A bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.
—HELEN ROWLAND
SOPHIE
Earlier that day
THE FLOWERS stand in the middle of the breakfast table, in a tall and unfamiliar crystal vase. Sophie counts at least a dozen red roses, six fragrant stargazer lilies, and four hydrangeas of the most delicately perfect blue. She adds cream to her coffee and says, “My goodness. Who sent the flowers? They must have cost a fortune at this time of year.”
“Your fiancé sent them,” Virginia says. “They arrived at lunchtime yesterday.”
“Jay sent them? Did he stop by?”
“No. Just the flowers.”
Virginia’s attention is directed not at Sophie or the flowers, but at her daughter, who’s attempting to clean up a spill of egg yolk with a slice of buttered toast. Father’s already at his workshop; he left even before Sophie came down this morning, chased by a resolute slam of the front door that seemed—at least to Sophie’s guilty ears—to promise a reckoning later. Due to a pair of flat tires, she hadn’t arrived home until well past dinner, by which time Father had already retired. Only a note remained of him, pushed under her door that morning, the contents of which made her stomach drop.
I presume you will have ready a reasonable explanation for your absence last night by lunchtime today.
“Did Father see them?”
“Of course he did.”
“Did he say anything?”
Virginia straightens at last and turns to Sophie. Her expression is both harried and compassionate, and rather startlingly pale. Or is it the morning sunshine, slanting at last through the window to whiten her face? She says, tilting her head, “Did you think he would?”
Sophie glances at Evelyn’s dark head, bent listlessly over her breakfast. She lowers her voice almost to a whisper. “Was he awfully upset last night?”
“You know he never gets upset, Baby. But he was very, very worried. You should have tried to find a telephone.”
“We did! The man in the service station let us use his. But the operator couldn’t seem to connect the call. I think she was drunk.”
“Where was this service station?”
Sophie hesitates. “Connecticut.”
“Connecticut!” The teaspoon drops from Virginia’s hand and hits the edge of the table, before landing with a soft thump on the rug. Virginia makes no move to recover it. “What on earth were you doing in Connecticut?”
What, indeed?
Sophie lifts her coffee and drinks long, and when she can’t put an answer off any longer, when she can’t think of a suitable half-truth that isn’t an outright lie, she sets down the cup in the saucer and says, “He was showing me the house where he grew up.”
“Sophie!”
“What?”
Virginia looks at Evelyn, whose small, flushed face is buried in a cup of weak tea fortified with milk: her favorite drink. She bends down and picks up the spoon, laying it carefully above her plate. “We’ll speak about this later,” she says, in a voice Sophie recognizes from her own childhood, when Virgo was more a mother to her than a sister.
In other words, Sophie’s in trouble. But it was worth it, this trouble, wasn’t it? And when she explains everything to Virginia—the frozen airfield, the beautiful turreted house in Greenwich, Octavian himself—then her sister will understand. Virginia believes in the same things Sophie does. Virginia will advise her. Virginia will help her do what needs to be done.
But until then. That awful note under her door. Father’s never been the warmest of parents, but the brief and arctic quality of his message—even the letters looked stiff and frigid, etched onto the page with an ice pick—destroyed all the feather-edged euphoria that had dusted her off to sleep last night, all the anticipation that nudged her awake this morning. And oh! The memory of that moment when Octavian had almost kissed her, there in the turret bedroom while the winter sunset was just beginning to soften the horizon, and then decided against kissing at the last instant, in such a tender, longing way that was almost as good as being kissed in fact. (Certainly lovelier than being kissed by a corked Jay Ochsner in the back seat of a taxicab, reeking of peppermint hair oil.)
He had gazed at her for maybe a half a minute longer, and it was the quietest and most eternal thirty seconds of Sophie’s life. His eyes were flattened of all color and still beautiful. He hadn’t even blinked, he was so still, and yet she could hear every thought in his head. Not now. We’ll make things right first. We’ll do this right, because this thing that lies between us is too perfect, too transparent to darken with the slightest tint of sin.
“You’re smiling,” he said at last, though not smiling himself.
“Of course I am,” she replied, and he released one of her hands and led her out of the room by the other, down the stairs and out the front door, which they had to leave unlocked. Oh, well. They hadn’t said a word. He tucked her into the Ford and they started the engine together in a wordless synchronicity of action, and about fifty yards back down the unpaved road the first tire went flat.
