In the dim library, Holmes gave a grunt of disapproval at the smell of must. This had been my father's study, where he had kept accounts and written letters, typing with remarkable facility on the enormous Underwood type-writer, its mechanism so heavy my child's fingers could barely propel the keys to the ribbon. The Underwood, like the desk and the two chairs in front of the pristine fireplace, was draped; the carpets here had been rolled up against the wall, and emanated a faint trace of moth-balls.

The stillness in the house was proving oppressive. I cleared my throat to remark, “How many acres of dust-covers do you suppose they used?”

Holmes merely shook his head at the disused and mouldering volumes, and went on.

As we worked through the rooms, various objects and shapes seemed to reach out and touch my memory, each time restoring a small portion of it to life: The looking-glass near the door, for example, had been a wedding present that my mother hated and my father loved, source of much affectionate discord. And the fitted carpet in the back parlour—something had happened to it, some catastrophe I was responsible for: something spilt? An upturned coffee tray, perhaps, and the horrified shrieks of visiting women—no, I had it now: Their horror was not, as my guilty young mind had immediately thought, because of any damage to the carpet, but at the hot coffee splashing across my young skin, miraculously not scalding me.

My eye was caught by a peculiar object on the top of a high credenza: an exotic painted caricature of a cat, carved so that its mouth gaped wide in a toothy O. But shouldn't there be a flash of yellow, right where that stick in the middle . . . ? Ah, yes: Father's joke. He'd found the cat in Chinatown and fixed a perch across its open mouth, then arranged it on the precise spot where my mother's canary, which was given the occasional freedom of the room, liked to sit and sing. How Levi and I had giggled, every time the bird opened its mouth in the cat's maw.

As I worked my way through the rooms, there was no entirety of recall, merely discrete items that sparked specific memories. I felt as if some prince was working his way through the sleeping events of my childhood, kissing each one back to life. Or tapping them like a clown with a trick flower that flashed miraculously into full bloom.

Not that I'd ever much cared for clowns, nor had I been one for fairy tales: The passivity of that sleeping princess had annoyed me even when I was small.