Locked Rooms Part 21

The road continued to flirt with the sea, coming near and ducking away again, before we turned definitively towards the hills and the engine noise deepened with the climb. My body knew the twists and turns, the scattered farms and cattle lots rang a familiar note in my heart, but the hollow s.p.a.ce at the core of me grew: I should not have come; Holmes was right, it was a mistake; it would be bad if I were to find something of my family still inhabiting the Lodge; it would be worse if I did not. I wanted to seize my savaged hair in both hands and scream aloud, just to relieve the building pressure, but I knew that if I screamed, it would be impossible to stop.

So I sat and quivered, staring in hope and apprehension, responding to Donny's questions with silence or a brief gesture-a flick of the finger to say, "Go right, here" or a nod to say we were on the correct road. I was conscious that Flo was watching me out of the corner of her eye, wary as a horse about to startle, but at some time in the previous couple of miles I had also become aware that Flo was riding in the place my mother had sat, and my mother had usually done something-very soon now, she used to . . . what?

We cleared a corner and the hillside of trees dropped away, and I threw off my rug and shouted, "Wait! Stop!"

Donny slammed on the brakes, causing Flo to choke on her chewing gum and the heavy motor to skid to the edge of the loose gravel roadway, but he managed to stop the machine before its front tyres entered the drop-off. I swallowed hard to push my heart back out of my throat-I emphatically didn't like being a pa.s.senger-and then scrambled over the side of the car to the ground. Donny turned off the engine. Silence took over, broken only by the crunch of their shoes on the gravel as they joined me, the ping ping of cooling metal, and the call of some rude-voiced bird. of cooling metal, and the call of some rude-voiced bird.

Mother used to call out for Father to stop, so she could see the view.

The trees were lush, dark redwoods interspersed with brash young maples, the native oak, and some leathery-leafed tree with peeling red bark. At precisely this point on the road, as if stage curtains had been parted by a pair of huge hands, the forest drew back, revealing a sparkle of blue water.

But something was missing. I stepped to the side, then further, until the very tip of a dock came into view behind the trees. I wondered if the dock had been truncated, by decay or purpose, or if it was simply that the trees had grown up and obscured its length. Studying the vista, I decided the latter was the more likely explanation: The end of the dock appeared to be as square as ever, and the slice of lake revealed by the parted boughs seemed narrower than it should be. I nodded, satisfied, and climbed back into the motor.

Flo and Donny glanced at each other, and I realised belatedly that some kind of explanation might be in order, considering that I'd nearly sent us off the road with my sudden shout. Their hearts were probably still racing.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'd forgotten until we reached this point that we always stopped to take a look at the lake. If I'd noticed what a state the road was in, I'd have suggested it more gently."

"No problem," Donny said. "My baby's got good brakes."

He was, I believed, speaking of the motorcar.

We drove on, slowing as we went through the village that was not as tiny as it had been. The general store had sprouted a petrol pump in front, which would mean that the residents no longer had to remember to stop in Serra Beach or Redwood City to fill up their tanks, and the cafe next door to the store had nearly doubled in size-it now might seat as many as twelve people at one time. The post office looked just the same, and the minuscule library, but I could never have imagined a day when I would see that brief stretch of village lane with more motorcars than horses.

"Half a mile or so, and the road will divide," I said to Donny. "Keep right and circle the lake. I'll tell you when to stop."

The lake was small, and in five minutes, I was saying, "We can pick up the keys from that house with the white picket fence. Flo, would you mind awfully going in and asking for them? If I go I'll get involved in offers of coffee and she'll stir up some biscuits and it'll be dark before we get away. Just tell her I'm feeling rather tired, and I'll call by tomorrow. Oh, and make sure she knows we brought a picnic for tonight, and that we don't need her a.s.sistance to make up beds." Mrs Gordimer's garrulous streak was a steady-flowing stream whose levee required constant shoring, lest the flood of words wash over the cabin's lovely quietude. She more than made up for her husband, whose speaking voice I had heard perhaps a dozen times over the years.

"Sure," Flo said, and hopped out to trot up the spotless stones of the front path between brutally pruned standard roses, all an identical peach-pink, that hadn't changed in as long as I remembered. Nor had the face that appeared at the door before Flo could touch the bell, the face that frowned mistrustingly at her explanations before peering past her at the motor. I leant forward, trying to look even more wan than I felt, and waved a feeble hand. Before the caretaker could come and deluge me with sympathy and questions, Flo laid a gentle hand on her, no doubt reiterating her lie about the state of my nerves.

