Fiona always knew exactly what her father would say — “What’d you expect, getting involved with a fellow like that?” She didn’t have an answer. A few weeks later she quit Aberdeen University and her mother, who ran a bank branch, met her at a tearoom and gave her cash for a plane ticket to Canada and said, “You have to get away from this country.” Fiona’s parents had been emigrants. Fiona was born on Vancouver Island but her family had returned to Scotland when she was two. As a teenager she often dreamed of a deep green tossing sea and her father said this was a memory of the Pacific Coast, where he had endured a collapsed partnership and six different sales agent’s jobs, hating them all, before swallowing his defeat and booking their passage home. “Don’t tell your father I gave you the money,” Fiona’s mother declared. Fiona flew from Prestwick to wintery Toronto, where her aunt and uncle met her at the airport and took her to their suburban home.
