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his boat behind him. He was a strange mixture of genuine ineptness and deliberate clowning. He and Martin had vicious fights; when Peter lost his temper he would pummel Martin blindly and frantically, rolling his eyes up and crying loudly through clenched teeth. Martin said the sight of Peter made him laugh so much he was too weak to fight back.
    Joyce was fifteen that spring, really too old to play at boats. It was only because she was small that she could fit in it, with her knees up to her chin. When she was quite a way from the others and their voices were remote, she stopped paddling and leaned cautiously back with the spade resting across the middle of the tub. She had been working all morning (it was a Saturday), learning the dates of the American Revolution, learning lists of French words for birds and trees, getting Peter to test her. She would have her School Certificate exams in a few months. Her head was full of the sound of herself, reciting, repeating.
    The sky when she leaned back and looked up was mostly steadily gray, like a dull wool soaking up the light, but over toward the estuary the gray had begun to break up and there was an opened gash of surprising brilliant blue with scraps of milky cloud floating in it. She imagined copying those clouds in paint, noticing how they had a bright hard edge of light against the blue. Then she thought about the art room at Amery-James, which was up a flight of stairs over the dining hall and always seemed restfully separate from the rest of school. Instead of maps and blackboards and piles of somber textbooks, the art room was filled with a clutter of interesting things to look at: vases of dried grasses and seed heads, printed silks and embroideries, a carved wooden mask, a bright yellow kite, a sheep’s skull, huge pottery dishes with coarse bold colors and patterns unlike anything Joyce had ever eaten off in anyone’s home. The room was high and light and airy and the walls were hung with pictures, some beautiful and some queer and incomprehensible. There were a couple of drawings of naked women, too, which Joyce studied with furtive curiosity and which made some of the girls say there was something funny about Miss Leonard, the art teacher.
    Joyce heard the others shouting to her and realized she was drifting toward where the rhine ran along the edge of the invisible field, marked out by a line of shrubs poking out of the floodwater. She let herself drift for a few more moments, wondering what would happen if she didn’t act, if she let herself go, drifting on into the faster current in her ridiculous frail boat, perhaps being tipped out into deep water by a surge of turbulence or perhaps being picked up and carried onward, faster and faster until there was no return, toward the estuary and then the sea. There was no real danger, of course. If she’d wanted to, she could have stepped out of the tub and walked back. When she did pick up the spade she paddled with studied insouciance, making strong elegant strokes and not deigning to look behind over her shoulder. She was coming to know she could summon up this power to do things elegantly: not infallibly but often. It was important to know how to carry things off, under the eyes of others: the family or the girls at school. She wanted never to make a fool of herself like her cousin Peter, who had reappeared buttoned up to the neck in his school blazer and was hovering outside the kitchen for a chance to dry his clothes over the stove without his Auntie Lil noticing.
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    That summer Aunt Vera often stayed late at school; she was rehearsing the historical pageant she was putting on to mark the Festival of Britain. Ann had to stay too; she had landed the much-coveted part of Mary Queen of Scots. (There was a craze for Mary, and a poem about her all the girls knew by heart and chanted in the lunch break with real tears in their eyes: “So she lived and so she died,/