At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Sophie that this might be an omen. After all, tires went flat regularly.
But then another tire had blown out, badly enough that they had to limp into a service station, and by the time it was fixed the sun had gone down, and they had found a nearby chophouse for dinner. He had called her Miss Fortescue and she had said he could use her first name now, if he liked, and he had smiled—at last!—and told her that in that case, she would have to call him Octavian. Only fair.
“It’s an awfully grand name,” she said. “Don’t you have a nickname?”
He hesitated. “No.”
“Then Octavian it is. Sophie and Octavian.”
Thinking about it now, she realizes that was a bold thing to say, but it didn’t seem bold at the time, over pork chops and fried potatoes on the post road, while the sunset died and the stars popped out in the navy sky. Bold enough that they were sitting there at all, the two of them; bold enough that it was well past nine o’clock by the time they rolled down Third Avenue and around the corner of Thirty-Second Street. He gave her a piece of paper with a number written on it. His telephone exchange—SPRing—followed by 4892. “If you need anything,” he said, and those were the last words she heard from him. Not I’ll swing by tomorrow at lunchtime, or Let’s meet again soon. Not even Good-bye, Sophie or Gosh, I had a swell time today on the steps, while she slipped inside the front door. No more words at all. As if he’d lost the ability to speak. She looked back over her shoulder, but he’d already turned and hurried down the sidewalk to the Ford, which was parked by the empty curb, a few houses down.
But words aren’t necessary, are they? Sophie knows what he couldn’t say. And against the awful might of Father’s note, Sophie has that scrap of paper with the telephone number tucked inside her pocket right now, resting against her leg, like a talisman. It’s going to give her the courage to tell her father she can’t marry Jay Ochsner, after all. It’s going to give her the courage to explain this change of heart to Jay himself.
And when she’s done all these things, well, that paper’s going to give her the courage to pick up the telephone, ask the operator to connect her, and tell Octavian that yes, in fact, she thinks she does need something.
She needs him.
FATHER DOESN’T ARRIVE HOME FOR lunch, which isn’t unusual on its own. Sometimes, when he’s especially absorbed in one of his new gadgets, he won’t come home all day and all night, and it’s Sophie’s job to bring him a hot meal in a covered dish and a bottle of milk—he doesn’t drink any kind of liquor—and to make sure the cot in the workshop has clean blankets.
So Sophie sits down to lunch in the kitchen by herself. Evelyn’s earlier fretfulness has turned into a fever, and Virginia now hovers anxiously over her daughter’s bed in the nursery upstairs. The house has taken on that edgy, nerveless atmosphere of the brink of collapse. Sophie eats her soup and places her left hand on top of her pocket, while the cook bustles around the range. Maybe she should telephone Octavian now. (But isn’t he at work?) Maybe she should put on her coat and hat and gloves and take the train downtown, to find the office where he works and tell him she absolutely must speak to him, she couldn’t bear waiting around any longer for things to happen to her. Waiting to ask permission, when she knows what Father’s answer will be: No. Sophie should stick to her word. Octavian Rofrano is just a boy, a boy with a slight job and no family and nothing but future before him. Jay Ochsner can take care of her. Jay Ochsner can protect her, the way Father has protected her so carefully all these years.
The soup is half-finished, but Sophie isn’t hungry. She stands up and sets her napkin next to her bowl. “Thank you, Dot,” she says to the cook, and she turns and walks up the stairs toward the hall, and later on, she’s never certain whether she meant to visit her father’s workshop first and inform him of her decision, or whether she intended to go straight to Octavian.
Because the instant she reaches the landing, the brass knocker comes crashing down on its plate, and—in the grip of some sort of fantastical hope, maybe—she bounds to the door and throws it open.
And what do you know? Jay Ochsner himself stands there under the steely clouds, cheeks pink from a recent shave, bearing a box of chocolates in one hand and a bunch of crimson roses in the other.
“Darling.” He steps forward and kisses her on the lips. He tastes like oranges and cocktails. “I’ve missed you like crazy.”
THE FUNNY THING IS, SHE can’t quite put her finger on why. Why a man who seemed so dashing and amusing and well-ironed and attractive a few days ago, so incontrovertibly right a fellow for a girl to marry, now seems so unquestionably wrong. It’s not as if he’s changed. Not a bit! He remains exactly the same, in every indivisible detail, as the man who first kissed her in the library of the Ochsner town house on Thirty-Fourth Street. His smile is still toothsome, his manners carelessly well-bred. Is she really so fickle as that?
