Thus Patricia had shrunk from David for months after little David died. It was as if she were pregnant with a grief that would never be born, and she wanted to isolate herself just as she had when she was heavily pregnant with David and could not bear the extra weight of his arm around her. To desire her filled David with unaccountable guilt, as if it were a taboo as strong as the one against lusting after mother or sister. Gradually he became impotent himself, and, though he had never invested much pride in himself as a sexual performer, it frightened him. It was against all instinct for their young bodies to close down against life like this, to lie together as if entombed.

Odd that he should take himself back there, not even in this room, for they hadn’t moved here until after the girls were born. He had never been so lonely, not even in the weeks of Patricia’s dying in hospital when he had to come home alone, or after her death when the loss of her had unmoored him and left him afloat on the seas of meaningless time.

If he had not suffered so acute a sense of deprivation, David might never have had reason to puzzle over the nature of desire, why he had never felt its real force until he was without it. It was then that he thought of his father, dead at the moment of David’s birth, and felt a peculiar kinship with him. At the same time David was appalled that he should be alive while both father and son lay dead. His child was a broken promise to that dead man. Only after there were other children could David gradually bring the two together in his mind, the secret male companions he had never sought out in life with whom he might claim common cause.

Peter Harkness was the only man David had ever felt close to. Peter had insisted on it, proffering friendship as other men didn’t without conditions, never objecting to the conditions David had to put in place. Peter had that kind of sexual vitality David recognized in Constance the moment he met her. It had nothing to do with their homosexuality. It would and did frighten David in women who might be available to him, and it was often crudely predatory in heterosexual men he knew. But Peter was like the sun, his warmth indiscriminate and constant. David responded to it as passively as a plant and was as nourished. He knew, if he had had a different moral nature, he could have been Peter’s lover. He could feel the unthinkable. And it did not frighten him. Instead it gave him a new sense of potency, which stayed with him even after Peter and Casper moved to Toronto.