a dramatic cry and fell back against the garden wall as if Friday had shot an arrow through her heart. But then she stood up and said almost spitefully, ‘Have they no say in it then, these brainless men? These breeding bulls? These bees who will fall to the lure of the flower?’
For some reason, I thought of Silk, who was a closed door. Would he someday see a woman and fall in love? Maybe all men were locked rooms until someone opened them, and maybe the opening could only be done with love. But if love opened men, what did women do with what they found inside?
‘We can’t speak for men,’ Bernice was saying now, rather dismissively. ‘I am only pointing out that whatever reason we have for loving and wedding a man, we are bound by love to give our whole selves to them, not just our bodies, because of the children we will bear them. And when the children are born, our love is drained off for them and men get what is left, like skimmed milk after the cream has been taken.’
Magda made a face. ‘How horrible and bare you make life seem.’
Bernice shot her a look of friendly contempt. Then she said, ‘It seems to me that the old romantic ideal of falling in love for love’s sake is outmoded simply because it leaves out most of the truth of what it means to wed. That is, all that comes after the wedding.’
The conversation was interesting to me because I had never heard love discussed in this way, as if there were various recipes for it. My idea of love had been shaped by the tales I had read, and by Mama’s loves, and it had surprised me to find I had any opinions on the matter, however muddled.
I had got cold, sitting so long and thinking, and I got up stiffly, undressed and put on my nightgown, then climbed into my bed to lie shivering a while before I slept.
I dreamed that Rose was not dead but in a stone chamber lying on a cobweb-draped bed in a gown of pink gold, scaled like the skin of a snake. Her face was pale as ice and still as stone, yet there was a blush of life upon her cheeks and a red bloom on her lips. A great window behind her opened onto a snowy park and I watched tiny flakes drift in and settle on the cobwebs and on Rose’s cheeks and lips and eyelashes.
‘I must save her,’ I thought. Then a wave of helplessness washed over me, for of course if she were a princess it would take a prince to find her and kiss her back to life. The only way to save her, then, was to bring a prince to her, but where was I to find him?
I woke, and the room felt cold, as if the snow had blown from my dream into my bedroom. But it was only the wind from the winter park, flowing towards the apartment block and through my open window. The maid must have crept in and opened it, for of course she did not feel the cold of the park any more than she could see the snow.
Wrapping myself in my shawl, I padded across the room and sank again into the window seat. I stared out at the moonlit park, thinking of my dream. The grey sky sagged over the white ground of the park, and the white trunks of the ghost trees shivered in the wind. Were those trees inside the park or outside it, I found myself wondering. Snow settled in them sometimes, but the next day their leaves would glitter greenly. Then I wondered for the hundredth time what had led Mama to enter the winter park. If I knew the answer to that question, perhaps I would know what had happened to Rose.
The policeman in charge of the case had asked me soon after the tragedy if it was possible that Rose had gone into the park first, and that Mama had followed her, for while their tracks ran side by side to where my mother lay, the two might not actually have gone into the park at the same time.
‘But where is Rose, since her tracks stop where my mother’s body was found?’ I had asked, for despite all the speculation, there had never been a sign of any footprints to support the theory that Rose had