They sit on the sofa. Betty brings tea and cake, the cake Sophie didn’t eat for dessert. The flowers are dispatched downstairs to be placed in a vase. Virginia staggers through the doorway, smoothing her dress, face all haggard. “Mr. Ochsner! What a lovely surprise.”
He stands at once and takes Virginia’s hands. (He’s a terrific gentleman, Sophie reminds herself, trying to be fair.) He looks into Virginia’s eyes and says, “Why, is something wrong, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”
“My daughter’s a bit ill this morning, that’s all,” she says. “A touch of fever.”
“My sympathies. Terrible ordeal. My sister used to go distracted whenever her boys were poorly, though I assure you it always came out right in the end.” He pauses and catches his breath, as if remembering something.
“Well, thank you. That’s reassuring,” says Virgo. “I’m a trained nurse, which ought to make me steadier, but it seems I’m just as hopeless as any mother.”
He smiles and gestures to an armchair. “Come sit down and have some tea. I was just talking to Sophie about setting a date. Maybe you can help us.”
“I don’t know about that. Isn’t this between the two of you?”
Jay waits until Virginia’s settled herself in an armchair before resuming his own seat at Sophie’s side. “She can’t seem to decide.”
Virginia pours herself a cup of tea and offers Sophie an inquisitive eyebrow.
“I’d like to talk to Father first,” Sophie says.
Virginia sets aside the strainer. “Well, it isn’t as though we have a great many conflicting engagements. Doesn’t Father want the wedding as soon as possible?”
“My thoughts exactly!” exclaims Jay. He seizes Sophie’s hand and kisses the knuckles. “The sooner the better. I know you young ladies like to savor a long courtship, but I’ve waited long enough to be a married man. I’d like to be off on our honeymoon before springtime, wouldn’t you?”
“I—I really hadn’t thought about that.”
Another kiss. “Where would you like to go, darling? Somewhere warm, I think, don’t you? What about South America?”
South America. In fact, Sophie would love to visit South America; just not with Jay Ochsner. She tugs her hand away and reaches for a piece of cake, though she still isn’t hungry. She might never be hungry again, at this rate. Her face is hot, her stomach tight. South America with Jay Ochsner. In a flash, she sees the luxuriously overheated stateroom of an ocean liner, skimming past an Amazonian jungle, while Jay reclines in a deck chair wearing a silk dressing gown, like an aging Rudolf Valentino.
“No,” she says, “I’d rather not, really.”
“No? What about Africa, then? We could go on safari. Always wanted to go on safari.” He makes a motion, as if firing a rifle into the clock above the mantel.
“Mr. Ochsner,” Virginia says gently, “let’s consider the wedding first.”
“Oh! Right. Getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? There must always be a wedding before a honeymoon, mustn’t there?”
Virginia stirs in a spoonful of honey. “Naturally.”
The first bite of cake makes Sophie feel sick. She sets it aside on a tiny new plate and picks up her tea. “Either way, I don’t think we should consider any of this without consulting Father first. I suppose he’ll be paying for everything, after all.”
That stings. As well it should.
Jay coughs into his hand and presses his fingers together, on top of his knee. “Well.”
“Sophie,” says Virginia, in a low voice.
Sophie just sips her tea. “So it’s Father’s decision, don’t you think? I’ll speak to him about it as soon as he arrives home from his workshop, and we’ll let you know what we decide.”
“You don’t think we should perhaps toss a few dates into the air, just for speculation?”
“No. I think we should wait.”
“Wait?” Jay looks at Virginia, and then at the tea. “But I don’t want to wait.”
“Jay, you sound just like a sulky boy who hasn’t got what he wanted for Christmas,” Sophie says. “Surely thirty-eight years on this earth must have taught you a little more patience than that?”
“Now, how can I be patient, my love, when it’s your darling self I’m going to marry? I’d have to be made of stone.” He picks up her hand again—the one that doesn’t contain a teacup—and presses the fingers against his lips. She’s going to be left with a tattoo if he keeps this up. “I’d marry you tomorrow if I could. Tonight.”
Virginia clicks her cup back into its saucer. “Mr. Ochsner. This is really unsuitable.”