In a moment, she had retreated; a minute later, and Flo was coming back down the walk with the keys swinging from her finger-tips. Mrs Gordimer came out onto her porch-whiter of hair and more stooped, but I'd have sworn wearing the same exact gingham dress she'd worn when I was a child. I waved at her again, and silently urged Donny to get the motor under way. He heard me, and did.

The track down to the Lodge had been maintained to the extent of having the ruts smoothed and the branches trimmed away, but Donny had to creep the last few hundred yards, chary of ripping out some vital piece of the underpinnings. Finally, the trees opened up, and we were there, at the living centre of my childhood.

Chapter Eighteen.

Not much to look at, actually. Certainly nothing grand enough to impress our Pacific Heights neighbours: an original one-storey house made of stripped logs with a newer two-storey addition to one side, cedar s.h.i.+ngles going slightly mossy on the roof. However, standing and looking at the way it sat on the earth, one became convinced that here was a house whose doors would shut true, whose windows would not rattle in a breeze, whose porch floor would not attack a child's running feet with splinters.

Father had called it the Lodge, and although Mother had complained that the name made it sound like the gate-house to a manor, the name had prevailed. In this basic summer house on the lake, we had been Family. When we were in San Francisco, my father had worked long days, appearing in our lives briefly in the evenings, generally granting us one whiskey-and-soda's worth of time in the parlour or library before he wished us a good-night and sat down to dine with Mother. Week-ends were better, but often he and Mother were taken away by social obligations-either that, or Levi and I were dragged along for social obligations thinly disguised as family events, such as one memorable picnic at the beach that ended with me b.l.o.o.d.ying the nose of the sn.o.bbish son of the bank's vice-president, who had dared to make a remark about my little brother's Jewish features. Family museum trips were better, but too highly organised to be much fun.

Here, however, Father had been himself. Which was only proper, since he had built the Lodge with his own hands.

The original building had comprised four s.p.a.cious rooms: an all-purpose sitting room at the front, a grand fireplace and dark-panelled walls, and beside it a smaller room that had served as my father's bedroom in his bachelor days, converted into a billiards and smoking room after my mother came. Behind these rooms were the kitchen, with the table at which we often took breakfast, and the dining room, opening onto a broad stone terrace that nestled between the back of the original Lodge and one side of the two-storey sleeping addition. The newer wing, five bedrooms and two baths, had been added (along with electric lights and hot-water heaters) when he had brought civilisation, in the form of Mother, back from England.

Father had lived in a tent among the trees for the better part of two years during the construction of the Lodge, which coincidentally amounted to the time it took his parents to withdraw their demands that he return to Boston and a.s.sume his responsibilities there. He had chosen the trees, helped to cut and haul them, milled the boards, and stacked them to dry. He had learnt a score of trades in the course of the building, become a brick-layer and a glazier, a carpenter and a plumber. He'd rebuilt the fireplace chimney three times before he was satisfied that its draw was clean, and spent a solid month experimenting with the decorative wood-work on the porch railing.

Despite the later additions, this house was his from foundation stones to roof-tree; every time he walked in, he looked around and made in the back of his throat a small sound of profound relaxation. It was, it now occurred to me, the precise equivalent of my mother's touching of the mezuzah as she entered the Pacific Heights house.

"Do you want me to open the door?" asked Flo at my shoulder.

"No," I said sharply, then softened it to, "Thanks, but I was just remembering how lovely it was to come here, and get away from the city."

"Really?" she asked dubiously. I laughed, suddenly seeing the rustic building through the eyes of Miss Florence Greenfield, and she hastened to add, "I mean, I'm sure it's a very nice house, and I know a lot of people have summer places or hunting lodges or things, especially with Prohibition and all, but it's just, well, I'm not really a briars-and-brambles kind of a girl."

"Not to worry, Flo-the plumbing works, there are no bears here, and I'm sure we'll find it clean and tidy. It's only for a couple of days, and if it's too dreary you two can always go back early."

But as I stepped forward with the key, it occurred to me that Flo was the one responsible for the transformation of the Greenfield house, and that to a woman with Deco sensibilities, the rusticity of the Lodge might prove a challenge.

