“It is, although the Cliff House I remember was a magnificently absurd Victorian monstrosity, so enormous and top-heavy it was a wonder that it didn't topple into the sea in the earthquake. We used to come here a lot with my father. Levi would build elaborate Gothic fortified castles using dribbled wet sand while I read a book, and my father would alternate between swimming and reading one of his dime novels. Which reminds me—do you know what I found on the shelves in the library?”

“Oh, Lord,” he said.

“Yes, three of the stories Conan Doyle published. Oh, Holmes, my father would have been so delighted by the situation. He had a very droll and complicated sense of humour—you saw the cat carving on the high shelf?” I explained to him my father's canary perch, and he chuckled around the stem of his pipe.

“Were the library books his?”

“A lot of them were in the house when he took it over. You see, his parents badly wanted him to remain in Boston, but he refused to leave California, and lived on his own here for years before they decided that, for the sake of the family name, if their son wasn't coming home, he might as well comport himself in as civilised a fashion as one could in the wilderness of San Francisco. They gave him the family house and its fittings to permit him to do so. I think they'd bought the books by the linear foot when they built the library—you know how it is, books look good on the shelves, even if they're never read. Actually, my father wasn't a huge reader himself—you may have noticed that many of those books still have uncut pages. He used to come home with a book he'd bought, spend half an hour skimming through it to extract the essence, and never look at it again.”

“Your mother was the reader, then?”

“A rabbi's daughter? Of course. Father used to say she was the brains in the family, but I think it was just that her intelligence was intellectual, his was practical. His mind grasped patterns—he could have been a superb chess player, if he didn't find the game so tedious. He loved gadgets, bought a new motorcar every year and tinkered with it himself. He was . . .” I thought a moment for a word that distilled his essence. “He was strong.”

“And your mother?”