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government functions—” She looked up, saying, “There are some old photograph albums up in the attic, with snapshots of the Falklands, and of Antarctica. You might enjoy looking at them.”
    I like looking at old pictures. “I would.”

    â€œJust take the elevator upstairs, and you’ll find the attic stairs at the end of the hall. Go on up and feel free to poke around. Don’t expect tidiness. Neither desks nor attics should be tidy.”
    â€œOur attic certainly isn’t. Shall I bring the albums down?”
    â€œPlease. I’ll tell Owain you’ll be a little late.”
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    I found my way to the attic stairs without difficulty, and fumbled around on the wall till I found a light switch. The stairs were as steep as ours, and I climbed on up, smelling the fusty odor that always seems to be in old attics. It wasn’t quite as untidy and cluttered as ours, but Aunt Serena was right; it wasn’t neat. There was an old clothes dummy, or whatever those things are called that look like female human torsos and were used when people made all their own clothes. There was a straw hat perched on top, full of faded silk flowers. There was a wonderful old rocking horse, a big one, which must have belonged to Adam II, but probably Adam III had ridden it, too. There was a big wooden box full of books, and I knelt down beside it, pulling them out, and finding some of my old favorites, The Jungle Books, and Charlotte’s Web and The Enchanted Castle, books Mother had read aloud to us, and which had been hers when she was a child. There were others I didn’t recognize, all about explorers, and then there were some textbooks on marine biology, and a big one on economics. I could have stayed there for hours, looking at the books, but Aunt Serena expected me back with the photograph albums, which I found on some shelves under one of the windows. At least, I found two big white albums which had pictures of penguins and icebergs, so I dusted them off with
an old towel that was hanging over a wooden rack, and took them downstairs.
    Aunt Serena was delighted. I put the albums on the table between us, and she opened one and laughed and pointed to a picture of a man in a uniform right out of Gilbert and Sullivan, wearing a sort of cocked hat with a great white plume. “That’s the governor of the Falklands, not Rusty Leeds, but an earlier one, who was governor when Adam went on his expeditions. He does look like a character out of a musical comedy, but Rusty wears the same dress uniform for special occasions.”
    â€œHonestly? Today?”
    â€œHonestly.” She turned the page to a picture of a group of men in fur-lined parkas, with what looked like a glacier behind them. I recognized Aunt Serena’s Adam because, although he was older, he still looked so like Adam, Adam III, that it was staggering. And there was Cook, looking just like himself, though his parka hood was pushed back, showing a full head of hair.
    â€œEven there,” I said, “he looks like a monk.”
    â€œDoesn’t he, though! He’s always had a monkish quality. There’s something about him that makes him easy to talk to, easy to confide in. He has a strange, slightly unworldly quality, as though he can see around corners that are hidden to the rest of us. I have sometimes wondered, if he hadn’t gone into the monastery, if he had gone with Adam on his second expedition, if then perhaps my son might have come home safely. But that is foolish speculation. There are many things we will never know. Not in this lifetime.”

    We sat in silence for a while, and finally, to break it, and her look of sadness, I asked, “How did Cook get to—to cook?”
    She smiled. “When he and Adam were at Harvard, living in a big old house—did you know about that?”
    â€œA little. Cook told me.”
    â€œWhen they distributed the jobs, he decided that he would