The key moved easily in the lock; I stepped across the threshold: no trace of mustiness in the air. The house was cool, certainly, but as we moved into the rooms I was relieved to find it as tidy and dust-free as it had ever been-clearly the interdiction against trespa.s.s in the Pacific Heights house had not extended here. There were even a couple of fairly recent Sat.u.r.day Evening Post Sat.u.r.day Evening Posts laid on the table between the sofas, just as Mrs Gordimer had used to provide for us. I told myself that Norbert would have informed her that I was coming to California, and therefore a visit of the Lodge's owner to the lake was possible-it was better than thinking that the poor woman had replaced these offerings and removed them, unused, every time she'd cleaned over the past decade.

Flo's cautiously polite noises had turned to honest appreciation as soon as she had seen the interior, and now, as she worked her way towards the back, her voice took on a note of enthusiasm and even-once she saw the view-wonder.

"Oh, Mary, this is perfectly swell! It's like something from a fairy-tale book, the flowers and the lawn and the lake-and look, there's even a boat, just sitting and waiting."

I moved, reluctantly, to join her at the expanse of windows that formed the back wall of the original cabin, and saw that, indeed, the little sail-boat lay ready. One glance at its trim paint told me that it had also been recently placed there-no doubt by the stout Mr Gordimer, grumbling and snapping at one or another of his youthful a.s.sistants as they wheeled the vessel out of the boat-house and down to the dock. He'd always knelt, laboriously, to pa.s.s a clean cloth over the boat's prow before nodding to himself, then climbed to his knees, turned his back on the gleaming object, and marched up the dock and the lawn with the weight of the world on his shoulders, muttering glum but inaudible invective to himself all the way-most of his conversations were conducted with himself.

I'd once caught my mother smiling at his retreating back; when she'd noticed me watching her, she had winked, as if we shared a secret.

I pulled my eyes from the waiting boat and made myself look at the wide stretch of green that spilled down to the water's edge: my mother's realm. Father had built the house, but Mother had formed the garden, and my dread for this spot was greater than any other. She had spent hours here every day we were in residence, pruning and weeding, planting the flowers and shrubs she had brought from the city, putting into effect the changes she had worked out with the help of Micah-who, as far as I knew, had never set foot here. It was all her, from the tiny pink rose she had placed in the shelter of the apple tree to the dancing fuchsias she had placed in shady corners and the wild-flower seeds she had scattered in the lawn, every inch of it her vision and her labour. I was afraid that seeing the garden without her in it would act like a knife in my heart.

But I had reckoned without the effects of time: What I saw was not her garden. Oh, the bones were there, the trees and shrubs she had planted, the shape of delineation between cultivated and wild, but the flesh had changed beyond anything she had known. The lilac, once a trim and obedient resident of the far corner, now appeared to be making serious inroads on the native growth. Another shrub-a peony, I thought-was halfway to being cla.s.sified as a tree; the tiny pink rose had all but overcome the apple in a riot of colour; and the English flowers she had nurtured around the perimeter had long ago broken for freedom in the lawn. The gra.s.s, which Mother had always preferred s.h.a.ggy as compared to the tight trim of English lawn-gra.s.s, was nearly a meadow; although it had been mown in the past couple of weeks, pink daisies and yellow dandelions gave it the appearance of a tapestry.

It was startling at first, then rea.s.suringly foreign. And as I began to relax out of my apprehension, two thoughts came to me: that it was indeed magical, as Flo had said; and that it was precisely what my mother had been working towards. I was grateful that Mrs Gordimer had not inflicted her tightly pruned system here.

My ruminations were interrupted by a voice previously unheard here-Donny's, coming from the next room.

"I don't know about you girls, but I could sure use a drink after that drive."

"Oh, yes!" Flo exclaimed. "A nice long drink, sitting on the lawn, watching the sun go down, that would be heaven. There probably isn't any ice," she added sadly.

"There probably isn't any booze," Donny commented, his voice saying that this was clearly a more serious problem. "I knew we should've brought along something stronger than fizz. All I've got's my flask-I don't suppose we could unearth the local boot-legger at six o'clock on a Sunday afternoon?"

"There should be both," I said, and followed his voice into the kitchen.

