‘I love you,’ he said, a hand on her shoulder as he bent down to kiss her good night.

In the morning David looked out to see the first early daffodils in bloom, their thin pale little trumpets no competition for the King Alfreds to come, but it was virtue enough to be the first. He would have liked to go out and work for an hour or two, to find about him all the intimate signs of spring, but he didn’t any longer feel free to. He was impatient with himself, to have somehow got himself into this position of being damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. It was far too large a garden for Mary to deal with herself, and neither Ted nor the children showed a gardener’s interest in it. Perhaps they might if they saw any need to. If he didn’t garden, how was he to fill his days?

In the desert no day was ever long enough, but what had he done but walk into the little town and back, swim, help with meals, be read to, occasionally watch television. If that essentially drab little town could occupy his interest morning after morning, surely Vancouver could provide distractions, but he looked down at the skyline of high rises with distance.

‘“When the city lies at the monster’s feet, there are left the mountains.”’ Was it Jeffers?

David hadn’t been up Grouse Mountain for years, but the idea of sitting in the chair lift, his legs dangling, naked of skis, among the athletic young had no appeal for him. He hadn’t walked in Stanley Park for years either. He had always thought of it as a place to take children to the zoo or aquarium or for a ride on the little train, but lots of old people without the excuse of children simply walked about or sat on benches at Lost Lagoon feeding the birds, and they were not really what his melodramatic career might have led him to believe, either child molesters or seducers of young boys.