muggy weather, against the slender bark of a silver birch. Mandy raised two ruddy eyebrows an kept on sketching. Baby Bea opened and closed her hands in spasmodic fists.

'I can't leave the babies for just anything,' Mandy said, very regal, very resolved.

'But you can get someone to mind them? Say, for a trip into the woods?'

Mandy hummed. 'Watch the girls,' she said. 'I'll scare up Astra.'

'Astra?' Mick wanted to know, but Mandy was gone, traipsing through the Meredith house, nosing footpaths and looking up trees. She was gone perhaps ten minutes, returning with a sleek, dark-haired elf of a girl, all thick black hair, delicately pointed ears and skin almost translucent in the summer sun. Mick saw her and raised his eyebrows in his turn.

'You never mentioned another sister,' he said, and the elf at Mandy's arm giggled.

'Oh, she's not ours,' said Mandy. 'Much as we'd like her to be. Just on loan. All the Kents are. You know – he paints portraits?'

She could tell by the proportionate rising of Mick's eyebrows that he did know.

'Friends of ours,' said Mandy recklessly, 'from back when we were living in Quebec all that time ago. He and dad talk art and Mums talks writing with – '

'Yes,' said Mick, 'I can picture her. We had her text at school. Seller of Dreams. Must have been before you'd come up the way.'

'Probably,' said Mandy. 'Astra, obviously, is their living star.'

'Because of Mum's name,' said Astra helpfully. 'Her last name, before Daddy. And because of…'she frowned, apparently struggling to place what she wanted to say.

'Ardua ad astra,' Mandy said and Astra beamed. Not to be left out, she added, 'And because I'm their path to the stars.'

'That's different Virgil, though,' said Mick. 'Sic iter astra.'

'Mums' idea,' said Mandy. 'No one could agree on a name for her - well Teddy wanted one no one else had used to call his wife, and Mums was always good with Latin. Though obviously courting by conjugation was all her and Dad. The Kents just ran with the idea.'

Jims grinned and shook his head. 'Dunno,' he said. 'The way you tell it, courting by conjugation is the matrilineal inheritance of Nan Meredith's daughters. You'd better watch the babies.'

'By quotation, maybe,' said Mandy with deadly emphasis. 'And it was nothing like.'

She resumed her story, unfazed. In it, Mick tilted his head in inquiry, apparently struck by the oddness of Through adversity to the stars for family slogan. Mandy shrugged. Said afterwards, in a quiet moment, that it made sense if you knew the family history. All the obstacles and almost-engagements and almost-marriages and sheer stubbornness on both sides that had generally run interference.

'Anyway,' said Mandy, with a squeeze of Astra's shoulders, 'I guess I can trust you with our sprites. Keep them safe?'

Astra gave her a two-fingered salute and that was enough. Mandy looped her arm through Mick's, her head half-resting on his upper arm. His sleeve cuffs tickled her ears and smelled faintly of woods, of pine and wet woodland and new-cut hay.

They walked arm-and-arm through Struan, past the clucking old hens on their porches; Mrs Lubowitz with her lemonade, Claudia Pye with her piecework, and onwards, past the children with their ball-games, and further, past the network of hidden ponds and tributaries and into the woods.

The ground was dry and puffs of dust sprang up under Mandy's feet, settling and resettling on her shoes as she went. They turned at a style for the path to the Challow farm, and then walked through that, long grasses tickling Mandy's legs, past the outbuildings, sprawled tools and nosing animals, to the shade of an old, gnarled oak tree.

'Here,' said Mick, stopping abruptly.

That was where the otters were. Mandy looked at them, sleek, slippery and pink nosed, and frowned. They were nestled down among leaves and twigs, wriggling and squeaking up at her, little feet batting the air.

'They shouldn't be here,' she said.

'Yeah, well,' said Mick. 'I wondered about that. But it's where they were and I didn't like to move them. Without your say-so I mean. I couldn't find the mum, and figured you'd know better what to do about them.'