If the Gordimers had laid out the magazines and the sail-boat in antic.i.p.ation of an unannounced visit, they might well have put milk in the ice-box, tea in the cupboard, and bread in the bin. I pulled open various doors and found them occupied as I had expected, so I took the ice-pick from its customary drawer, wiped off its rust on the clean dish-towel that hung below the sink, and handed it to Donny.

"Chip off some bits from the block in the ice-box. Flo, you'll find gla.s.ses in the second cupboard there. And unless the mice have figured out how to use a cork-screw . . ." I laid my hand on the tea caddy that sat on the set of narrow shelves along one wall, and tugged. Then I tugged harder, hanging my weight against it. Flo and Donny both stared, no doubt wondering both why the caddy had been glued down, and why I so wanted it off. Slowly, the apparent canister gave way, tipping forward: Its tin sides concealed, not tea, but a lever for unlocking a sliding door. With a grinding protest of gears long unoiled, the caddy folded itself face-downward on its shelf. I stuck my fingers against the edge of the shelf, pulled hard, and the entire wall of shelves trundled slowly to the left and vanished behind the cupboards.

I turned to grin at my amazed companions, both of them crowding to see beyond my shoulders. "My father had an oddly elaborate sense of humour," I explained. "He used to offer my mother a gla.s.s of tea, and this is what he meant."

"And that in the days before the Volstead Act!" Flo said.

"Even more appropriate now," I agreed. I started to move forward into the dim hidden closet to peruse the bottles, then stopped dead at a tinkle of gla.s.s skittering across the floor. "Don't come in, there's gla.s.s on the floor. Some of the beer bottles probably exploded in a hot spell. However, apart from that, there appears to be pretty much whatever you like," I said to Donny. "Gin?"

"Any vermouth? I could make us a shaker of martinis."

I'd never had a martini, but I obediently handed out the bottles. While he and Flo searched the cupboards for a shaker of some kind, ending up with a decidedly rustic Mason jar, I found a broom and swept up the shattered bottles-two of them. I also gingerly took the remaining three out to the dust-bin, although they were probably no hazard in the cool of that day. When I returned, I was checking over the other contents of the hidden closet when an arm snaked past me holding a cold, clear gla.s.s.

"Cheers," said Flo. I took the gla.s.s, lifted it in response, and took a swallow. After that, I stood where I was for a while until my eyes had stopped watering. Flo studied the shelves with her own clear eyes. "What a nifty little room, Mary. Like a safe-room."

"More or less. My father figured that there would be long stretches where the house was empty and didn't want to leave things out in the open to tempt pa.s.sers-by. Not that there's anything particularly valuable here, but there's the candelabras, and a nice set of old silver in that chest, and two or three of the cameras he used to fiddle with."

"Ooh, and a phonograph! Does it work?"

"I should think so, although the music will be old."

"How sweet, we can lace up our whalebone corsets and tap our toes decorously to the old songs. Donny, be a sport and wrestle that old Victrola out onto the lawn, would you?" She followed him, clutching a stack of recordings in one hand and her drink in the other; I ran a last eye over the shelves, made a mental note to find some oil for the mechanism, and wrestled the door shut, tipping the tea canister back upright to lock it.

We drank rather a lot that evening, between the martinis, the wine Flo had brought for our picnic dinner, and a bottle of very old brandy from the hidden store-room. We drank and we laughed and we listened to the music of another generation, Flo and I taking turns dancing with Donny on the uneven stones of the terrace. When it was dark, we placed candles in the three tarnished candelabras and ate our picnic on the lawn. The night was so still that the candle flames scarcely moved, and the occasional moth drawn by the light was soon extinguished. Afterwards, we returned to the terrace, where Flo and Donny danced in and out of the light. They found a tango, a dance that had been new and racy during my family's last two summers here, and set about it with great seriousness that soon gave way to laughter. I realised that I was rather drunk and very tired, and that before too long I would become maudlin; to top it off, we hadn't made up the beds.

With a sigh, I put down my gla.s.s and went to see about sheets and things, only to find that the ever-efficient Mrs Gordimer had made up every bed in the place except that of my parents' room. I took my own childhood room, not even seeing the walls or tables, simply divesting myself of spectacles and shoes and tumbling in between the sheets, there to weave gently to and fro on a sinking s.h.i.+p into the depths of unconsciousness.

And struggled up from the dark comfort of sleep at the sound of a voice.

