I have almost always slept alone. A few nights here and there, yes, but even then the presence of another body often caused me to sleep fitfully and rise early. I have almost never, since early childhood, been awakened by another person. That morning I was awakened by George.

Slumped in the chair behind the counter, I dreamed I was trying to take a picture of my mother. I was watching the camera, which she had snatched from my hands, slowly tumble towards the rapids of the Genessee River when George shook my shoulder.

“Is Augusta still here?” he was asking. “Is she still here?”

“Of course,” I said. “She went upstairs, she went to bed” I put my hands on the counter and pulled myself out of the chair. “Where the hell have you been?”

He didn’t answer at first. His face was grey, his eyes bloodshot. “Why did that woman come here?” he asked. “What reason did she have for coming here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She didn’t tell me.”

“I couldn’t want her,” he said. “I don’t even know who she is.” He was looking at the curtains at the end of the room, the curtains through which Augusta had passed. “I never knew who she was. God, the nights I spent inventing her, trying to work out what had happened.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “Now she’s gone for good.”

“Gone for good.” He looked at the two Blue Willow cups. Then suddenly his face changed, turned paper white. He staggered a bit and then steadied himself on the stepladder on which Augusta had been sitting. I saw he was beginning to tremble dangerously. “Augusta,” he whispered.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

“She didn’t drink anything,” he said.

“No, I drank it all. What’s wrong?”

“Did she talk … did she talk about the war?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “Quite a lot. She talked quite a lot.”

“She never drinks, and she goes on and on about the war when …” Suddenly he swung away from me as if he sensed something menacing behind him. He looked around in an unfocused, almost desperate manner, then bolted from the room, through the curtains, and up the stairs.

I felt wretched. The dawn was weak and grey and it was still snowing. I wanted my studio, the pale geometric shapes I had been working with, their emptiness. The China Hall was crowded with colour, with subject matter. I found myself staring at a row of ridiculous tankards from England: square, arrogant faces whose smirking expressions infuriated me. The whole breakable business infuriated me — all the flowered tableware destined to carry bad food and encourage idiotic conversation at dinner parties. I was on my way to the door when I heard George yell.

I had never heard a sound like it before. It was almost musical, almost like song.

One cry. That’s all. A held note. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Then silence.

I have often, since then, thought about Augusta’s claim to unhappiness, her insistence upon the exclusivity of its ownership. “My unhappiness,” she had asserted. “Mine!” The fierceness with which she identified the singularity of her emotions, her state, is something that has preoccupied and perplexed me for the remainder of my life, for there had been a sense of triumph in her declaration. Each of us wants something that is ours alone, I suppose, some idiosyncrasy of character, some carefully maintained victory or sorrow. Augusta had her dead friend, the war, her drift towards morphine. Certainly she could have allowed George his neophyte failed marriage, his passion, his anger concerning Vivian.

I’ve come to believe there was something twinlike about George and Augusta, their shared war, their shared recovery, their knowledge of this for all the years after. Was Augusta defining herself in the face of partnering by clinging to memories of grey girls and hallucinations of lost children? Was she laying claim to sorrow? Or was it simply that by walking out the door with Vivian, George had broken the partnership?

But what did I really know of them? Augusta, as I’ve said, was almost a stranger to me. Perhaps George was as well. He had thrust the painted cup in my face, in the face of the life I had chosen to live, the art I had chosen to make. How long had he held all of this, held me in contempt?

Now, as an old man, I ask myself: How long did I refuse to look at George, to learn him, to come to know him?

I was about to leave.

I placed my hand on the doorknob, which I noticed for the first time was porcelain and covered with small bunches of painted violets. This pointless decoration sickened me. Someone I couldn’t see was shovelling the snow from a nearby sidewalk; a harsh, scraping, rhythmic sound. Through the glass panel of the door I noted one lone figure heading for Victoria Hall. He crossed the street at an angle, his head bent into the wind, his hand on his hat. I wanted to be that figure, walking away from the scene that I believed was unfolding upstairs; George’s yell, the inevitable quarrel. We were that close, Augusta had said. That intimate. And intimacy, I had always suspected, was one long argument. Still, I drew my hand away from the porcelain knob, from the delicate flowers I so despised. I was going to wait it out, speak to George when he descended the stairs. It was Monday morning. No matter what, he would have to be in the shop. As I walked back towards the chair in which I had spent the night, I heard the sound of breaking china. Despite her previous calm, I concluded, Augusta must have been enraged.

