David had never been anxious about money. As a child he had never felt poor though he’d lived in a modest house in Kitsilano without a view and a good hike from the beach. He never thought to wonder where the money did come from that kept his mother from having to go out to work. It was true that the expensive presents he and Diana sometimes received were never from their mother but from unknown grandparents, somewhere in the east, his father’s people; but his mother never spoke about money. David hadn’t associated his mother’s growing attachment to Hugh Bacon as, at least in part, motivated by her anxiety about money. She told David only much later, when she was collecting her war widow’s pension, that she had pretty well spent her first husband’s insurance money and been as much of a burden as she’d dared on her own parents before she married Hugh. It had shamed David the more because he knew his mother was offering that information up as an apology, when David should have been on his knees to her to be forgiven for all he’d done to try to undermine her chance for security, and for his own mindless childhood and his sister’s. At least Hugh had left her and his children modestly provided for. When David asked about his father’s family, his mother said, ‘Well, they didn’t really know me. They were always very generous with you children for your birthday and Christmas. And they had other children, closer to them.’

David married, hardly realizing it at the time, into a family both affluent and so generous that Patricia didn’t have to wait to inherit before she could live where she wanted to. David sometimes wondered if he might have been more ambitious without that help. Instead, he had taken his father-in-law’s advice about investments and worried no more about being what seemed to him rich than he had about his mother’s threatened poverty. With interest rates what they’d been recently, he was better off than ever. ‘The rich get richer, my boy,’ his father-in-law told him.

Ted worried. His law firm, in which he wasn’t yet a partner, had let a few people go, and, though Ted himself didn’t feel immediately threatened, he made uneasy jokes about its probably being a better world when fewer people had the money to sue each other. David knew what a relief it had been to Ted to get out from under his own fifteen per cent mortgage, even though he’d lost money to get rid of their house. He knew the relatively modest rent he paid to David went into a trust fund for the children’s education.