Playing Sarah Bernhardt. Joan Givner

nothing’ll be good enough for you when you get home.”

      “A couple of weeks aren’t going to change her,” her father said.

      In spite of all her fears, Harriet enjoyed the journey to the coast and slept well at night, lulled by the steady rhythm of the train. It seemed no time at all before they were in Vancouver. She had no problem spotting her aunt at the train station, because she stood out in the crowd, being so well dressed and wearing a perky hat on her head. She knew how to dress because she’d been to Paris once and picked up a lot of hints. She put dabs of rouge on her earlobes and had bottles of French perfume on her dressing table. She showed Harriet how to put just the right amount behind her own ears, and she let her try on her hats. Harriet even met her aunt’s boss.

      The day after she arrived there was a thump at the door, the sound of a key turning in the lock, and there he was. Aunt Nina looked astonished.

      “I have my niece here,” she said.

      “Ah yes,” he said. “It slipped my mind.”

      “Well you might as well come in now that you’re here,” her aunt said. “This is Harriet.”

      “I have an aunt called Harriet,” he said.

      “Everyone has an aunt called Harriet,” her aunt said very tartly.

      Harriet wondered how she could talk to her boss like that. She thought he was stupid, and she didn’t appreciate comments on her name.

      It was the first time Harriet had seen anybody rich and famous close up, and he was a big disappointment. He looked like any other middle-aged man, and she thought he was uglier than most, with not much hair and great bushy eyebrows. She changed her mind when they stood at the window and watched him stride down the street to his car. It was twice as big as any other car on the street, and a man in a uniform jumped out, ran around, and opened the door for him.

      Harriet’s father sometimes drove a cab in winter, but he didn’t wear a uniform and jump out to open doors for people. It was dangerous work because he never knew who’d jump in the back seat or what state they’d be in.

      Mr. Herbert seemed even less ordinary when she saw the house on the beach he was letting them have all to themselves. They went by ferry to Vancouver Island, took another small ferry when they got there, and then drove up the coast a short distance to the house. It was a huge place, and it wasn’t even his main house, just his summer home. There was glass all along the front so they could look out at the sea, and it was surrounded by little cottages. There were two guest houses, two cottages for the help, and a kind of greenhouse with an indoor swimming pool inside it.

      At first it felt to Harriet like going into one of her friend’s houses and raiding the fridge when their parents were out of town. She thought her aunt felt the same way, because she tiptoed around looking at everything as if she’d never seen it before. She said that she’d once stayed for a whole winter in the gardener’s cottage when she was working on a project for her boss.

      There were photographs in silver frames on the tables. One was of the queen, not in evening dress like the one on the wall of the principal’s office at school, but in summer clothes in the garden of this very house. There was a photograph of Mr. Herbert on his yacht with a huge fish he’d caught, and there were a lot of photographs of his wife and two sons. In the pictures Mrs. Herbert was always sitting down or lying in a deck chair, and Aunt Nina said she was ill with MS. In one photo she was in evening dress in a wheelchair. Her aunt said that was all right because Roger didn’t care for dancing. He said, “Why dance when you can hire someone to do it for you?”