"Huh?" I asked sensibly.

"I said," came Flo's voice, "do you want a sleeping draught?"

"No, thanks," I told her, and put my head down again.

I came awake again in the quiet hour before dawn, when a faint light brought shape to the undrawn curtains. As my mind returned to me through the fog of the previous night's drink and the deepest night's sleep I'd had in ages, three thoughts came with it.

The first was that the years spanning the ages of fourteen and twenty-four were long indeed. In my case, they had been longer than for most people: Very little remained of the girl whose hair-brush lay on the table, whose books inhabited the shelves.

The second came, wryly, as, "And being the married matron here, I was supposed to act as chaperone." I had no idea where Flo and Donny ended up, and frankly had no intention of looking into the matter.

Last was the thought that had me sitting up in bed and patting along the bed-side table for my spectacles: hidden room. hidden room.

I had searched every inch of the Pacific Heights house on Sat.u.r.day and found nothing there that joined up with the third of my dreams, the dream of walking through a house and showing its rooms to my friends, all the while aware of the key in my pocket, the key to a hidden apartment. I had searched my family house both literally and figuratively, looking for an actual, physical concealed hideaway or even a place that possessed the same sensation of secret and personal knowledge, and found neither. My father's library had contained the closest facsimile of that sensation, but when I folded myself up beneath his desk (abashedly, checking first that the door was bolted) and curled my legs to my chest, it had not been the same.

But the casual expertise with which I had reached for, then worked, the hidden-door mechanism off the kitchen-even though I could not remember ever being allowed to work it myself as a child-had contained precisely that blend of the hidden and the known, the important buried within the everyday. I wanted to see that room again, now.

Once upright, I discovered that not only was I unsteady, but I was dressed in the same crumpled trousers and s.h.i.+rt I had worn from the city the day before. I cast the garments off and took my childish bath-robe from the wardrobe, thinking to slip out to the motor and retrieve my possessions, but one step outside my door and I nearly went sprawling over the valise. With a silent word of thanks to the hard-headed Donny, I carried it inside, scrubbed myself with a cold cloth in the bedroom's flowered basin, and dressed in warm trousers and a pull-over sweater. I picked up a pair of shoes and tip-toed down the stairs, where I became aware that Donny was behind the door to the first guest-room, the one with the largest bed. Demurely, I stepped into the main wing of the house before I could locate my other guest by her snores, shutting the connecting door behind me.

To my mother, one of the great blessings of the Lodge had always been the relative lack of servants. We ended up roughing it, yes, but we were also granted a degree of privacy we rarely found in the city. Not that Mother did all the work herself-just that my father before her had trained the Gordimers to slip in and out like the elves of a fairy-tale: Meals appeared as if by magic, dinner dishes she didn't feel like was.h.i.+ng up were miraculously restored to their shelves by morning, clothing left in the hampers materialised a day or two later, freshly ironed.

The polite fiction of our independence here was maintained by the unspoken agreement as to the times of day we would be absent from kitchen and bedrooms. Mrs Gordimer and a changing regime of a.s.sistants let themselves in once in the afternoon, then in the evening, during which times the dishes were made clean, the cupboards and wood-box filled, and the oven stocked with an evening meal. The other times of day we fended for ourselves, leaving a note on the kitchen table if we had any request.

Thus without a maidservant's help, I laid a handful of kindling atop the stove's embers and put the kettle on, finding an unopened tin of MJB coffee in the cupboard beside a fresh packet of Lipton's tea, a jar of Mrs Gordimer's blackberry jam, and similar basics. While the water was heating, I stepped into my shoes and went onto the terrace.

The last stars were fading as the sky grew light; the lake was a sheet of black gla.s.s with a mist gentle over its surface. Everything was so completely still and utterly magical, merely drawing breath seemed a disturbance.

After a time, the sound of water boiling drew me back. With a regretful glance at the calm, I returned to the house, opening the noisy packet of tea and wincing at the clatter of the cup and the suck and snap of the ice-box door. Unearthing a thick travelling-rug in the cedar chest near the entrance, I carried it and my milky tea outside.

I must have spent an hour there on the tapestry lawn that flowed into the lake, sipping my tea, wrapped in the fragrant blanket, watching the morning come. The fish began to rise for insects, dotting the sheet-gla.s.s water with rings; a tall white bird stood in the reeds near the dock, perusing for frogs. The beauty of the moment made my bones ache with pleasure, and when at last the morning's ethereal perfection had faded and it had become just another lovely day, I felt complete and calm in a way I had not for many weeks.

