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ears. What else? Because you looked a bit wild, like you’d been in a fight. I’d been on my bike in the morning. She raised herself up on one elbow to get a better view of his face, and they held each other’s gaze. It was still a novel and vertiginous experience for them to look for a minute on end into the eyes of another adult, without embarrassment or restraint. It was the closest they came, he thought, to making love. She pulled the grass stem from his mouth. You’re such a country bumpkin. Come on. What else? All right. Because you stopped in the doorway and looked around at everyone as though you owned the place. Proud. No, I mean, bold. He laughed at this. But I was annoyed with myself. Then you saw me, Florence said. And you decided to stare me out. Not true. You glanced at me and decided I wasn’t worth a second look. She kissed him, not deeply, but teasingly, or so he thought. In these early days he considered there was just a small chance that she was one of those fabled girls from a nice home who would want to go all the way with him, and soon. But surely not outdoors, along this frequented stretch of river. He drew her closer, until their noses were almost touching and their faces went dark. He said, So did you think then it was love at first sight? His tone was lighthearted and mocking, but she decided to take him seriously. The anxieties she would face were still far off, though occasionally she wondered what it was she was heading toward. A month ago they had told each other they were in love, and that was both a thrill and afterward, for her, a cause of one night of half waking, of vague dread that she had been impetuous and let go of something important, given something away that was not really hers to give. But it was too
keep up with immediate needthe coal to be brought in for the kitchen stove, the sittingroom fire to keep going in winter, semiclean school clothes to be found for the children. Laundry was done on Sunday afternoons, and that required lighting a fire under the copper tub. On rainy days, drying clothes were spread over the furniture throughout the house. Ironing was beyond Lioneeverything was smoothed out with a hand and folded. There were interludes when one of the neighbors acted as home help, but no one stayed for long. The scale of the task was too great, and these local ladies had their own families to organize. The Mayhews ate their supper at a folding pine table, hemmed in by the close chaos of the kitchen. Washing up was always left for later. After Marjorie had been thanked by everyone for the meal, she wandered off to one of her projects while the children cleared away and then brought their books to the table for homework. Lionel went to his study to mark exercise books, do administration and listen to the wireless news while he smoked a pipe. An hour and a half or so later he would come out to check on their work and get them ready for bed. He always read to them, separate stories for Edward and the girls. They often fell asleep to the sound of him washing the dishes downstairs. He was a mild man, chunkily built, like a farm laborer, with milky blue eyes and sandy hair and a short military mustache. He was too old to be called uhe was already thirtyeight when Edward was born. Lionel rarely raised his voice or smacked or belted his children the way most fathers did. He expected to be obeyed, and the children, perhaps sensing the burden of his responsibilities, complied. Naturally they took their circumstances for granted, even though they saw often enough the homes of their friendthose kindly, aproned mothers in their fiercely ordered domains. It was never obvious to Edward, Anne and Harriet that they were less fortunate than any of their friends. It was Lionel alone who bore the weight. Not until he was fourteen did Edward fully understand that there was something wrong with his mother, and he could not remember the time, around his fifth birthday, when she had abruptly changed. Like his sisters, he grew up into the
interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper. Now, on the riverbank in the soporific heat of one of the last days of this summer, she concentrated on that moment when he had paused at the entrance to the meeting room, and on what she had seen and felt when she looked in his direction. To aid her memory she pulled away and straightened and looked from his face toward the slow muddy green river. Suddenly it was no longer peaceful. Just upstream, drifting their way, was a familiar scene, a ramming battle between two overladen punts locked together at right angles as they rounded a bend at a slew, with the usual shrieks, piratical shouts and splashing. University students being selfconsciously wacky, a reminder of how much she longed to be away from this place. Even as schoolgirls, she and her friends had regarded the students as an embarrassment, puerile invaders of their hometown. She tried to concentrate harder. His clothes had been unusual, but what she noted was the faca thoughtful, delicate oval, a high forehead, dark eyebrows widely arched, and the stillness of his gaze as it roamed across the gathering and settled on her, as if he were not in the room at all but imagining it, dreaming her up. Memory unhelpfully inserted what she could not yet have hearthe faint country twang in his voice, close to the local Oxford accent, with its hint of West Country. She turned back to him. I was curious about you. But it was even more abstract than that. At the time it did not even occur to her to satisfy her curiosity. She did not think they were about to meet, or that there was anything she should do to make that possible. It was as if her own curiosity had nothing to do with heshe was really the one who was missing from the room. Falling in love was revealing to her just how odd she was, how habitually sealed off in her everyday thoughts. Whenever Edward asked, How do you feel? or, What are
you thinking? she always made an awkward answer. Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back. In the stonefloored echoing hall with the heavy low beams, her problems with Edward were already present in those first few seconds, in their first exchange of looks. He was born in July 1940, in the week the Battle of Britain began. His father, Lionel, would tell him later that for two months of that summer history held its breath while it decided whether or not German would be Edward’s first language. By his tenth birthday he discovered that this was only a manner of speakinall over occupied France, for example, children had continued to speak French. Turville Heath was less than a hamlet, more a thin scattering of cottages around the woods and common land on a broad ridge above Turville village. By the end of the thirties, the northeastern end of the Chilterns, the London end, thirty miles away, had been invaded by urban sprawl and was already a suburban paradise. But at the southwestern tip, south of Beacon Hill, where one day a motorway torrent of cars and trucks would surge down through a cut in the chalk toward Birmingham, the land was more or less unchanged. Just near the Mayhews’ cottage, down a rutted, steeply banked track through a beech wood, past Spinney Farm, lay the Wormsley Valley, a backwater beauty, a passing author had written, which had been in the hands of one farming family, the Fanes, for centuries. In 1940 the cottage still took its water from a well, from where it was carried to the attic and poured into a tank. It was part of family lore that as the country prepared to face Hitler’s invasion, Edward’s birth was considered by the local authority to be an emergency, a crisis in hygiene. Men with picks and shovels came, rather elderly men, and mains water was channeled to the house from the Northend road in September of that year, just as the London Blitz was beginning. Lionel Mayhew was the headmaster
but no one contradicted her, and ritually, at the end of every meal, the children and their father would thank her. It was a form of makebelieve that was comforting for them all. When Marjorie announced that she was making a shopping list for Watlington market, or that she had more sheets to iron than she could begin to count, a parallel world of bright normality appeared within reach of the whole family. But the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed. They grew up inside it, neutrally inhabiting its absurdities because they were never defined. Somehow they protected her from the friends they brought home, just as they protected their friends from her. The accepted view locallor this was all they ever hearwas that Mrs. Mayhew was artistic, eccentric and charming, probably a genius. It did not embarrass the children to hear their mother tell them things they knew could not be true. She did not have a busy day ahead, she had not really spent the entire afternoon making blackberry jam. These were not falsehoods, they were expressions of what their mother truly was, and they were bound to protect hein silence. It was a memorable few minutes, then, when Edward at the age of fourteen found himself alone with his father in the garden and heard for the first time that his mother was braindamaged. The term was an insult, a blasphemous invitation to disloyalty. Braindamaged. Something wrong with her head. If anyone else had said that about his mother, Edward would have been obliged to get in a fight and deliver a thrashing. But even as he listened in hostile silence to this calumny, he felt a burden
