‘– find out just precisely where we want to—’ she was saying, taking a book off the shelf behind her. She opened the book and handed it to him. ‘Will you—?’ Jonathan looked at her in terror. ‘Don’t be shy.’

He ran his hand over the words, closed the book and handed it back to her.

‘Too hard?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘“A is for ax,”’ he said. ‘“B is for box.” “Do you not love to play a game of ball?”’

They started part way through the McGuffey Third Reader, at just the point the Stoke children had reached when the plague of grasshoppers descended on the homestead and Benbow Wikin had struck his bargain with Alvah for the production of Wikin’s Sweetbrier: ‘Alvah Stoke to manufacture. George Stoke to sell around.’

12

This first reading lesson in Helen’s study left my grandfather drenched with sweat. After it she led him to a second-floor room in one of the barns. On the door outside there was a plaque that said STUDY-BEDROOM NO. 7 where everything smelled of wax polish, clean linen and of the pine trees outside the window. The bed had an embroidered coverlet over it. He peeked in the bureau drawers, discovered a lavender sachet, sniffed it, replaced it. He opened the closet door, took off his frock coat, hung it on a wooden hanger, stood back to survey it: the best tailor in Chicago. He folded down the coverlet on the bed, then the cover, the sheets, the underblanket; he’d seen such materials before only in the frocks of lady passengers. He took his coat off the hanger, put it on again, picked up the Reader, read a sentence: so it was that he caught his own eye in this mirror in this house where College had been brought up and educated, well educated, properly educated: so it was that he caught himself frock-coated and in the very act of his own education.

Later that evening, at dinner, he puzzled over the two forks that lay beside each place and the napkin next to them. He hadn’t even noticed these things at noon. The men went to the library afterwards; books lined the walls, floor to ceiling, and Sebastian poured port from a crystal decanter. After dinner, Jonathan sought out what Helen had called the ‘bathroom’. This turned out to have a magnificent porcelain water closet in it with a pattern of roses and leaves. He tried it immediately, but he’d never worked a flush mechanism before, and the abrupt torrent of water left him trembling. There was a bathtub with two large taps – hot and cold water both, he decided, bending down to study the lion’s paw feet underneath.