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the garden. This part, edged with tea-tree, formed a sort of stage. On its far side rock-strewn, scattered with scratchy bushes, the land dropped and then rose again almost at once into a dune so dense with tea-tree it resembled a stopped grey sea.
    Propped on an uncomfortable bluestone seat at the centre of this stage, Kit felt like the picture of somebody enjoying a view. Near her feet stone urns held the stems of dead geraniums. She felt too aimless, too expectant, to stay still long. The sharp edge of the seat was pressing into her thigh. She got up and followed a gravel path around the house, stepping from weed to weed, flinching over the sharp stones. Everything, like her pale toes, felt newly exposed. Her mother had been a child here. Again in her mind, she tested what Treen had said last night. It was like glimpsing her motherthrough a camera lens: not young—impossible to think of her as young—but distant and reduced.
    Morning had not yet reached this side of the house. Kit stood in the house’s long shadow, in grass thick with unlit dew. The house was smaller, prettier, than last night’s arrival had made it. Its verandah made an outdoor room, ornately tiled and furnished with rusting wrought iron chairs and benches. Over the verandah, corrugated iron curved to meet iron lace and iron pillars. Behind that roof, corrugated iron rose steeply between two spires. Were there rooms up there? They had no windows; she had seen no stairs. The house had a lot of roof: under it, tucked away, the verandah looked private, those wrought iron chairs its one concession to the idea of a view.
    The front door was unlocked. Kit stepped into a square hall, wood panelled, with a chequerboard floor. A high skylight left the hall dusky where she stood but bright overhead, giving the impression that she had stepped a little way into the ground. Her reflection wavered in the mirrored hall table. Beyond it on both sides doors opened into wide, bay-windowed rooms crowded with armchairs, chaise longues, nesting tables, intricate decorative boxes, tapestried firescreens, sideboards, glass-fronted cabinets. The blinds were drawn in these rooms. The half-light gave them an underwater look. The tasselled curtains, the silver candlesticks, even the furniture seemed suspended in a watery dimness. On one mantel, in silver stands, Kit found two hollowed-out cattle horns: their outsides polished and intricately carved, their insides scratched with names, of cattle or people she could not tell. Inside each, at the tip, shefound rust-coloured strands. After she touched them, she realised these were the dried-out residue of veins.
    These rooms were everywhere crowded and vacant. To walk through them was to realise how entirely the house in which she lived was her mother’s house. The phone by a single white armchair overlooking the courtyard, a stack of hardcover books under the curve of an arc lamp: everything spoke of deliberate habits, of willed good taste. What was strange for her here was to be noticing so much: evidence that made no pattern, told her nothing. Her mother could not have been young here; no one had ever been young here. It reminded her most of the heritage house that her class had visited on a school excursion. They had filed along the hall. Held back by velvet rope they had peered into rooms: stagey, silent, flat as pictures. Here, though, she had stepped over the rope. At any moment, she was expecting someone to accuse her. She picked up glass paperweights, each with its swallowed treasure, with a nervy self-consciousness.
    Still no noise. Threading back to the entrance hall she took her bearings again. Directly in front of her, across from the front door, a square arch hung with crimson curtains opened into a long room, its ceiling and corners lost in shadows. Were those tapestries on the walls? The floor was polished stone, overlaid with cowskins and Persian rugs. On both sides of the arch a passage led away,