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the New York material, in a way that I did not deserve. I was coated with the success of the city, as though I had built every brick of it. I was my own man, but these gestures appropriated from others kept rising up. I doubted at that moment whether Rockwell Kent even existed. And what made me laugh was knowing that other people were left thinking me such a strong character, when no character existed at all.
    It made me miss Gerald. It made me think of that last night with him, when he said, If there is one thing I wish, it’s that Alma were younger.
    He was referring obliquely to Kathleen, who was eight years younger than me. If he had a Kathleen. Often Kathleen looked at me, and while she admired my ambition, I could see she thought of a fixed plan. Fixed plans stifle me. She thought of growing old with me. She saw the plan of her life decided, and she did not have enough interest in opportunity. She was not attentive to the avenues of venture we happened to be walking past.
    I said to Gerald Thayer, Perhaps Kathleen’s not enough.
    Gerald: Enough is asking too much. Then he said, Is she lazy?
    No.
    Then there’s something. There will be something in her that’s praiseworthy. She will have a talent. If there’s a — no, find the talent and you will love her.
    I thought it was good sex, getting along, be unboring.
    No, it’s talent. And avoiding laziness. No one is enough. That’s why you have friends.
12
    Tom Dobie said that house on the Head belonged to the Pomeroys. They had closed it up for the winter. We walked into Irishtown, past the Stand where the two churches stood, around Jackson’s Quay and Grave Hill and down through Pomeroy’s fields, where Stan Pomeroy and Tony Loveys were cutting firewood on a sawhorse. They did not wave. Ice at low tide passed through the footing of the bridge. And was slit up by it. It was slit in two. Seagulls sat on the rocks and on the ice. Low tide, Tom said. The low water revealed twelve feet of dark wet rock and then the bright snowline, like a receding gum. Tom Dobie named every place we came to because I asked. Up Rattley Road, which narrowed to a cart path, the snow had collected in the corners of the path. Youre going to need your racquets if youre to push through this, he said.
    We left Brigus outright and the path widened to an arm of soft white land between the rough rocks. Printed in values of grey, white, and black, as though the land were an engraving done in zinc. There was no colour, except for the blue of the sky. Pointy tips of fir sticking off the horizon of hills. It’s a landscape on a human scale. We crested this and now the cottage that I’d spied with Rupert’s binoculars, snug and rough, in behind a screen of young juniper, their limbs coated in fresh snow. The house was quite to itself, the windows boarded up. There was not one footprint near it. There was snow here beneath the trees, and it had moulded itself and hardened from the prevailing wind.
    We stood at the gate. It stank of creosote. I was overjoyed.
    That house have seen a better day, sir.
    It will see even better, Tom.
    The little house stood on a sheltered terrace that had been dug from the steep hillside on the north side of the bay. It was just one and a half storeys built into the side of the hill. What you saw of the roof through snow looked sound and the foundation solid, and on these straight qualities I trusted. I was right to trust.
    That house, Tom said, havent been lived in for a generation. But whoever built her was thinking about grandchildren.
    We walked to it.
    Dont know who’d want to live in her, though. Youre closer to Cupids than to Brigus.
    He said the glass had been taken out of the windows and stored under the stairs so it wouldnt bust.
    There was four feet of level ground in front of the door before the hill began again its tremendous descent to the bay. The house seemed like a predicament, a toehold.
    What a spot.
    There was a stunted tuckamore, the nest of a