At 9:30, two delivery men arrived with a shipment of dinnerware. I thanked them, signed for the crates, watched them drive away. About fifteen minutes later a customer appeared and asked for George. I told her I was minding the shop, said she should return in an hour.

At 10:30, I called both their names from the hallway of the ground floor. I waited for five minutes for an answer. Then I climbed the stairs.

There are a number of formal things that one has to do after death enters a house. Someone has to be called: a policeman, a coroner, an undertaker. I am nothing if not efficient when it comes to formal things.

That night when Augusta told me she had sometimes used the drug, she had referred to it as “morphia” and I remember thinking that the word had a lovely, open, feminine sound to it. I thought about how George had said that he wished she had been involved in a less dangerous profession. Only after I had climbed the stairs did I understand that the danger in nursing lay, for Augusta, in the easy access it provided to the needle, the easy access it provided to the end of the story she had been telling me all night long.

But it was all hers, wasn’t it, this addiction, if that is what it was? A gift from the war.

I think. But then, as I’ve said so many times before, what did I know, what do I know about George, about Augusta, about myself?

They looked like children who had been playing and who had been overtaken suddenly by sleep. George hadn’t even removed his coat, though his hat lay where he dropped it on the floor and there were a number of dark spots on the carpet where the snow he had tracked in from the street and up the stairs had melted and been absorbed. I thought of the Nordic sagas that Rockwell so loved. I remembered him telling me how Burnt Njal and his wife lay down in the midst of fire on a nuptial bed wreathed in smoke, glowing beams falling on them. The pain. I thought of those old ballads of partnered death where roses and briars entwine on freshly dug graves. On the bedside table were the needle and the small, now empty, bottle.

The rose. The briar.

There was no note; no testament to the sequence of events that had led this woman and this man to the brink. I still believe it possible that Augusta’s death may have been a mistake, one last injection beyond the limit. But there was no mistaking what had happened to George. And he had left a personal message for me: the shards of his china collection were strewn like petals all around the room.

This was my first inheritance.

I remembered how he had showed his few purchases to me before he left for the war, my trivialization of them, his defence. I remembered that, since then, whenever I had seen him, he had assured me that I was still to be the beneficiary of the collection, including the newer pieces he had added. Now I understand that until that dreadful night he had clung to the belief that I might come to have some affection for the small, the delicate, the fragile. At the time, I remained staring stupidly at the mess on the floor, this reprimand spelled out in shards, which told me that George believed that I had never understood, that I was responsible, that the scene that greeted me in this boyhood room had been created by me as surely as if it were a painting I had completed with my own hand. It told me he was convinced that what had transpired was a deliberate act of cruelty on my part.

But it was much worse than that. It was an act of carelessness.

After the men had taken George and Augusta away, I returned to the China Hall, where I carefully unpacked the new shipment of dinnerware, making a display of a complete setting in the window as I had seen George do in the past. Then I tucked a broom under my arm and hauled the empty crate up the stairs. There I removed dustpan after dustpan of fragments from the floor. I washed the shelves where George had kept the collection and dusted the top of the dresser with a damp towel I had found in the bathroom. I shook a small braided rug out a window I had forced open and pulled the still-wrinkled coverlet tight across the bed. There were indentations in the pillows where their heads had rested and I couldn’t bear to touch them. “No, sir,” the coroner had assured me, “you won’t be needed. Mr. Kearns has a brother in Brockville.”

The older brother whose education was paid for.

The room was beautifully clean when I had finished with it. Getting the crate into the Packard was difficult, but I managed somehow to wrestle it into the back seat. I slammed the rear door, opened the front, and climbed in behind the wheel.

On my way out of Davenport I stopped at the telegraph office in order to wire Silver Islet. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to follow the old King’s Highway to Port Hope and make a right turn at Highway 28. Sara once told me that in winter there were no roads to Silver Islet, told me how she would sometimes ski across Thunder Bay to the small city of Port Arthur, often for something as simple as writing paper or to buy a book. I had no experience with skis, no experience with frozen lakes, but I could steer the Packard. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to drive north.