At first, Fleda recalled, it hadn’t been quite so easy to let go of the familiar articles of domesticity. The carpet-sweeper she had owned in the old house, for instance, sometimes, even now, entered her mind like an old acquaintance – one she hadn’t seen for a long time and whose face she could barely remember. And occasionally she was surprised to find earth, instead of carpets, under her feet for most of the day. True, she owned a broom, had morning chores to perform, had to sweep the tent each day, had to fill the galvanized tub with water from the barrel in order to warm it over the fire for dishes and laundry. But there was nothing here like the insistent pressure of a house that wanted putting in order. There was hardly any call to order at all.

The carpet-sweeper, she remembered, had been called “Mother’s Helper,” a name she found mildly ironic since she had never been, and somehow knew she would never be, a mother.

Sometimes when it was damp or cold she felt a faint sense of mourning for the old house (though never for the rooms in town), felt a sense of loss for its calm, quiet, predictable rooms, and the furniture that filled them. Then she would wander through her old home in her imagination, taking note of its eccentricities, its bric-a-brac, the piano, the view from the window over the sink, until at last she came to the spot she had called The Poet’s Corner, the location of much pleasure and much disquietude.

There she had placed engraved portraits of her favourite writers on the wall, and copies of their books on a table beneath, a kind of shrine where, in true religious form, she could leave behind the perceived world. As David spent more and more time in his study untangling the mysteries of his battles, she spent more and more time with these other men, until the hallucination of their language, the strength of their fantasies became, at times, more real to her than the man whose meals she cooked, whose socks she darned.

Then the house became a kind of fortress where she sequestered herself with these companions, with their visions, their dark landscapes, until she knew the geography of Venice, of Florence, of the English Lake District, better than the streets of Fort Erie, the hotels of Niagara Falls. No church bazaar, no meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary could pull her from their influence. The women of the area became suspicious and, as she became more aloof from them, finally angry and cruel. The men were simply frightened. In another era she might have been burned at the stake.

Then came her husband’s posting to Niagara, the sale of the house, the storage of the furniture, and the removal to temporary quarters in Kick’s Hotel. The second that Fleda had closed the door for the last time, had heard the latch drop and the lock click, she knew it was the end of a period, a cycle. She took her books with her into the real landscape of her own country.

From then on, except in those rare moments when she mourned the old place, her home became a dream, a piece of imaginary architecture whose walls and windows existed in the mind and therefore could be rearranged at will. A house where the functions of rooms changed constantly, where a wing could be added or a staircase demolished, where furniture could re-upholster itself, change shape, size, period.

Today, gazing past David’s socks, which she had hung on a branch to dry, she watched the ribbons on the survey stakes move in the summer breeze, still cool at this hour, and knew, for her, there would be no actual house, not soon, not ever. The stakes marked out a dream, an illusion, which if laboured into permanence, would produce a similar fortress and the feeling of caged torpor she was now beginning to associate with her last dwelling. She walked over to the space that she and David had carefully paced out and, on impulse, swung her arm right through the spot where the library windows ought to have been, feeling the cold, free air on her wrist as she did so. Then, stepping lightly over the string which connected the stakes, she began to walk right through the non-existent walls.

She had broken out of the world of corners and into the organic in a way that even her beloved poets in their cottages and villas hadn’t the power to do, and the acre had become her house. The acre and the whirlpool. Predictable flux, entry and exit of animals, birds, cloud formations, phases of the moon. The arrival and departure of men, returning to their rooms, to rectangles and corners, while she breathed whirlpool and kept her place there and her fire. The tent functioned for her merely as a shelter. And, unlike a real house, it was capable of motion and response; sagging a bit after a storm, billowing and flapping in the wind.

She was standing where the kitchen should have been, her body immersed in a transparent pantry cupboard, when Patrick took up a final, permanent residence in her mind. The poet. Released from boundaries, from rectangles, basements, attics, floors and doors, she felt free to allow him access, whatever form that access might take. Every cell in her body, every synapse in her brain, demanded the presence of the poet in her life. As if all the reading, all the dreaming, had been one long preparation for his arrival.

His arrival, which coincided so neatly with her departure. Departure from everything she had assumed she would be; from the keeping of various houses, from the sameness of days lived out inside the blueprint of artificially heated rooms, from pre-planned, rigidly timed events – when this happened in the morning and that happened in the afternoon, just because it always had and always would.

Fleda walked over to the tent and opened its soft door easily with the back of her hand. The mosquito netting clung for a moment to one of her shoulders then dropped comfortably back into place. Then, moving her fingers through skeins of wool and spools of thread in her sewing basket, she soon grasped cold steel. Holding the blades downwards for safety, she took the scissors with her to the outdoors and placed them on a stump in the sunlight where they shone with an unusual, almost foreign, brilliance. Then she began to pull the pins out of the bun at the back of her neck.

As she cut her long, long hair to a spot just below her shoulders, she remembered the years it had taken her to grow it; how, since she had been an adult, there had always been the morning problem of doing up her hair and how that problem would exist no longer. The act of cutting her hair now was difficult and required strength as it was thick and often resisted the blades. She managed, however, by separating it into six parts as her mother always had when she braided it for school. The severed portions Fleda paid no attention to whatsoever, merely flung them to the wind or onto the ground. Finishing, she brushed off her skirt, and the part of her back she could reach, and decided to walk down the path to the whirlpool.

She hadn’t gone more than twenty steps down the bank when she remembered the scissors and, wanting to return them to her work basket, she changed her direction.

Then she saw Patrick and stopped.

The poet, darkly dressed, his back bent, collecting her discarded hair; stuffing first the pockets of his trousers and then his jacket with it, moving from place to place, chasing the strands that were beginning to be carried away by the wind.

Gradually Fleda understood that he had watched her before, and often, and the knowledge both frightened and delighted her. “How wonderful this is,” she whispered to herself as she moved quietly away so that he would not see her. “To think that he looks at me.”

As she was returning from the whirlpool later that afternoon, she thought about her husband’s gifts to her. Books and books and now, finally, the poet himself in the flesh. Patrick, with the long sensitive hands and pale skin, his reddish hair surrounding his head like a burning aura. The weak, long, listless body. To think that he had crept through the woods like an intruder, a ghost, a witness, responding, and now he had crept right up to the hearth rug of a dream which had spilled through walls and into the landscape.

Fleda sighed and unconsciously walked right through the spot where the front door of the house was to be, heading back, once again, to the tent. Inside she picked up a plaid blanket and reached towards Patrick’s small book which David had brought only a few days before to the forest. Then, disturbed by the emotions that the sight of the little collection aroused in her, she changed her mind, felt that examining its contents, at this moment, would be an invasion of privacy, though whose she was not entirely sure. She glanced at the bed where she and David had spent the night, noticing the jumble of an unsmoothed blanket which looked as if it might have concealed an oddly shaped beast. Then, after running her fingers once over the embossed book cover, she left the poems unopened on the pine table.

Outside again, she walked over to the section of the bank where the whirlpool was visible, despite thick foliage. There she placed herself in the hammock which David had strung between two cedars. For a minute or two she looked down, watching the few seagulls who had ventured this far inland from the lake move around and around, following the pattern of the current. For the first time she felt the several parts of her world interlock… felt herself a part of the whirlpool, a part of the art of poetry.