In Kay’s memory the two of them took picnic lunches every day to lonely little beaches, but it may have been only two or three times that they did this. Probably they bought what they needed in the village shops, bread and sausage and a bottle of cheap wine. Kay remembers that one day-this was perhaps the same day Philip was cured of his obsession with the room numbers-they lay on their backs on the warm sand and she felt something brush her knee. It was a butterfly, not large, but quite brilliantly colored in shades of red and yellow and amber. She thought of her father’s book and its brightly illustrated pages. Between the windows of color on the wings were tiny transparent panes edged in black. She held perfectly still, wondering what this creature made of the roundness of her knee, wondering if it perceived its own ephemeral grace. “Maybe it’s a rare mutation,” she said to Philip who had fallen asleep. “Maybe it’s the world’s rarest butterfly.”

This seemed possible. She was not just being whimsical. Almost anything she could imagine seemed possible and, for the moment at least, she felt she knew everything she needed to know to stay alive in the world.

“The world’s yours, honey, if you want it,” Kay’s Auntie Ruth used to say. Auntie Ruth was her mother’s younger sister. She arrived every June for a visit and stayed until the first of August, sometimes longer if she judged she was not getting on her brother-in-law’s nerves. For his part he was fond of her, but found her noisy chattering tiresome, and objected in a mild, manly way to her many toiletries lined up along the toilet tank. Kay’s mother defended this array of lotions and powders; Auntie Ruth suffered from eczema, also heat rash and various unidentified allergies. Besides, she got it all for free since her husband, Uncle Nat, was a pharmacist.

Uncle Nat was left at home in Brandon. He was too tied down with the drugstore, Auntie Ruth maintained, to go for a vacation. He wasn’t one for travel anyway, being older than Auntie Ruth, twenty years older, and suffering from piles and also backache. She, and Kay’s mother too, referred to him as The Old Poke. “I’d better drop a few lines to The Old Poke,” she would say a week or so into her visit.