Any effort to draw him away would, I knew, serve only to entrench him further; when he was drunk he had a perverse way of always wanting to do exactly the opposite of what anyone suggested.

'Does Camilla know you're here?' I asked him.

He leaned over, palm on the bar to brace himself. 'What?'

I asked him again, louder this time. His face darkened. 'None of her business,' he said, and turned back to his beer.

My food came. I paid for it and told Charles, 'Excuse me, I'll be right back.'

The men's room was in a dank, smelly hallway that ran perpendicular to the bar. I turned down it, out of Charles's view, to the pay phone on the wall. Some girl was on it, though, talking in German. I waited for ages, and was just about to leave when finally she hung up, and I dug in my pocket for a quarter and dialed the twins' number.

The twins weren't like Henry; if they were home, they would generally answer the phone. But no one did answer. I dialed again and glanced at my watch. Eleven-twenty. I couldn't think where Camilla would be, that time of night, unless she was on her way over to get him.

I hung up the phone. The quarter tinkled into the slot. I pocketed it and headed back to Charles at the bar. For a moment I thought he had just moved somewhere into the crowd, but after standing there a moment or two I realized I wasn't seeing him because he wasn't there. He had drunk the rest of his beer and left.

Hampden, suddenly, was green as Heaven again. Most of the flowers had been killed by the snow except the late bloomers, honeysuckle and lilac and so forth, but the trees had come back bushier than ever, it seemed, deep and dark, foliage so dense that the way that ran through the woods to North Hampden was suddenly very narrow, green pushing in on both sides and shutting out the sunlight on the dank, buggy path.

On Monday I arrived at the Lyceum a little early and, in Julian's office, found the windows open and Henry arranging peonies in a white vase. He looked as if he'd lost ten or fifteen pounds, which was nothing to someone Henry's size but still I saw the thinness in his face and even in his wrists and hands; it wasn't that, though, but something else, indefinable, that somehow had changed since I had seen him last.

Julian and he were talking – in jocular, mocking, pedantic Latin – like a couple of priests tidying the vestry before a mass.

A dark smell of brewing tea hung strong in the air.

Henry glanced up. 'Salve, amice,' he said, and a subtle animation flickered in his rigid features, usually so locked up, and distant: 'Valesne? Quid est rei?'

'You look well,' I said to him, and he did.

He inclined his head slightly. His eyes, which had been murky and dilated while he was ill, were now the clearest of blues.

'Benigne diets,' he said. 'I feel much better.'

Julian was clearing away the last of the rolls and jam – he and Henry had had breakfast together, quite a large one from the looks of it – and he laughed and said something I didn't quite catch, some Horatian-sounding tag about meat being good for sorrow. I was glad to see that he seemed quite his bright, serene old self. He'd been almost inexplicably fond of Bunny, but strong emotion was distasteful to him, and a display of feeling normal by modern standards would to him have seemed exhibitionist and slightly shocking: I was fairly sure this death had affected him more than he let show. Then again, I suspect that Julian's cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death kept him from feeling too sad about anything for very long.

Francis arrived, and then Camilla; no Charles, he was probably in bed with a hangover. We all sat down at the big round table.

'And now,' said Julian, when everything was quiet, 'I hope we are all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?'

Those days, I took an enormous relish in my new-found freedom.

Now it appeared that we were safe, a huge darkness had lifted from my mind. The world was a fresh and wonderful place to me, green and bracing and entirely new, and I looked at it now with fresh new eyes.

I went on a lot of long walks by myself, through North Hampden, down to the Battenkill River. I liked especially going to the little country grocery in North Hampden (whose ancient proprietors, mother and son, were said to have been the inspiration for a famous and frequently anthologized horror story from the 19505) to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons – a waste of time, I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

On one of those afternoons I wandered by Henry's house and found him in his hack yard digging a flower bed. He had on his gardening clothes – old trousers, shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbow – and in the wheelbarrow were tomato plants and cucumber, flats of strawberry and sunflower and scarlet geranium.

Three or four rosebushes with their roots tied in burlap were propped against the fence.

I let myself in through the side gate. I was quite drunk. 'Hello,'

I said, 'hello, hello, hello.'

He stopped and leaned on his shovel. A pale flush of sunburn glowed on the bridge of his nose.

'What are you doing?' I said.

'Putting out some lettuces.'

There was a long silence, in which I noticed the ferns he'd dug up the afternoon we killed Bunny. Spleenwort, I remembered him calling them; Camilla had remarked on the witchiness of the name. He had planted them on the shady side of the house, near the cellar, where they grew dark and foamy in the cool.

I lurched back a bit, caught myself on the gatepost. 'Are you going to stay here this summer?' I said.

He looked at me closely, dusted his hands on his trousers. 'I think so,' he said. 'What about you?'

'I don't know,' I said. I hadn't mentioned it to anyone, but only the day before I had put in an application at the Student Services office for an apartment-sitting job, in Brooklyn, for a history professor who was studying in England over the summer.

It sounded ideal – a rent-free place to stay in, nice part of Brooklyn, and no duties except watering the plants and taking care of a pair of Boston terriers, who couldn't go to England because of the quarantine. My experience with Leo and the mandolins had made me wary, but the clerk had assured me that no, this was different, and she'd shown me a file of letters from happy students who had previously held the job. I had never been to Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city – any city, especially a strange one liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Henry was still looking at me. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. 'You know,' he said, 'it's pretty early in the afternoon.'

I laughed. I knew what he was thinking: first Charles, now me.

'I'm okay,' I said.

'Are you?'

'Of course.'

He went back to his work, sticking the shovel into the ground, stepping down hard on one side of the blade with a khaki-gaitered foot. His suspenders made a black X across his back. 'Then you can give me a hand with these lettuces,' he said. 'There's another spade in the toolshed.'

Late that night – two a. m. – my house chairperson pounded on my door and yelled that I had a phone call. Dazed with sleep, I put on my bathrobe and stumbled downstairs.