In the immediate present Jims laughed in spite of himself and said, 'I might have known. Trust the way to Amanda Meredith's heart to be through an animal. I take it all back about the Latin.'

Mandy rolled her eyes. 'Impossible,' she said, 'the lot of you.' And told him about how they had moved the otters, gently because they were wee and eel-slick, the way they wriggled, down to one of Mandy's pet ponds. She explained how this was better suited for them, the mud of the nearby slope for slipping on, the water for plashing in later, the reed grasses and greens for eating. She shrugged, lying on the hot sugar sand of Prince Edward Island and said, 'It was nothing, really.'

'Oh yes,' said Jims. 'Bet it was so much of nothing you let little Astra and the babies come out with you two to look after them.'

Mandy hummed, vague and non-comital. Jims grinned. 'Told you so,' he said. 'You didn't, did you?'

'They were otters,' said Mandy. 'I didn't really think she'd be all that interested in the care and management thereof.'

'Mm,' said Jims. 'And you went on your own did you, to look after the otters?'

'Course,' said Mandy, laconic. 'There wasn't any point Mick trekking all that way out to pick me up and them double backon himself, was there? Much more efficient our way.'

Jims weighed the merits of pointing out this casual, arbitrary our and decided against it. Some battles weren't worth it. Even so, Mandy rolled two brilliant, hazel eyes expressively and said, 'You're as bad as Pete,' which necessitated her explaining this local character.

Jims duly gathered the boy was native to some local tribe, and an adept fisher, and that he had looked up one afternoon to see Mandy and Mick busied over the otter babies and categorically refused to accept such a clandestine explanation of their watery meeting. Even though, as per Mandy, it was obvious they were looking after the otters, because you could hear the squeaking they made as they wriggled and tumbled out of Mandy's arms to get to the food she'd brought them. Plants were some of it, as were crayfish, the smell of them intensifying in the summer sun. Pete was either oblivious, unimpressed, or both.

'Is that what they're calling it, these days?' he'd said. 'Looking after the otters?'

Jims almost resisted laughing. But the colour of Mandy in the retelling, the crackle and bristle of the well-caught out – it wasn't Jims' fault, he decided, if he could see Pete's point. Mandy swatted at him and said, 'Well, go on then, your turn, if you know all about it.'

'Why?' said Jims, caught out in his turn.

'I'm making a picture in my head,' said Mandy. 'I'll sketch it for you if you're specially nice. Just for you, obviously. Not the world.' And she turned her attention ostentatiously back to her insect.

Jims watched her watch it and considered. Danger! cried the gulls. Warning! Shrieked some, internal, gut-deep instinct. But was it, really? Jims had already told Mandy so much…And then, too, as Jims sat on the white sand, baking under an Island sun, there flashed through his mind another couple, another love story. Not told under the harsh light of day, but in the seclusion of a bedroom that was not really a bedroom, Hera the cat as she had been in her glory, the local traffic of St George St humming and buzzing below the window. He recalled the jumble of Cherubs, and the particular slope of the desk chair he had appropriated. Please, Jims had said to the aunts, gangly-limbed and young as he had been.

It came back to Jims too the stumbling and stuttering of this story, and how his aunts could not tell it, yes, partly, because theirs was not the kind of love story one told, but also for no better reason than that they had never been able to tell it before, and did not, therefore, know how to tell it. Not to little, eager-eared Cherubs, not to Jims in his slow-dawning self awareness, and possibly not to each other, whispered in the dark. How could they have done?

Jims thought of this, of the inky, musty smell of the room that was not Aunt Cass's, and felt with a sudden, crushing conviction that he could not let it happen to himself and Tom. He must be able to narrativize this story. Their story. As much for any subsequent children that asked for it as for them.

