A moving novel of love and loss

By Philippa Tracy

It begins with a memory. A piano lesson. A room with “an orange-tiled floor” and a young female teacher with “deep red” lips and nails. The latter is an immediate and obvious clue to the danger she represents to 11-year-old Ronald Baines. Roland has recently been sent to a boys boarding school in rural England; his father, Captain Baines, serving with the British army in Libya, thinks that children get “in the way of a marriage” and Roland is too “girlishly” close to his...