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I worried that the constraints of scholarship might irritate Nicole into rebellion, but instead she settled down and even displayed an academic aptitude that surprised us both. Not that the old, angry Nicole vanished entirely. She threw herself eagerly into campus politics and succeeded in having herself arrested for throwing eggs at the Prime Minister in a protest against power-station emissions. When I said that it seemed damned silly to be arrested for throwing eggs, I was treated to a half hour’s scathing denunciation of my generation, my views, and my carelessness for the planet’s future. Yet, despite her passionate intolerance for any views other than her own, Nicole seemed happy and purposeful, and Joanna and I had begun to anticipate the day when we could fulfill our long-held dream of selling the house and buying a boat large enough to live aboard permanently.
    Then, in an Irish springtime, when the blossoms exploded white in the deep hedgerows of County Armagh, Richard had died.
    And something in Nicole had died with her twin brother.
    She abandoned her studies and came home where, like a wild thing, she raged against life’s injustices. Joanna and I were advised to give Nicole’s grief time to work itself out like some splinter of shrapnel, but instead it seemed to go deeper, and there sour into a grim and hopeless misery. Nicole lost weight, became pale and snappish, and for a time she haunted the local churches, even going so far as to declare an intention of entering a Discalced Carmelite house in Provence. Her Uncle David told her to snap out of it, which she did, but only to hurl herself in entirely the opposite direction. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and three weeks later for possession of marijuana. Joanna and I paid those fines, only to discover that our daughter was pregnant and had no idea who the baby’s father was. Nicole herself opted to abort the child, and afterward sank into a sullen, vituperative mood that was worse than her previous extremes of religiosity and carnality.
    “It isn’t your fault.” David tried to reassure Joanna and me, though David, who had no children himself, was hardly an expert on childrearing.
    “I could understand,” Joanna had said, “if we’d dropped her on her head as a baby, or abused her, or disliked her, but Nickel had a wonderful childhood!”
    “Nickel” was the family’s nickname for Nicole.
    “It’s just her nature,” David had said. “Some people are excessively ambitious and competitive, and Nickel’s one of them. It’s a Blackburn trait, and you’ll just have to endure while she learns to channel it. Right now she’s like a motor given too powerful a fuel, but she’ll eventually learn to control it, and then you’ll be proud of her. Mark my words, Nickel will achieve great things one day!”
    Joanna had sighed. “I hope you are right.”
    Then, that same summer, Nicole met Caspar von Rellsteb. She met him in our boatyard, where he had docked to repair his catamaran’s broken forestay. It was a Saturday, and Joanna and I had been trying to hack some order into our tangled garden when, late in the afternoon, Nicole came home and calmly announced that she was leaving to live with a man called Caspar. “I’m going right now,” she added.
    “Now? With Caspar? Caspar who?” an astonished Joanna had asked.
    “Just Caspar.” Nicole either did not know the rest of his name or did not want us to know. “He’s an ecologist. He’s also a live-aboard like you want to be,” she airily told us, “and he’s leaving on this evening’s tide.”
    “Leaving where?” Joanna asked.
    “I don’t know. Just leaving.” Nicole went into the house and began singing as she collected her oilskins and seaboots. For a moment Joanna and I had just stared at each other, then we had tentatively agreed that our daughter’s sudden and unexpected happiness might prove a blessing, and that running away with the mysterious seagoing