“That’s something. Did you really get to meet them?”

“Almost…” As an undergraduate prank I had taken off my academic gown and laid it in a pool of water under the wheels of the approaching Daimler. Describing the incident, I realised that I had impressed Brigid at long last. When I entered her body she saw me as working for her, doing my bit to help the unborn child, but now I was more than twenty Canadian dollars.

In the next room David and Yvette were asleep. I was glad that David had calmed himself and was able to embrace Yvette without needing some elaborate ruse. Flying, and these matter-of-fact women with their direct view of the world, had settled him.

Brigid lay on her side and pressed my hand to her abdomen. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“I used to be a medical student.”

“Then you know about it. Yvette says it’s going to be hard in the last months. You can attract the wrong kind of guy.”

I was massaging the small of her back, in a way that I imagined young husbands caring for their pregnant wives. I felt the child stir, as if woken by the music. The likelihood of Captain Artvin being the child’s father was remote, but something bound them together in my mind. Assuming that Artvin was dead, and that I alone knew his resting place, as a fellow pilot I had some notional responsibility for this infant. I tried to think of Miriam, but her letters had become more and more infrequent.

“Tell me, Brigid, would you like to go to England?”

“Sure. I could meet the queen—you can introduce us.”

“I mean it. I have enough money.”

“So?”

“So we go together. You can stay with me there.”

“Together?” She turned from me and lay on her back, moving my hand from her abdomen. She pulled down the black slip.

“Why not?” I waited for her to reply. “You think I’m too young?”

“Just a little. You NATO boys … you’re going to be flying around with your atom bombs, making the world a safer place. Let’s get to sleep while there’s still time left…”

*   *   *

Her coolness hurt, however naïve my drunken scheme seemed in the uneasy light of the next day’s hangover. A week later, flying over Deer Lake, I tried to remember the position of the drowned Harvard. Somewhere to the northwest I had seen the turtle-shaped lake, but it had vanished into the featureless landscape. Warmed by the late February sunlight, the surface ice was beginning to melt, and the lakes were changing shape as the snow retreated to the original shorelines. Abandoning my navigation exercise, I flew back and forth across the white land, past the isolated water towers and grain elevators.