It was a fault of age, David knew, to be glad to be old, but he was. He wouldn’t be either of his sons-in-law, Ted or Jack, so much more trapped than he had been between what they had been raised to expect and what they now confronted—a middle-class being peeled like an onion, stinging the eyes of wives and children for all they wanted and increasingly could not afford. Ted was afraid as David had never had to be. Ted gave away what he did, not out of benign condescension but out of a real awareness that there, but for luck, went he, and there might he still go any day.

As David walked along Granville Street, a street kid called out to him, ‘Hey, Gramps, how about a five? What do you say?’

He had nothing to say, past failure, past being frightened into generosity.

Stripped across every movie ad were warnings of obscene language, nudity, excessive violence, calculated to induce anyone but an old fogie like himself to join the line-up at the box office. He walked on through the theatre district into the sky-roofed tunnel of department stores, manikins keeping their own company in bright boxes. One display had been stripped down, leaving nothing but flesh-coloured torsos with bald heads. ‘Minimal nudity,’ David labelled it for the censors, as he passed on down towards the working water. He stopped in the parking lot of the train station where he could look out at the docked freighters, at the dark water, at the misted lights of the north shore.

He was cold. His right shoulder had begun to ache from the damp that was settling into his coat. He was too old to walk the city streets like a brooding teenager, yet that was what being retired and being a widower had turned him back into, a person who simply went out, having nothing but a marginal role to play in the strife and striving of family life, his destination this parking lot at the edge of the world, from which he had never had any desire to run away to sea.

Laura had said to him, ‘You should marry again,’ a suggestion that had shocked him, for, though he missed his wife and lacked her defining presence, he had no desire to hand himself over to yet another responsible keeper. He needed his freedom even when he did not know what to do with it, even when its only purpose was to humiliate him as it did now. He had spent his adult life not doing what he shouldn’t, being told to do what he should and doing it, occasionally with grace. Any way forward now had nothing to do with beginning again but somehow with returning to these blank destinations where as a boy he had broken himself to his life and lived it.