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uncle’s garden but in most gardens that I visited as a child. A few years ago, I saw in a newspaper article a list of garden plants reputed to be poisonous to human beings. Several on the list were plants that I had chewed and savoured often as a child.)
    The fernery, on the less-frequented side of the house, always attracted me. Perhaps some of the trailing leaves reminded me of the potted palms meant to suggest opulence in the line drawings of hotel-foyers or hotel dining-rooms where so-called romantic episodes took place in comic-strips that I had read. Or, perhaps, I responded to the comparative seclusion of the fernery in the same way that I responded whenever I found myself alone in a secluded place or an empty landscape or even whenever I read about such a place or such a landscape—by seeing myself and a young female person alone together in that place or that landscape.
    The person I most often saw alone with myself in the fernery would have been one or another of my three girl-cousins, the daughters of the well-off owner of the fernery. The youngest of the three was four years older than myself. None of the three, as I recall, took the least notice of me during my childhood. Two of the three are long dead, and the third I have not met up with for nearly twenty years. Even so, I am able to recall precisely the peculiar attraction that I felt towards each of my three cousins. I never felt towards any of them the sort of yearning that I often felt towards one or another girl of my own age whom I thought of as my girlfriend. That is to say, I never yearned to have a cousin follow me around or spy on me or interrogate me in order to learn my every thought and daydream. Nor did I lie in bed at night trying to see myself with one or another cousin in the far future as husband and wife in a house of two storeys on an extensive rural property. Perhaps my feelings towards my cousins arose partly from my having had no sister and no female friend of my own age during my childhood. My only sibling was a brother five years younger than myself. Moreover, my father’s losses from his betting on racehorses caused us to move from one rented house to another almost every year, so that I always felt myself to be a transient and likely to be soon snatched away from any friend I might make. What I most yearned for my cousins to do was to advise me. I never stood alone in the fernery without the vague hope that one or another cousin would join me there among the trailing greenery and would give me what my mother and my aunt would have called a good talking-to.
    My cousin might have told me in the fernery no more than how she spent some of the many hours when I was unable to observe her: what she discussed with her girlfriends at school or with her sisters late at night in the bedroom that they shared. Even this would have been of value to me, who had to put into my girlfriends’ mouths predictable words of my own choosing whenever I tried to foresee our future dealings with each other. I knew there was much more that my cousin might have told me if I could have earned her sympathy, and although I could never formulate any detail of this precious information, I could cause myself to feel sometimes, alone in the fernery, a pleasant dizziness merely by supposing that I might one day hear such stuff from a young female person while she stood so close beside me that I could see the faint hairs on her forearms or the pale freckles just below her neck.
    I daydreamed in the fernery only about the three female cousins of mine who lived thereabouts, but in other secluded places images of other female cousins appeared to me and advised me or revealed things to me. My Catholic father and my Protestant mother had each eight siblings. Of my eight paternal uncles and aunts, only three married, and these three together produced eleven children. All eight of my maternal uncles and aunts married and together produced more than forty children. My father