people—recognize each other. Perhaps one just has to be patient.’
San Fairy Ann
Having no community duty, Clover walked back alone from the Opera House in evening sun, thinking of the chattering girls and the women winding bandages like tiny shrouds. Thinking too of Victor’s dream, which had woken him many times in terrible fear—that he was mistaken, that these corpses he was burying were not dead. Somehow their not being dead was more fearful. Burning of the bodies … He spoke only in fragments about it, and had only spoken twice, but she thought he had the dream often.
Tiny green bugs danced in the golden air as Clover walked. Her shadow fell very long, stalking into the fields beside the road. Perhaps she would still feel patriotic about the war if he had not come back a ghost. How could the eloquence she loved so much be gone? His romantic gall, his openness in declaring love—which had let her be open too, for the first time in her life.
At the door Elsie met her with a shushing finger: the children were already in bed, she whispered. Clover went up, making no noise.
Victor sat at the edge of the bed, talking quietly to the children to let them go to sleep. These days he could not seem to stop his hands from fiddling. He was stroking Harriet’s hair with one hand and playing, playing with the old prop compass in his other hand. Harriet’s eyes had half closed; in the cot Avery lay staring at the eastern wall, striped with long strands of late sun.
‘San fairy ann, they say out there. When my mother speaks in French, Harriet, you hear her say that: Ça ne fait rien. It matters nothing. But San Fairy Ann, she’s another thing altogether. She hovers over the world, sometimes sighing and sometimes laughing a little in her sleeve. Once long ago, San Fairy Ann went walking in a wood in France, where every leaf had fallen, but it was not winter. Bare trunks of trees stood up in serried rows and San Fairy Ann wound her way between them, looking for a lost child. That child’s name was Harry—don’t worry, Harriet and Avery were safe at home, being looked after by their mamas, but Harry had gone adventuring into the world, to find their three fathers, who had disappeared some time before.’
Close to sleep, Harriet’s breath was given up, as Gali said to do in his breathing work. Gentry had said that too, years ago, Clover remembered. Let the breath fall in, give it up. Avery’s eyes left the bars of light to watch his uncle’s face, grave in the twilight.
‘San Fairy Ann has a compass too—but hers can point to more than North. She set her compass for Harry, and the needle wobbled and wobbled, winding round until she bent her wrist and the arrow could point down. So then she knew that Harry had found some sign of his father, had gone into the maze of tunnels underground, where his father wandered lost and alone.’
Clover backed away from the room, going slow and light, so the wide plank floor did not creak. She felt light-headed, and a little sick. But she thought Victor had been working to make the story not frightening.
When Aurora and Mabel came back, Clover tugged Aurora’s sleeve, pulling her sister out with her for a last breath of air. They walked around the loop of the drive, grasshoppers leaping at mad angles from their feet, and talked over the concert, less than a week away. Their skirts, shorter these days, still flowed around their knees in the wind that rose off the grass. At the end of the drive they turned.
The warm house lay in front of them, windows rosy in the darkness.
Aurora said, ‘Don’t you think you could stay here for a while? A year, for Victor to get better—Uncle Chum asked me to tell you that you’d be welcome as long as you like.’
‘On charity? We haven’t got much left, after the trip. I’ve got to find a gig soon.’
‘There’s plenty of money in the Indian Head account. I haven’t needed anything but a little for Christmas presents. We could take a little house.’
‘I don’t want to live on Bella either! But it’s not the money. It’s—needing to go. Some people are citizens, and some are nomads, I think. We’ll be glad to be on the move again.’
Aurora did not try further persuasion.
‘Come too,’ Clover said. ‘When we leave,