She gave a little sigh, and the glowing ember sagged to the ground. “No, I suppose not.”

“Flo?” I said, hesitant about offering advice. “You know, one thing I have found, that it helps a lot to have some kind of interests outside of the marriage itself.”

“Easy for you to say. I had to have help getting through high school.”

“You did a magnificent job converting your house.”

“I did, didn't I?” she said proudly.

“What about that?”

“What, decorating? You mean as a job?”

“As a profession you love. You have the skills, and you have the social contacts necessary. Think about it.”

“Hm,” she said. “I will.”

The sound of splashing reached us, but before he got close enough to hear our voices, I hurried to ask, “But tell me, Flo, what happened to your father? If he didn't die in France, where is he?”

“Oh, I think he did die in France, just not the way Mummy says. You see, he wrote to tell her that he was going to join the French army, which by that time was taking pretty much anyone, even broken-down men in their late forties. He'd been living in Paris—he had a half-sister there, about fifteen years younger than him. His father had left his first wife and remarried—divorces seem to run in Daddy's family. Anyway, that was the last we heard from him. Rosa, his half-sister, wrote at Christmas, 1918, to say that he had gone missing in action in September, three months before. So I suppose in the end, he became a little more responsible after all.”

“It sounds like it.”

“Anyway, I'm sorry he's gone. He wasn't around a whole lot, but he was fun.”

We sat in silence for a moment of eulogy, then Flo jumped to her feet and picked her way down to the water. In a minute, the swimmer got close enough that she could speak with him, and the two joked and carried on like . . . well, like an old married couple.

Two hours before dawn on Wednesday morning, I sat bolt upright in my bed while the dream of the hidden apartment faded before my eyes, to be slowly replaced by the dim outlines of my childhood room in the Lodge. I'd only had the dream once or twice since arriving in California, and this time it took place in a house similar to that of the Greenfields', except that the vining Art Deco motifs were actual vines growing up the high stone walls, and the thin greyhound statues were living creatures, mincing about on their impossibly thin legs. It was as if some long-lost jungle temple, overgrown with creepers and saplings, had been chosen to host a party of the fashionable crème of Society.