the name more time-erased than he remembered or than it had been when he had last seen it, but the same. He started down the looping road, brown as milk-chocolate after the rain, stepping along cautiously and surprised by the loudness of his footfalls. He hadn't understood how much he had been deprived of during his months in the City. The Art of Memory could make a plan of his past where all this had perhaps a place, but it couldn't have restored to him this fullness: these odors, sweet and moist and vivifying, as though the air had a clear liquid texture; the constant low nameless sound filling up the air, whispering loud to his dull ear, pricked out with birdsong; the very sense of volume, of far distances and middle distances made up out of lines and groups of new-leaving trees and the roll and heap of the earth. He was able to survive outside all this well enough—air was air, after all, here or in the City—but, once plunged down within it again, he might have felt returned to a native element, might have uncurled within it, soul expanding like a butterfly sprung from its confining coccoon. In fact he did stretch his arms out, breathe deeply, and quote a few lines of verse. But his soul was a cold stone.
As he went along, he felt himself to be accompanied by someone: someone young, someone not in a lank brown overcoat, someone not hung over, someone who tugged at his sleeve, reminding him that here he'd used to pull his bike over the wall to return by secret ways to the Summer House and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, there he'd fallen out of a tree, there bent down with Doc to hear the mutter of closeted woodchucks. It had all happened once, to someone, to this insistent someone. Not to him . . . The gray stone pillars topped with gray oranges rose up where and when they always would. He reached up to one to touch the pitted surface, clammy and slick with spring. Down at the end of the drive his sisters awaited him on the porch.
Now for God's sake. His homecoming was to be no more secret than his leaving—and as he thought this, he realized for the first time that he had intended it to be secret, had supposed himself able to slip back into the house without anyone's noticing he had been gone for some eighteen months. Foolish! And yet the last thing he wanted was a fuss made over him. Too late, anyway, for as he stood by the gate-posts uncertainly, Lucy had spied him and leapt up waving. She pulled Lily after her to run and greet him; Tacey more regally kept to the peacock chair, dressed in a long skirt and one of his old tweed jackets.
"Hi, hi," he said, casual but suddenly aware of the figure he must cut, unshaven and bloodshot, with his shopping bag and the City dirt beneath his nails and in his hair. So clean and vernal Lucy and Lily seemed, so glad, that he was torn between drawing back from them and kneeling before them to beg their forgiveness; and though they embraced him and took his bag from him, talking both at once, he knew they read him.
"You'll never guess who came here," Lucy said.
"An old woman," Auberon said, glad that once in his life he could be sure he guessed right, "with a gray bun. How's Mom? How's Dad?"
"But who she is you'll never guess," Lily said.
"Did she tell you I was coming? I never said it to her."
"No. But we knew. But guess."
"She is," Lucy said, "a cousin. In a way. Sophie found out. It was years ago . . ."
"In England," Lily said. "Do you know the Auberon you're named after? Well, he was Violet Bramble Drinkwater's son . . ."
"But not John Drinkwater's! A love child . . ."
"How do you keep all these people straight?" Auberon asked.
"Anyway. Back in England Violet Bramble had an affair. Before she married John. With someone named Oliver Hawksquill."
"A swain," Lily said.
"And got pregnant, and that was Auberon. And this lady . . ."
"Hello, Auberon," Tacey said. "How was the City?"
"Gee, just great," Auberon said, feeling a hard lump rise in his throat and water spring to his eyes. "Great."
"Did you walk?" Tacey asked.
"No, the bus, actually." They were silent a moment at that. No help for it. "So listen. How's Mom?