ONE

      It was a pretty street in a good neighbourhood. The Stewards had seen that right away, as soon as they turned the corner from Pleasant Street into Kendrick, at the beginning of their first year in New England. The houses were a friendly distance apart, with mown grass and tidy trees between them. There were basketball hoops over the garage doors and children’s bicycles on the open porches.

      ‘Looks okay,’ Jack said from the back of the car. ‘Looks good, in fact.’

      In fact was one of his sayings. You see was another of them, and both were copied directly from his father. Jack used them in his careful explanations of the world for his younger brother’s benefit.

      ‘I know that already, you don’t have to tell me that,’ Merlin would retort, conscious as always of his position as the youngest and least well-informed of his family.

      ‘It’s kind of neat-looking,’ was Merlin’s verdict on the house as they drew up. From the beginning he was the most determined to fit into this new world. He spooned up the language as if it were ice-cream.

      ‘So, what do you think?’ Matthew Steward asked his wife, after they had seen around. He was eager for her to like it. They needed a home to settle into in Franklin, a real home not a rented apartment, and Matthew wanted to have all this fixed up so that he could be free and comfortable to concentrate on his work.

      ‘Oh. Ye-es, I think it’s the best we’re likely to find,’ Dinah answered.

      They had moved only a week ago from home in England to this stately tree-canopied college town in Massachusetts. Matthew was a scientist, a molecular biochemist. He had been invited here by the university to set up a prestigious new department and his wife and children followed behind him, bobbing in faint bewilderment in the wake of his latest success.

      Dinah stood on the porch steps of the house on Kendrick Street, her head tilted as she squinted upwards. She could see snug-fitting window frames and solid timbers. Even so, the house appeared to slide out of focus and then, when she stared harder, it took on an insubstantial quality, two-dimensional, like a family home mocked up for a film set.

      Jack looked from one parent to the other. ‘I like it. I really, really like it. There’s room for everything, all our stuff.’

      ‘Me too.’ For once Merlin did not try to argue the opposite case. The boys also wanted to feel that the decisions were safely made and that they were fixed, taking root in a