Chapter Eight — We leave to discover whence we come

What had begun as a matter of possession ended, as such things often do, as a matter of inheritance.

The painting did not so much arrive as consent to be seen. It stood where none of them remembered placing it, leaning slightly—as if tired—against the limewashed wall of Lavinia’s north room. Morning light found it without ceremony and revealed what candlelight had only suggested: gold laid thin as breath, lapis worn soft as dusk, a face rendered with such intimate restraint that none of them spoke for a long while.

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Chapter 7
Across the Sea

The evening announced itself quietly. There was no ceremony to it beyond the way the last light slid off the fields and the candles were struck, one by one, along the long oak table. Lavinia had set it with a deliberate elegance—linen softened by use, glassware thin enough to sing when touched, plates whose imperfections were earned rather than designed. Rahim noticed these things, as he always did, but said nothing. He understood that the room itself would do the speaking.

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Chapter 6 — Buried Treasure

The Ottawa River moved with studied indifference, broad and pewter-bright under a late afternoon sky, as if it had seen far worse moral dilemmas than those presently troubling two young people seated on its grassy bank. Lavinia had slipped off her shoes and pressed her toes into the cool earth. Rahim lay back on his elbows, eyes narrowed toward the opposite shore, where Gatineau rose without comment.

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Chapter Five
Escaping the Noise

They arrived in Rosebank on a Tuesday that smelled of cut hay and wet cedar, the sort of place where time felt padded, deliberately slowed, as if the land itself disliked haste. Rahim drove the last kilometre with the windows down. Lavinia watched the lake flash silver between the trees and thought, not for the first time, that anonymity could be beautiful.

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Chapter 4
Immersive Conduct

Weeks after the dinner party, Lavinia found that the townhouse no longer behaved itself.

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Chapter 3
Mr. Chesnick and the hidden portrait

“Yes, I’ll hold”, replied Lavinia King, bolstering on her shoulder the receiver of her ancient landline telephone attached by a coiling cord to its absurd cradle on the oak filing cabinet of her study. While doing so she looked critically at her fingernails on her left hand, ensuring that the manicurist had done his work properly. The nails glistened with lustrous red paint, the perimeters finely polished.  Mrs. King turned her fingers about for full examination from every possible perspective.  She didn’t approve of compromise. At that same moment she caught a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror.  She turned her head as though preparing for a photograph.  Good, she thought to herself. But before she could venture deeper into her personal assessment the response came on the telephone line, “Mrs. King, this is Jeffrey, sorry to have kept you waiting.”

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Chapter 2
The Terms of Disguise

They did not sit at once. This was the first rule, unspoken but universally observed: standing conferred no advantage, yet it delayed concession. The men with the briefcases arranged themselves with studied informality, as though chance had placed them where intention ruled. The man in the red turban—who, it soon emerged, was called Rahim—inclined his head to Lavinia with a courtesy that was neither servile nor familiar. It was the bow of a man who understood hierarchy and had survived it.

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Chapter 1
Greeting the other

Like music in the background she filtered into the hotel lobby unobtrusively but with the mystic allure of a theme recalled from long ago. It was an exclusive resort uncontaminated by numbers. She wore a diaphanous pallid gown. As she approached the front desk and was about to drop her ivory white hand upon the ringer, an attendant, struggling into his sport jacket, fully materialized and asked superfluously, “May I help you, ma’am?” Lavinia – for that was her name – turned and looked perishingly at the floor near the counter. She hadn’t spoken a word. The desk clerk knew enough to follow her gaze. Silently he stretched himself and peered over the counter onto the slate floor. Her silken white flats were covered in mud, red mud.

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Reviving my erstwhile stoic ambition, I arose from the lair this morning promptly around eight o’clock. I was greeted from the drawing room window by a distinctly winter view. Overnight the temperature lingered in the low minus teens, thus preserving the modest blanket of snowy perfection following the recent northern blast. Already temperatures are rising and are forecast to be the reverse image by week’s end with rain. The geography will no doubt recover its brownish earthiness. Whether we shall in the upcoming months beyond the Winter Solstice be spared mounting layers of snow is never assured by the Farmer’s Almanac projection. Certainly it appears to me that in the past several years we’ve endured less snow than when I was young (when – as I like to quip – we went to church through the steeple).

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If you haven’t read Plutarch’s Moralia (customs and mores) I recommend it to you. It is plainly but intelligently written and easy to read – as well as beguiling. Plutarch (c.46–c.120) was a Greek biographer and philosopher belonging to the Equestrian order of Rome. Plutarch’s antiquity does not compromise his writing. Astonishingly the same things mattered then as do now. Moralia contains unique and unexpected topics, among them talkativeness, curiosity, shyness, anger, how one can praise oneself without exciting envy, against borrowing money and how one may discern a flatterer from a friend (plus many more of equal relevance and amusement).

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