‘You’ve come to see me,’ she said. Behind her, shelves extended the height of the wall, stacked neatly with small glass vials of scent, each labelled with a rectangle of white paper.

‘I was looking for stockings,’ I said.

‘Nonsense!’ She pinched my elbow. ‘You’ve come to see me. You want to make friends and I wouldn’t blame you. Life with your Madame must be deadly boring.’

‘On the contrary.’

‘Hm.’ She studied me for a moment, tapping one finger against her lips. She turned and walked up and down the aisle of perfumes, selected a bottle, then another, and then hovered over yet another but changed her mind and came back. She carefully pulled the wooden stoppers out of the two bottles and placed them on the counter between us. ‘Hand?’

I gave her my hand. She undid the cuff buttons of my blouse and rolled it back to expose the white belly of my arm, then tipped one of the bottles just at the spot on my wrist where a thick, bluish vein branched off into smaller tributaries, and held the bottle there until a drop of amber oil fell from the spout. She rubbed the oil into my skin with the knuckle of her middle finger.

‘Other hand,’ she said.

On my other wrist, same procedure, different scent.

‘It takes a moment for the oil to settle into the skin. On you, one scent will have a very different odour than it would on another woman. Stay here a little longer and we’ll know which is best.’

So. I stayed a little longer.

12

Anouk

A Mennonite Farm, 1987

The last week of that summer, the summer of the wasp trap, Anouk and Nora and Red did the long drive to Toronto for Anouk’s appointment at the specialist clinic. Red drove and Anouk watched the familiar pass by the window: craggy walls of Canadian Shield rock that had been blasted open with dynamite when the road was built, in some places painted with decades-old graffiti; mixed forest of birch and pine, fir and maple. Swamps and bog land where dead pines, which looked as if they’d been scorched then cooled to ash, protruded out of water that was clogged with algae, lilies and milfoil. They passed a hundred lakes and they passed gas stations where you could buy gun ammunition and marshmallows and beer; they passed hand-painted signs for fresh strawberries, blueberries and corn.

Somewhere in the farmland north of Peterborough, where the fields rolled with wheat and corn and where aluminum-sided barns glinted in the sun, Red stopped at the mouth of a long driveway, which led to a Mennonite farm, because there was a sign he hadn’t seen before. Duck Eggs For Sale Here, the sign said.

‘These folks usually stay away from the rest of us,’ Red said, excited. ‘We can’t not go in.’

‘They only want to sell eggs,’ Nora said.

‘It’s an invitation,’ said Red, reversing the car so he could make the tight turn into the driveway. ‘And anyway, you’ve never had a duck egg. They’re delicious.’ Still reversing, his hand on the back of Nora’s seat, he turned his face to Anouk. ‘They’re blue,’ he said to her, as if this fact proved his point.