I gathered up my cup, draped the now-damp rug over a bench where the sun would soon hit it, and went inside to look at my father's hidden room.

I worked inside the room for an hour before the sound of water in the pipes betrayed a guest's waking. I made haste to shut the secret door and went to wrestle with the tin-opener, and had the coffee finished by the time Flo came in, yawning and tousled and looking far more beautiful with her skin pink from sleep than she did with rouge and paint and immaculate hair. I poured her a cup of coffee; she mumbled something that wasn't quite words, drifting away into the sitting room. A suspiciously brief time later, Donny came through from the sleeping wing, dressed in a white 'Varsity sweater and plus-fours. He, too, accepted coffee, although he was somewhat more communicative than Flo, dropping into a kitchen chair and, after asking my leave, sticking a cigarette into its holder and lighting it.

"This is a peach of a place," he said. "My parents have a summer house, but since every one of their friends has a house in the same square mile, it's just like being back in the city, only cooler."

"Where is that?" I asked.

"In Chicago. They're still there, in spite of the winters. I've tried to get them out here, but they're sure the place'll s.h.i.+mmy down around their ears."

"Yes," I said with a grin. "Half my friends in England a.s.sume that San Francisco collapses on a yearly basis."

"Flo said you're in London?"

"I do have a flat there, but we live on the south coast. I also spend a lot of time in Oxford."

"That's right, she said you were a, whatchamacallit, bluestocking."

"She probably said I spent my life with my nose in a book."

"Something like that. Can't manage it, myself. Books, I mean. Ever since I graduated, anything but a novel brings me all out in hives."

He had a nice laugh, pleasantly crooked white teeth, and-although he'd taken a minute to make the razor-sharp part down the middle of his hair and slick it into place-a nicely rakish blond stubble on his square cheekbones. He might not be much of a one for books, but in addition to being restful on the eyes, he was intelligent, thoughtful, and seemed to care a great deal for Flo. I was, theoretically, a member of the same "jazz generation" as the rest of Friday night's party, but in truth I hadn't known many of this sort of social animal with any intimacy, and hadn't expected to find a solid foundation beneath the self-consciously blase pleasure-seeker. Maybe it was because Donny was a little older; maybe he was just made of stronger stuff.

Hearing our voices, Flo re-appeared. "Morning," she said, taking the chair between us. "Is there any more coffee?"

Donny reached for her cup and stood up; as he went past, he mussed her already on-end hair affectionately. "Not a morning girl, my Flossie."

"h.e.l.l, I'm full of pep," she protested, then yawned.

He poured her coffee, placed it in front of her, then started opening various cupboards and taking things out. "How do you like what my old man calls 'cackle berries'?" He held up a pair of eggs.

I placed a half-hearted objection, saying that I really ought to be doing the cooking for them, but Flo said, "Donny loves to mess around in the kitchen. It's going to drive the cook bananas, when we're married."

"I didn't know," I said. "Congratulations."

"Oh, we haven't set a date or got a ring or any of that hooey," she told me. "When we do, Mummy will take over, and it'll be just another rotten bore. We'll probably elope, but right now we're having too much fun. Plenty of time to be respectable when our livers give out."

I shot a quick glance at Donny; he was breaking the eggs into a bowl, but from the side of his face, I thought perhaps the wild boy of the Blue Tiger might be more ready for the ring than his girl-friend was.

"Well, in any case," I said, "it's a good thing he likes to cook, because otherwise you'd be eating burnt food chipped from the pan. I am no chef."

Donny scrambled the eggs with some herbs that I hadn't noticed growing along the outer wall of the cabin-at least I a.s.sumed they were herbs and not some poisonous weed. The eggs tasted good, whatever the herbs' Latin names, eaten with sausages from the ice-box and toast heaped with Mrs Gordimer's jam. We ate on the terrace, which gathered the morning sun nicely. When our plates were polished and the toast basket was empty (Flo having pressed the last pieces on me) I cleared the table and made more coffee, returning to find Flo stretched out on one of the deck-chairs with her face to the sun, eyes closed like a cat.

"I'm gonna bake in the sun all day," she declared.