Two and a half years before — the last time I had been in a room with her — Sara was no longer a young woman. Though in certain lights and from certain distances she could still be taken for one, mistaken for one because of her slimness and the fact that her hair showed no traces of grey. She wore her hair in a braid that hung down her back, or sometimes she wound it around her head as if it were a crown. Or a serpent. She wore it like that when she was swimming. Only very occasionally did she let it hang free, after she washed it and was letting it dry, or now and then when I asked her to.

She was, as I’ve said, no longer a young woman — maybe forty, or forty-five — but I can’t say for certain because she’d never told me her age and I’d never asked. We had regarded each other, Sara and I, from the opposite ends of a room I knew so well I could have drawn it, could still draw it, in my sleep. Have I mentioned her eyes? They were quite unusual, grey mostly, but with a yellow sunburst at the centre when the pupils were small. The last time I stood in a room with her, the pupils were large, the eyes wide open, as if she wished to absorb the most minor details of the visual information surrounding her.

It had been her father’s room, and everything that was beyond the windows was, as she had pointed out early on, her father’s view. I had told her that it couldn’t possibly be the same view that her father had seen since the mine on the small offshore island, the island for which the settlement was named, was in a state of collapse. The superstructure had been slowly pried apart, year after year, by storms and the lake, ever since my father abandoned it in 1920. Sara believed that there was still silver there and she may have been right. But in the last year of its operation a half-dozen otherwise rational men from good American families had lost their fortunes to my father’s obsession, his certainty that something continued to glitter under the water. And then in the end, all my father’s money, all of the shareholders’ money, was washed away by the superior lake.

Sara had said that her father’s view had included more than Silver Islet Mine. It had included the lake, the landscape, the sky; especially the sky, which was precious to him because he had spent so much time underground. He had loved the surfaces of things, she said, rock, bark, water. He had loved light. In that way, she said, he was like me, for I was a landscape painter at the time and undoubtedly talked about colour and texture and light at great length, even though I don’t remember doing so. I do remember speaking to her about the working class, about strikes and unions, working conditions and social injustices. I thought I was interested in the working class, had seen in Sara the embodiment of all that, and so I lectured her on the rights and privileges that, in my opinion, her father ought to have demanded from various bosses. Lectured her until one day she rose from her chair, walked across the floor, opened a cupboard door, and pulled out his last weekly two-pound supply of candles.

“These are what my father carried with him into the dark,” she said.

She was angry with me then, and she had every reason to be. The ignorance. The condescension.

The small log house where she lived was filled with lamps and lanterns. All of the miners’ houses had been, Sara told me, because the men so loved light. One of their great pleasures when emerging from the mine in the evening was to see the settlement lit like a locomotive along the shore. In the winter, of course, daylight would be lost to them, their shift being twelve hours long. One of Sara’s great pleasures as a child was to imagine the miners’ lanterns coming to life on the winter island, then moving slowly towards the log houses as the men made their way across the ice. The candles, she told me, had been stuck on the miners’ hats to help light the rock faces of the tunnels under the lake, tunnels which had been flooded ten years before her birth.

How sad to have been Owen Pengelly, to have been Sara’s light-loving father. At the age of seventeen he had walked away from the only map of the world he knew, a map comprising footpaths over fields, engine houses looming awkwardly on precipitous coastlines, the shafts and passageways and caverns under the sea, and the wretched rows of grey houses. He had walked with three of his friends, away from the weeping mothers of the village of St. Just, eight miles to the port of Penzance and to a ship headed for Canada and another set of shafts and tunnels and caverns; this time under the greatest of lakes: Superior.

How is it that this ordinary boy, who became an ordinary man, this man I never met, occupies my thoughts when I can barely call up the features of my own father’s face? Of course, I never really knew my father, could only guess at what moved him to search for wealth, for social standing. Him and his money. Sara, on the other hand, learned her own father, stayed close to him until his last rattling breath. She wanted to be known by me as she had been known by him and so handed me her father’s story as if it were a gift. I have not yet used it in my work, though there is still time.

It was only very recently — just a few weeks ago — that I pulled the atlas from the shelf and looked at the claw-shaped land that Owen Pengelly sailed away from. I was examining Belgium, France — Étaples, Ypres, Calais — and all those other godforsaken places that I have kept so unfortunately close to me, when I noticed Cornwall at the bottom of Britain. It looked like the back paw of a beast, extended as if attempting to grasp something in its talons. Familiar names came into focus under my magnifier. St. Ives, St. Just, Lizard, Ludgvan, Botallack. Suddenly I recalled a pair of mining overalls hanging from a hook on the back of Owen Pengelly’s cupboard door, my drawings of them.

The last time Sara and I spoke we had been alone in her father’s room and she had said to me, “I have neither the strength nor the shallowness …”

She didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t tell what she had neither the strength nor the shallowness for. I remember once, long ago, reading a book by a classics scholar who had spent much of his life decoding fragments of Greek sentences. The tone of the book was one of frustration, of desire rarely satisfied. “Would that we had the subject of that verb!” the scholar exclaims in an uncharacteristically personal way about halfway though the book. There were nouns and a verb in that partial sentence of Sara’s, but over the years its fragmentary nature has been a source of discomfort for me.

Cornwall, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I consulted after I was finished with the atlas, is a peninsula seventy-five miles long by forty-five miles wide. The climate is mild and by British standards quite sunny. In fact, its coast is often referred to as the English Riviera. Palm trees flourish there. None of this would have made much difference to Owen Pengelly, who spent most of his boyhood under the ocean in the hellish halls of the tin mines, learning in the darkness to love light.

In the beginning I had decided to work in Owen Pengelly’s room because of the view and for the light. Sara led me into her father’s room and watched as I looked out each of its three windows in turn. She removed the curtains. She removed the curtains and sunlight filled her father’s room.

Fifteen summers had passed. The last time I had seen her, Sara and I stood facing each other at opposite ends of Owen Pengelly’s room, me leaning against the interior wall, she a dark figure framed by the south window. I had been walking back and forth over paint-spattered pine flooring. She had remained entirely still. As I approached the east window, the hotel at the Landing became larger. As I approached the west, the beach flung itself into my line of vision like a small white scythe. I did not want the details of these things, the hotel’s unpainted clapboard, the sand backed by dark pines, but they pressed themselves upon my attention as I spoke. I no longer wanted any details, the objects I had drawn so fastidiously: lamps and washstands, suspenders, boots and overalls, candleholding hat, her father’s stories, her mother’s death, the sharp sun in the sky above the lake, the grotesque gestures of north-shore pines. I no longer wanted sentences leading to narrative. Sara had taken me from the mine that we could still see bits of out the window all the way back to Cornish labyrinths under heaving oceans. I didn’t want sweating rock lit by lamplight, and I didn’t want exaggerated light raking the surfaces of objects locked in rooms.

I have neither the strength nor the shallowness …

I stopped pacing and leaned against the wall. “It has nothing to do with you, Sara. I’m not talking about character.”

“Fifteen years,” she said.

“Fifteen summers,” I corrected.

She stared hard at me then. The sunbursts in her eyes had been swallowed by her pupils. I was angered by the shame I felt under her scrutiny.

We were both silent.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said, though I wasn’t at all at the time. “I’m sorry, but this is an aesthetic not an emotional decision.”

Sara stood at the south window, blocking the view of the sun-drenched lake.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, with all of the coldness I had in me then. “I’ve painted you enough.”