So Jims rolled onto his back, and shielded his eyes from the sun, and told Mandy in his turn. He described the flash of a high, stained glass window in the university chapel where they'd met, the cut and colour of Tom's hair where the sun had struck it. How his eyes had flashed now in disagreement with the sermon, now with delight over some favourite verse. He told her about the terrifying moment when they'd stood on the threshold of us and that agonizing elastic moment when Jims thought perhapsps he had miscalculated, leaped into space and failed to stick the landing. Told Mandy too of the relief, later, of recognition. Of a kiss in the flickering gaslight of a cobbled sidestreet deserted, and late, some nearby church bell ringing the changes. Jims had counted them deep and slow in some oblique corner of soul that wanted to memorialise this moment always.

He told her how, in the long dark hours of Sissy's illness, he had risked the long-distance call, not from Ingleside or even Mum's hotel, but in the anonymity of the hospital phone, where no one would trace the caller, or would be hard pressed to, anyway. Detailed the things they could say, because it was safe, and the territory they had steered well clear of because the line was open and God alone knew what stray person might listen in. Jims recounted too, Tom as he had been the other side of the line, exhausted by the lateness of the hour, but commiseratory and anxious, because once, he too had had a sister and had loved her. How he had fussed over Sissy when she later came to visit, and of the moment Jims had looked up at the two of them laughing innocuously over something in the middle of the Cherubs' visit, and known fiercely, intensely, he would risk the world for this to last always.

'I didn't think,' said Jims, 'it happened like that. Not for me, anyway. I mean,' as he squinted against the sun, 'I knew it was like that for some people; Mum and Cap, Granny and Grandpa Gil, but I always thought that was different.'

'Everyone thinks that's different,' said Mandy. 'I think because when you're looking in, love is so obvious. You know? Looking at other people's love that bit of Corinthians – you know the one I mean? – Love is patient, etc, etc, well you see what it means. Not all the time maybe, but enough that you get the impression of what it should look like. But when you're in the middle of it…Sometimes that gets lost in translation, because sometimes nothing else matters but them, and sometimes you'd as soon murder them as not and so that kind of instant-just-add-water stuff we hear about, well it doesn't land.'

'Oh yes,' said Jims, 'You know nothing about any of this at all.'

When no spirited rejoinder came, he said, not without affection, 'You've missed your calling.'

Mandy laughed. 'Chance would be a fine thing,' she said. 'Anyway, not enough trees in church. I'd miss my friends.'

She said it with complete, unapologetic sincerity.

'Yeah, well,' said Jims, impulsively, 'I'll just have to get you out to visit, won't I? Tom can take my side. Maybe he'll bring you round, seeing as theology and all that is his bag of tricks, not mine.'

He was surprised both how easy talking had become and by how much he meant it. The gulls wheeled overhead and Jims found he was beginning to picture it. Mandy would travel down by train and Jims and Tom would meet her at the station. They would show her the area and spoil her with meals out and it would be safe, because Mandy would make them three, and they could just say they were her cousins from opposite sides of the family, or something, if the wrong people got too curious. She would play with Ganymede the cat, because Jims had heard about Mandy and her animals, and maybe she'd insist on tea on the back lawn, which was nice and secure, and Jims would play Thais for her. Massenet. Lovely. And it would just be – well, it would be good to share this.

'Theology?' said Mandy, incredulous, puncturing the daydream.

'Mm,' said Jims. 'There's a church. Nice place. They don't know, obviously.'

'Doesn't that – complicate things?' asked Mandy, as she twisted to look at him.

'So I keep saying,' said Jims.

Mandy, undaunted, had raced gamely on. Now she said with dizzying rapidity, 'The church, is it Grandpa's we're-all-probably-damned-but-won't-know-until-death-so-should-sometimes-eat-God-on-the-chance-we're-actually-Elect kind, or Iain's everyone-who-can-be-saved-is-savable-so-always-eat-God variety?'

There was a delay of seconds in which Jims proceeded to parse this theological distinction. When it had passed he said, 'I think they have names for those things you're describing.'

'I could never get past eating God,' said Mandy with feeling. 'So I might have missed the nuances. Anyway, which is it?'