“I’m sorry.” He grins at her, the kind of effortless, lopsided smile that must have gotten him anything he wanted, at one time. When he was a child. “She’s just irresistible, isn’t she? And once a confirmed bachelor makes up his mind that he’s going to marry, why, he doesn’t want to remain single a minute longer than necessary.”
Sophie rests her teacup on her leg, right near the pocket where Octavian Rofrano’s telephone number waits for her to act upon it. Now, she thinks. Now is the moment when she should speak.
Open your mouth, Sophie. Say what needs to be said. Speak, for God’s sake.
Sophie opens her mouth, but a grim, fatherly voice emerges from the doorway before the words stand a chance.
“My thoughts exactly, Mr. Ochsner.”
SHE’S A COWARD.
All she had to do, really, was to stand up and say those words. Stand up and say, “I’m very sorry, the two of you; I know you both desire this marriage to take place as soon as possible. But I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake. I was swept along by the excitement of it all, by my inexperience, by my eagerness to do what everyone wants of me, and now that I’ve had a chance to reflect on what it all means—why, I just can’t. Not with Mr. Ochsner, anyway. And that’s it.”
A good speech, isn’t it? Full of resolve, a dignified reflection. Impossible to argue. A girl who knows her own mind and isn’t going to let you persuade her otherwise. She rehearsed the words to herself as she sat there on the sofa next to Mr. Ochsner, while Virgo poured Father a cup of tea, and Father and Mr. Ochsner discussed their mutual satisfaction with the match. (Why don’t they marry each other, then?) Several times, she cleared her throat and set down her teacup. Several times, when someone posed her a question, she prepared to reply in the manner of the paragraph above.
And could not.
The look on her father’s face just strangled the words in her throat. The pig iron in his eyes pressed and pressed against her resolute vowels and courageous consonants, until they crumbled against the wall of her esophagus, ashes to ashes, drenched in tea.
Now Jay is rising to his feet, beaming from every surface. Even his hands are beaming. They are going to be married on the fourteenth of February! Just a small ceremony, followed by dinner on Thirty-Second Street, only family and the odd close friend. And then off for the honeymoon! Father thinks South America is a splendid idea. Stay as long as you like. He’ll look out for a house for the newlyweds, have it all ready and fixed up by the time you return.
“Father,” Sophie says, “may I speak to you for a moment?”
“Sophie. We don’t want to be rude.”
“Oh, I’m in no hurry,” says Jay, checking his watch to be sure. “Though I guess it wouldn’t do any harm to stop by the office and see if I’m supposed to be in court.”
“Dear me! You’d better be off, then.”
“Ha! Only joking, dear heart. I practice corporate law, don’t you know. Never spent a day in court in my life.”
“Sophie,” says Father, “why don’t you see Mr. Ochsner out?”
The hallway is chillier than the parlor. Sophie hands Jay his coat and his round hat from the stand against the wall. He puts them on and winds his scarf about his throat. Sophie stands carefully back, but that doesn’t stop him from reaching out to take her by the shoulders. “They aren’t coming out yet, are they?” he asks.
“Not yet.”
“Good.” He bends down and kisses her, so forcefully that Sophie staggers back against the opposite wall and gasps into his tea-scented mouth.
“Mr. Ochsner!”
He goes on kissing her. He hasn’t put on his gloves yet—they’re resting on the small console next to the umbrella stand—and his hands slip downward from her shoulders to the edge of her blouse. She works her fingertips into the space between his rib cage and her chest and pushes him away.
“Someone’s coming!”
“I don’t hear anyone.” As if he’s listening, or even cares. His eyelids have slipped downward, maybe he’s about to fall asleep, except that the rest of his face is flushed, and his mouth is toothily half-open, and his chest pumps like a small machine beneath the lapels of his black overcoat, and Sophie is astonished that she once actually wanted him to kiss her. That she actually once thought she wanted to marry him.
She presses her palms against the wall. “Listen to me. I don’t want to get married.”
“What’s that?”
“I can’t marry you!”
The eyelids lift; the teeth disappear. “Can’t marry me? What does that mean?”
“I just can’t, that’s all.” She tries to remember all her careful, reasoned words, but they’ve stuck somewhere on the wall of her skull, impossible to retrieve. “I’ve thought it over, and I can’t.”
