Mother knew that I waited for her and when she and Daddy returned home usually around midnight she wouldn’t even take off her fur coat but come straight up the stairs to my bedroom. She would sit down on the end of my bed and say “Now which chapter did you get up to?” I’d tell her and she’d want to talk about Aslan or Edmund andLucy or the fawn that had the gall to betray the children to the White Witch. But I wanted to hear about the women’s gowns and their hats and all the magic she had seen that evening. A shadow would pass over her face. “My sweet nightingale ” she would say “I had the loneliest evening on the planet.” She would linger at my forehead as she kissed me and I would breathe in her honeysuckle eau de toilette and the slight smell of my father’s cigarettes and wonder. How could she have been lonely surrounded by all those people? I certainly hadn’t been lonely although I had been alone. And so I learned that with a book in hand time alone can become simply solitude.