As far as her husband was concerned nothing had changed.

But for Fleda, who had been training herself to look for nuances, everything had. Something about the way Patrick’s eyes moved told her that, even though he behaved with utter courtesy towards her when he visited, there would be no turning back from their confrontation in the forest. He was gone. Or perhaps the part of her that he had secretly examined had been dismissed by him, simply eliminated by a new brand of selective amnesia. Once, just days ago, he had still looked at her. But not now.

She felt like an abandoned house. He was closing doors, drawing curtains, nailing windows shut. The dream, the image he had created was being boarded up, condemned, and its demolition had already begun.

His eyes travelling from place to place when she was there, never stopping, avoiding focus. It was as if he were watching a frantic insect, trapped in the tent, moving, moving, never coming to rest. Outside, they followed the flight of birds, the passing of clouds, the unpredictable behaviour of the wind in the trees. At night he gazed at fire, but uncontemplatively… he actually scrutinized it, mirroring its erratic movements with his new, restless eyes.

Her first reaction was anger. How could he disappear, go from her like this? She had felt his attention. They had talked once, maybe twice… never really touched, but she had known about the focus of his mind. And now this was gone; the complex symbolism that had described the meaning behind the meaning. This absence was something taken from her… leaving her flat and empty, and the life she had lived before became impossible to re-enter.

Fleda’s second reaction was pain; a sense of loss so brutal it stunned and confused her. How could she possibly lose something she had never had? No matter. This was foreign matter clogged in her throat, choking her, but not quite. It would neither completely leave her nor completely suffocate her. Not a terminal but a chronic disease.

And then, to make his act of treason, of denial, complete and sure, Patrick removed her last hope. He did not stay away. If he had, she might have been able to move these tiny particles of experience into her memory, place them in a special chamber and make them beautiful. As it was, he was now, more than ever, present in their lives; unravelling what he had woven. She knew, and she suspected he knew, that his extended presence after this change would continuously diminish her in his own memory, possibly even in hers. She would shrink and shrink, years would move out from her like an unblemished highway, until she would become a detail lost in the greater whole. Eventually, she might disappear altogether.

This was too much for her to bear. She would not be discarded, disposed of like this. She had felt his attention around her, even when he wasn’t there. She had felt herself a part of his quest, his desire to break free, to attempt the whirlpool. Part of the creation of poetry.

As if to fill his former ambiguous silence – the space that Fleda knew she had occupied – with evidence of the ordinary, he began to talk. He talked and talked… about suspension bridges, about the St. David’s buried gorge, about the war, about Indians, about Confederation. He talked about the Fenian Raids, the spiral nebulae, Walt Whitman and Butler’s Rangers. He talked about the Falls, how they were eating their way up the Niagara River. A terrifying image, he announced… sublime! They might, in time, devour the whole borderline. David had laughed then, delighted by the young man’s wit, his cleverness.

In a subtle shift of alliance, he entered David’s territory, cunningly, as if he had been there all along. Fleda was isolated, other, driven to remote corners of the acre, taking long, desperate walks along the bank overlooking the whirlpool, while they talked and talked, excluding her.

No day was safe from him. Once, Fleda returned in the late afternoon to the sound of hammers bouncing from tree to tree. Three carpenters had just begun work on the carriage house which was to be situated just beyond the main building. Patrick and David had opened a bottle of wine in celebration, were toasting the building, the invisible house, each other. Patrick was standing in front of David.

“Next year I’ll come back and you will have built it, a house, right here, where once there was nothing at all.”

Nothing at all, thought Fleda, unobserved, though standing near them in the forest. Nothing, nothing at all.

She would send him away, she decided. She would not let his betrayal slide away without comment. She would make an articulate summary of what she felt, what she knew had happened. She would bring it to his attention, his attention, and then she would send him away.

The anger awakened her in the middle of the night, pounding in her ears. And the pain stayed, lodged in her throat, a piece of glass, a rusty tin can, a bundle of burdock.

Corners were being introduced into her geography, accompanied by enthusiastic comments from the men. The building was a woman. “She looks good, don’t you think? Shouldn’t she have a back door too? She’ll be big enough for two good-sized carriages.” Pushing back their hats, they stood looking upwards at timber, at straight lines and corners, at the artificiality of geometric order. Fleda held on to the tent, even though she began to feel it was becoming extinct. A memory, a monument to another fading time.

In the end she did nothing at all. She let him go and she let him stay. She did not speak her pain, her anger. She began to write small notes to herself, tiny, etched, painful lines on torn paper. These she hid in her long sleeves or in her corset. She recorded her dreams; ones where he was conclusively absent or conclusively present, ones where he appeared as a bird or a fish. She leafed, for the first time, through his book, vaguely noting a word here or there and letting no word touch her.

She let him go. The man who visited had nothing to do with the other, the one in her dreams, the absent one. She was able, within days, to speak pleasantly to the man who visited, while mourning steadily for the one who had, as she perceived it now, completely abandoned her. This visitor was David’s friend, a man she could talk with but one she was closed to.

The other in the dream house in her mind.