“Nonsense.” He reaches for her again. “It’s just nerves, that’s all.”
“It’s not nerves.”
“Every bride gets nerves.”
Sophie pushes against his ribs again, but this time his embrace is interminable. Like resisting the walls of a canyon. He holds her close and croons in her ear.
“We don’t have to get married on Valentine’s Day, you know. That was just an idea. We can wait a little longer, until you’re used to the idea.”
“I won’t get used to the idea, I assure you.” But her protest is muffled against the wool of his overcoat.
Jay sets her away, keeping hold of her shoulders with his wiry hands. “Then let’s elope. What do you say? We could sit here turning it over in our heads until the roses start blooming, but sometimes the best thing to do is to jump right in. Like learning to swim!”
“Learning to swim?”
“Exactly! We’ll run off to Niagara or someplace this weekend, and I’ll show you how terrific married life can be. I’ll spoil you rotten, Sophie.”
“I think that’s a terrible idea.”
“It’s a wonderful idea! You don’t know what you’re missing, that’s all.”
“I have an idea, and that’s all I need.”
“Now, darling.” He sweeps her back into his arms. “I know there’s a passionate girl inside there, just waiting to come out, and I intend to see that she breaks free. If we elope—”
A mighty shove, and she’s free. “You’re not listening, Jay. We’re not eloping. We’re not getting married. I—”
Jay puts a single finger to her lips. “Shh. Don’t say any more. I understand. My sister warned me about all this. She was married young, too, to a fellow a few years older. And you know what? It all turned out just fine. There are advantages, you know, when youth marries experience. Just you put yourself at ease, darling, and let me take care of everything. Why, I’ll make you so happy, you won’t see straight.”
He slings his hat back on his head—like a born gentleman, he’s taken it off to kiss her—and winks that sleepy blue eye at her, an eye that’s winked a million times to a million girls, and adds just the right amount of somnolence to make it work. She can’t deny he’s a charming man, if you liked that kind of charm. She can’t deny his classy fingertips, his creamy self-satisfaction, his ability to show her the world and all that’s in it. Maybe a week ago, he was just the right man for her. Just the right ticket out of this black-and-white tiled hallway on Thirty-Second Street and into the wide blue-skied world. Even Father approved.
But that was last week. That was before Connecticut.
“But I’m not—” she begins, but Jay Ochsner is already opening the door, waving his hand in the air, departing in a breeze of cold, dirty air.
The breath goes out of her. Her brave shoulders deflate, and then she straightens and kicks the door, leaving a small dent in the glossy new paint.
“Sophie, my dear,” comes a fatherly voice behind her, quite calm, “did I hear you properly?”
Sophie spins.
Father stands before her, arms akimbo atop his spindly hips. The pig iron is back in his eyes, double strength. His hair, a little greasy from his labors, falls in thick pieces onto his forehead. Actually, he’s still a handsome man, if he were cleaned up properly from the hours spent dogging over his latest design. If he were a gentleman like Jay Ochsner, who seemed to stop off at work only when the whim struck. But Father, for all his shiny new wealth, is a working man. He doesn’t give a damn about the money and the leisure that ought to come with it; he’s only happy when he’s absorbed in some project: so absorbed that he can’t think about anything else, until his whole world has sunk into a few precise millimeters of metal that might or might not change the course of civilization.
Father’s not a gentleman, and it shows. His skin is tough, his clothes are unkempt. In the symmetry of his features, there’s an accidental air, utterly untended and mostly unnoticed. He needs a wife, the way a lawn needs a gardener. Funny, Sophie’s only just thought of it now.
A wife, Father. That’s what you need. Two grown-up daughters just aren’t enough anymore.
She says clearly, “I said, I don’t want to marry Mr. Ochsner after all.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“So it’s off. The wedding. You can explain the whole thing to Mr. Ochsner. He doesn’t seem to be taking my word for it.”
“No, of course not.” Far too calm. He pushes his hair back from his forehead and tugs at his right earlobe. An old tic. Means he’s thinking about something. Pondering. “And what, may I ask, do you propose to do instead? Find someone else to marry?”
For some reason, this question ignites a certain spark of defiance inside Sophie’s belly. She tips her chin upward. “I don’t see that I need to marry anyone at all. I’m thinking of getting a job, in fact.”
“A job! Well, now.”
