“Well, fancy that,” I said in the end, vowing to myself never to tell Holmes of my failure. We sat beneath the stars and the sliver of new moon, speaking of other things, and after a while Donny brought out a ukulele and sang in a surprisingly sweet tenor a bouncy melody assuring us that “It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo',” some of the words of which escaped him, and another tune (this one sung in a startling imitation of a Negro woman) about Mamma going where Papa goes. He played songs I did not know and others of my childhood, and although the ukulele has never been one of my favourite instruments, under the stars and beside the lake that night, it seemed the only appropriate music in the world.

Eventually, when the moon had slid beneath the hills and the Milky Way was a bright smear across the firmament, we took ourselves to bed.

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

Tuesday was a day of leisure, an unlooked-for holiday from care, during which we at last eased into the attitudes appropriate to a summer house. The weather cooperated in the venture, with a slight high fog to keep the sun from waking us too early, then burning off to present us a day worthy of the Riviera. Flo and Donny appeared, yawning and tousled, to exclaim in appreciation of the sparkle off the lake. Flo turned on her heel and went back to don her bathing costume, and while Donny was studying the potential contained in the cupboards, she trotted down the lawn and to the end of the dock where she stood, pulling on her red bathing cap, before launching herself off the end into the water.

Donny produced griddle-cakes (apologising all the while for the lack of some spice or other that his mother used and which, he claimed, defined the dish) until we were groaning, and we then merrily abandoned the mess in favour of reading in the lawn-chairs.

They had both brought novels, although at the moment both were buried in other things. Flo was reading one of the Saturday Evening Posts that Mrs Gordimer had left in the sitting room, chuckling over an F. Scott Fitzgerald story called “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” I glanced automatically at the book beneath her as I settled onto my chair. “Heavens, Flo,” I said, “what is that door-stop of a book you've got?”

“It's Ulysses,” she said with a giggle. “A friend bought it in Paris and smuggled it in disguised as a five-pound box of Swiss chocolates. Have you read it?”

“Not yet.”

“They say it's hot stuff.”

“It had better be, considering the size of it. And what's that you have, Donny?”

“Cross-word puzzles,” he replied, holding up a peculiar book that had come with a pencil attached to it. “Just hit the shops, and a friend said it was going to be all the thing. Can't see them catching on, myself. They're tough.”