And so it had proved: Coming here, I had known what the village would look like before we drove into it; I had anticipated Mrs Gordimer and her work, known what the Lodge would look and feel like before I turned the key, and been able to lay my hands on specific items without having to pat around blindly for what logic told me had to be here. I remembered this house, in a way I did not my more permanent home in Pacific Heights, where each event, it seemed, had to be laboriously prised open, each person and memory all but chiselled from the walls.

The Lodge, I thought, was how memory was supposed to work: fully and openly, not grudgingly and piecemeal.

So then why was the third dream so damnably insistent? Not a physical hidden room, not the general opening up of my past—what? What was it I hadn't yet explored, what did I still shy away from confronting?

(Their deaths) my mind whispered to me, but before the phrase was complete I was already on my feet and moving to the kettle, reaching for the tin of coffee, wondering even if Flo had left one of her cigarettes downstairs because although I didn't normally smoke I found myself craving one, the nicotine and the calming ritual of lighting and puffing.

While the coffee was brewing I went to my bedroom and put on some warmer clothes, then took a cup outside where I could sit on the terrace and watch the stars fade, but as soon as I had sat on the low stone wall and drawn my feet up the whisper came again.

(Their deaths.)

I jumped down from the wall, took a swallow of the scalding brew, and set the cup down again, where it clattered so badly it nearly leapt from its saucer. The air of the terrace was suddenly cold, and I hugged my coat around me and walked to the end of the stones and back again, pausing again to take another drink from the cup that persisted in shaking between my hands. I paced to the end of the terrace and back again until I began to feel like some lion in its cage, then abandoned the coffee and the terrace and set out blindly across the wet grass.

(They died) and Yes, damn it, they died, and the immediate cause of their deaths was my irritable adolescent self tormenting my brother and forcing my father to take his eyes off the road. Only he shouldn't have done so, because he was an experienced driver and almost never did that, he'd driven across the country and never got into trouble, not once, and it was a terrible road but he knew it was a terrible road and he was well used to it.

But other people who knew the road went off it as well, as evidenced by the thin insurance man clambering around on the rocks in precisely that spot.