I fervently wish to find Harold again, he in his yellow clothes, me in this red coat: together we’d be like a caution light and a stop signal joining forces to halt my old sadness. Dare blues try and barge through such a blaze?

15 Umbrellas

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7.

EVENING.

Mont Royal. Montreal, Quebec

AT NIGHTFALL IN THE TENT, Sophie seems unimpressed with me.

“What’s the matter with you? You’re jittery. You’re unfocused. You haven’t been to see Madame Bee at all, have you?”

“I went to buy a ticket but—”

“But but but. You didn’t go and see her but you did something. What was it?”

“I’ll go to see Madame Blanchard. Tomorrow…”

Is the old walrus on Sophie’s tent moving? She’s done something to its eyes so they find me like eyes in a portrait gallery, which I find disconcerting. She has painted, in the sea and around the walrus, some new small fish and weeds and flames of blue and green. I wish I could dive in. My coat glares in the half-light. Red is not a colour that merges with the walrus’s colours. Red wants to subjugate other colours but here in the tent it cannot.

“You’re preoccupied with something or someone—you have been since Tuesday—who is it?”

I fear that if I risk telling Sophie about Harold or Mrs. Waugh she’ll want to know all the details and give a verdict before I’ve had time, myself, to decide how I feel. But if I don’t come up with something to appease her she’ll wear me out with her questions, well-meaning, all of them, but…

“I was thinking about my mother. Her pretty miniatures—”

“Henrietta?”

“She kept them on a tray to look at when she couldn’t sleep.”

“For God’s sake.”

“She did! She had a miniature shoe, an infinitesimal harpsichord and even an umbrella, though no one in England had a real umbrella then.”

“They had. England invented bloody umbrellas.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Babies in England are born with tiny umbrellas attached to their thumbs.”

“When I brought an umbrella home from my leave in Paris I was the only person in Blackheath in possession of one. I was laughed at.”

“A likely tale. Did you find that story in the library?”

“It’s true! You know I still love umbrellas. Umbrellas have always struck me as graceful, multi-purposed. Do you not want my tales anymore?”

“I want you to get better. And for that, I need your tales to ring true.”