The addictive bewitchment of travel – its hued romanticism, the memorable enchantment of windswept beaches and thatched rooftop restaurants on open jagged rock by the sea, sandy passages wending along the frothing shore of an endless ocean, a distant horizon to nowhere and everywhere – these images of once boundless fortuity have begun to dissolve, evoking a fabric of reality more crucial for its estrangement from native land and substance. The enthusiasm of getting there is superseded by the peril of leaving. The inevitability of recognition exceeds the myth of discovery. The lonely avenues of circus entertainment, void of the hysteria of imagination and performance, retreat to the plain ambition of temporary diversity, its ferris wheels and rotating gondolas suspended in time.

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Conundrum at the North Pole

(Refined version)

The elves were having an awful time of it. The conveyor belt on which rode teddy bears, model cars, train sets, smart phones, dolls, dollhouses, and wind-up toys had jammed no fewer than three times already that morning—and it was only ten o’clock. Now it had jammed again, of all times, at the busiest point of the year.

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Marjorie liked Christmas Eve best when it did not insist on cheer.

From her armchair by the tall window, she watched the river slide past below—dark, slow, half-erased by fog. The day had never quite decided whether it was snow or rain; it hovered at that indecisive edge just above freezing, where the world feels held in suspension. She held her own small suspension in a cut-glass tumbler: Dry Sack sherry, poured carefully, the way she had learned to do everything carefully after a certain age.

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The Pembroke Regional Hospital in Pembroke, Ontario is distinctly part of the Ottawa Valley, the former timber run down the Ottawa River most notably from Renfrew County where the lumber barons are reputed to have achieved immense wealth.

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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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