“Everyone’s getting jobs these days. Girls, I mean. You can’t just sit around anymore, waiting to get married. I might take a stenography course, or maybe work at a magazine. Or an engineer’s office. You must remember how clever I am with mechanics. It wasn’t that long ago.”
“Oh, I see. Seems my daughter’s been out acquiring a few modern ideas.”
The air in the hallway is quite cold. Sophie feels the hairs prickling her arms, the hardness of the tiles beneath her shoes. Father’s not bothered by cold, of course. He’s spent so much time in his drafty old workshop, he’s impervious. As if he’s got some kind of internal combustion in operation, right inside his rib cage, chugging out faithful quantities of British thermal units to keep him toasty beneath that tough old skin.
“Yes, I have. I have lots of modern ideas,” she says bravely. “It’s a new age, isn’t it? We’ve done away with the old world.”
“Have you, now? I don’t know about that. Looks pretty solid around here to me.”
“Well, the war, for one thing. The old ideas brought us nothing but misery and death, and it’s time we threw off the shackles of the past and—”
“Do you know what I think, Sophie?”
“Yes, Father?”
“I think you don’t know a damned thing, that’s what. Getting a job? I guess that’s not really a choice for most girls, is it? Never has been. There’s just a few of you lucky enough to have someone to provide for the family, without your having to get your own hands dirty. And now jobs are the fashion. The new craze. It’s going to emancipate you, is that the idea?”
“I just think it would be much more interesting and useful than running around doing nothing.”
Father rubs and tugs at his earlobe. Rolls and worries it. “Well, I think you have no idea what it means to work for a living. I think you imagine it’s a fine and pretty thing, the world out there, and it’s not.”
“I don’t think it’s fine and pretty at all. I think it’s interesting.”
“Interesting! You don’t know what interesting is, Sophie, or you’d be glad not to have it. I thought . . .” The hand drops away from his ear and falls to his side. “I thought, when you finished school, I thought maybe it was time to give you a bit more freedom, to let you make a few young friends and see a little more of life. Both of you. And look what it’s done.”
As if on cue, a thin cry drifts down the stairs, shushed quickly.
Father waves his hand at the hallway behind him. “You see? Virginia’s got a baby on her hands and some kind of new-fangled phantom of a husband who doesn’t see fit to visit. You think you should be out in the world, getting your hands dirty, instead of starting a nice clean virtuous new life with an upstanding member of society. You have no idea, the two of you, no idea what it takes to make a real life, out of raw clay, out of your own two hands.” He holds up his palms, his knobby fingers. “You see this? All I want is for my two girls to start their own families, to have a brand-new life. To go pure and unstained from this house into a better one. I thought, if they can just have new names. A new start.”
“Oh, Father—”
“But it seems I’ve made a mistake. You don’t have a clue, Sophie, not a clue what waits out there for the unwary woman. You think you’re so modern. You think I’m just a conservative old fool, sticking to the old ways. But I’m right. You’ll see that I’m right.”
Sophie’s beginning to shiver. It must be the cold. She folds her arms and meets her father’s gaze: an act that requires all the bravery she can muster out of the contents of her pocket. The slip of paper etched with a promising number. “What does that mean?”
“No more going out with that Schuyler girl, for one thing. No more sneaking out—don’t think I don’t know about that—and no more question of hiring yourself out for money. We’ve got plenty of money; I’ve seen to that.”
“You can’t keep me trapped in here!”
“Can’t I? I can, Sophie, but I won’t. You’re a good girl. I know you won’t disobey me. Will you, Sophie?”
His voice, as he says this, is so dreadful it might as well be a threat. Sophie knows that voice well; it’s been her companion all her life. Since her earliest memory, her father’s voice has tugged on her conscience, dragged on her shame and her desire to please him. To elicit some small smile or word of praise. The choice is always clear: she can be a good girl, or she can disobey him. And she has always chosen the former, hasn’t she? She’s always been a good girl.
Sophie wavers, physically wavers, there on her feet in the chilly hall. Her father’s face swims before her eyes, and she sees, for a brief instant, the view from a turret window toward the sea, except that it’s summer instead of winter, and there is a clean white sailboat beating hard for the lighthouse, against the wind, tack on tack, and she cannot tear her gaze away.
Then it’s gone.
Sophie turns to the hall stand and lifts her coat from its peg.
“No,” she says, and she walks right out the door, without her hat.