“What was it like in yours?” Grace Kimlock asked. “Edward used to talk about your mother. She must have been an extraordinary woman, really—she painted, wrote poetry or something, didn’t she?—gardened …” She looked at Isabel expectantly over the rim of her coffee cup. But Isabel was thinking, That is what a life adds up to, the things one does. Her mother, defined like this, had no reality, loomed up out of focus. How to say it right?

“Somehow she was full of life, it was that. Wonderfully responsive to everything—a child’s game, the light on leaves—she was always there so completely”—Isabel faltered, turned to Julia—“how little the words mean.”

“She shouldn’t have died,” Grace Kimlock said. “It did something to Edward.” She seemed unconscious of the implied rebuke, but Isabel colored.

“She didn’t want to die,” she said quickly. The fact that Edward had wanted to die rushed into the silence as the three women sat and looked at the fire. After a pause, Isabel went on, “It was Edward’s year at Oxford. She wouldn’t let me tell him, and she only lived as long as she did because she meant to, willed it, kept her heart beating somehow for his sake. The last thing she said was lovely’ about a little green orchid someone had sent. That,” Isabel added, “was very like her.” She was suddenly grateful to these two strangers, to these two friends of Edward’s for making it possible for her to talk. “You’re quite right, Miss Kimlock,” she said quite seriously, “you’ve startled me into telling things I haven’t ever spoken aloud.”

Grace flashed a look of triumph at Julia, but Julia, lost in her own thoughts, was looking at the fire. Was it the orchid? Something led her to say, “It’s strange but these last years I’ve almost forgotten that side of Edward, the passionate love of beauty.” Stretching her hands to the fire as if from some hunger, she said, “But of course it was always there. Did you ever go to a museum with him, Grace?”

“No,” Grace answered shortly. She couldn’t really bear what anyone else knew of Edward.

“I did, that summer in France. We ran into him quite by chance at Albi and saw the Toulouse-Lautrecs together. I’ll never forget the way Edward lit up then, how he could make one see. I expect he got that from your mother.” She turned to Isabel, drawing her in again.

“And what did he get from your father?” Grace Kimlock leaned forward to ask for another cup of coffee.

Isabel froze. This was a question she had never asked herself. Her mind raced ahead while she said, “They didn’t get on, never did. Maybe they were too much alike.”

“Edward never talked about his father.”