'Presbyterian,' said Jims, as much for the fun of ribbing her as because he couldn't now remember Mandy's verbose and elongated theological monikers.

'Right,' said Mandy, 'so that will be the probably-damned-but-possibly-Elect read on the cosmos then? I ask because that would have appeased Susan Baker. She never could get over how horrifying I found the whole concept of God-consumption.'

'Well, if you're going to be literal about it,' said Jims, 'which, I am reliably informed the best Presbyterians are not…' He grinned. He mentally underlined the plan to invite Mandy to stay, because her irreverence would make Tom howl with laughter and that would be more than worth it.

'Go on,' said Mandy. She sat up and nudged at him. 'I still have questions. Favourite hymn, bible verse, hair colour – he can't possibly be taller than you, so that's out.'

Jims shook his head. The gulls were still crying warnings but it wasn't that. It wasn't even that the children were almost done with their castles.

'My turn,' said Jims. 'Definitely my turn to play inquisitor. For instance, why have you not run screaming to alert the cavalry?'

If Jims expected Amanda Meredith to dissemble, it did't happen.

'Because,' said Mandy, as she folded her knees to her chest and looked out at the frothing, foaming horses of the sea, 'the kindest man I had the luck to know, kinder even than my dad, or Uncle Peter – he lived with his brother. Now, I never met the brother, or even heard that much about him. This was out in Lac a L'Eau Clair and I guess Miri and I were too young to think about anyone much beyond each other. And probably he couldn't risk passing on that kind of high-calibre explosive to a pair of prattling girls. But we noticed the pictures. There weren't lots or anything, just a few on the mantle, maybe one by his pet armchair. And I guess he caught us looking, because that's when he told us they were of him and his brother. We were young enough, too, that it never dawned on us that they didn't look like brothers.'

'I don't mean they didn't look identical; Miri and I were hardly mirror images, so that wasn't it, though it might have contributed to my taking so long to work it out. But these two brothers…they weren't even a little alike. Not in the nose, or the jaw, or in their bone structure. They were, in fact, completely unrelated people. And they had loved each other. It was in those pictures.'

'Obviously, everything said that wasn't normal. It was against God and nature and I don't know what else. But he'd taught me, this man, to sing the loons down, and he built the most excellent fires. He called me Miss Witch, and kept us in the wildest ghost stories and the worst tea I've ever had to suffer through. And somehow, in the moment of realizing, those things mattered more than the brother who wasn't his brother, because he'd loved us fiercely, in his gruff, understated way, and Miri and I loved him. And God was love. I get all the rest of it wrong, I know, about eating God and Election, and maybe your Tom could fix that, I don't know. But that part went in. God is love, and where there's love, there's God, so I guess there was God in that house, first, when they lived there as brothers, and afterwards, when an old man tolerated two little girls with a patience even Job couldn't have equalled.'

'I think about it lots,' said Mandy, 'I've often thought of writing and telling him that I know, and I love him, and miss him and his ghost stories – and that daft horse he was uncreative enough to name Other Jack. But I never worked out if he could read, and it would never do to have the housekeeper read that to him.' Mandy shrugged clumsily. She said, 'And I guess if I couldn't run screaming from him, I could hardly do it to family. Especially because you're here, and maybe if I tell you, he'll look out at that clear blue water, or walk by the old family of white pines, and know Miss Witch never stopped loving him. That she couldn't.'

'I reckon he knows anyway,' said Jims. 'I know I'd know. There are so few people you can talk about it safely too – you don't forget that. It's why it's meant so much talking like this. I don't get to do it often, and it's felt important.

'To me too,' said Mandy, and smiled at him. Jims smiled back, because he understood the promise of it. Safe was part of it and I love you was another.

'You'd better not disappear on me,' he said.

Mandy tossed her head, all fiery indignation, and said, 'Not on your life. I'm very hard to get rid of, you know.'

'I'll hold you to that,' said Jims. He stuck out his hand and offered it. Mandy shook, and as she did Jims grinned and added for good measure, 'Miss Witch.'