On Chesil Beach

TWO

HOW DID they meet, and why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and innocent? They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny, but still, it remained a paradox to them that so momentous a meeting should have been accidental, so dependent on a hundred minor events and choices. What a terrifying possibility, that it might never have happened at all. And in the first rush of love, they often wondered at how nearly their paths had crossed during their early teens, when Edward descended occasionally from the remoteness of his squalid family home in the Chiltern Hills to visit Oxford. It was titillating to believe they must have brushed past each other at one of those famous, youthful city events, at St Giles’ Fair in the first week of September, or May Morning at dawn on the first of the month–a ridiculous and overrated ritual, they both agreed; or while renting a punt at the Cherwell Boat House–though Edward had only ever done it once; or, later in their teens, during illicit drinking at the Turl. He even thought he may have been bussed in with other thirteen-year-old boys to Oxford High, to be thrashed at a general knowledge quiz by girls who were as eerily informed and self-possessed as adults. Perhaps it was another school. Florence had no memory of being on the team, but she confessed it was the sort of thing she liked to do. When they compared their mental and geographical maps of Oxford, they found they had a close match.

Then their childhoods and school years were over, and in 1958 they both chose London–University College for him, for her the Royal College of Music–and naturally, they failed to meet. Edward lodged with a widowed aunt in Camden Town and cycled into Bloomsbury each morning. He worked all day, played football at weekends and drank beer with his mates. Until he became embarrassed by it, he had a taste for the occasional brawl outside a pub. His one serious unphysical pastime was listening to music, to the kind of punchy electric blues that turned out to be the true precursor and vital engine of English rock and roll–this music, in his lifelong view, was far superior to the fey three-minute music-hall ditties from Liverpool that were to captivate the world in a few years’ time. He often left the library in the evenings and walked down Oxford Street to the Hundred Club to listen to John Mayall’s Powerhouse Four, or Alexis Korner, or Brian Knight. During his three years as a student, the nights at the club represented the peak of his cultural experience, and for years to come he considered that this was the music that formed his tastes, and even shaped his life.

The few girls he knew–there were not so many at universities in those days–travelled in for lectures from the outer suburbs and left in the late afternoon, apparently under strict parental instruction to be home by six. Without saying so, these girls conveyed the clear impression that they were ‘keeping themselves’ for a future husband. There was no ambiguity–to have sex with any one of these girls, you would have to marry her. A couple of friends, both decent footballers, went down this route, were married in their second year and disappeared from view. One of these unfortunates made a particular impact as a cautionary tale. He got a girl from the University administration office pregnant and was, in his friends’ view, ‘dragged to the altar’ and not seen for a year, until he was spotted in Putney High Street, pushing a pram, in those days still a demeaning act for a man.

The Pill was a rumour in the newspapers, a ridiculous promise, another of those tall tales about America. The blues he had heard at the Hundred Club suggested to Edward that all round him, just out of sight, men of his age were leading explosive, untiring sex lives, rich with gratifications of every kind. Pop music was bland, still coy on the matter, films were a little more explicit, but in Edward’s circle the men had to be content with telling dirty jokes, uneasy sexual boasting and boisterous camaraderie driven by furious drinking, which reduced further their chances of meeting a girl. Social change never proceeds at an even pace. There were rumours that in the English department, and along the road at SOAS and down Kingsway at the LSE, men and women in tight black jeans and black polo-neck sweaters had constant easy sex, without having to meet each other’s parents. There was even talk of reefers. Edward sometimes took an experimental stroll from the History to the English department, hoping to find evidence of paradise on earth, but the corridors, the notice boards, and even the women looked no different.

Florence was on the other side of town, near the Albert Hall, in a prim hostel for female students where the lights went out at eleven and male visitors were forbidden at any time, and the girls were always popping in and out of each other’s rooms. Florence practised five hours a day and went to concerts with her girlfriends. She preferred above all the chamber recitals at the Wigmore Hall, especially the string quartets, and sometimes attended as many as five in a week, lunchtimes as well as evenings. She loved the dark seriousness of the place, the faded, peeling walls backstage, the gleaming woodwork and deep red carpet of the entrance hall, the auditorium like a gilded tunnel, the famous cupola over the stage depicting, so she was told, mankind’s hunger for the magnificent abstraction of music, with the Genius of Harmony represented as a ball of eternal fire. She revered the ancient types, who took minutes to emerge from their taxis, the last of the Victorians, hobbling on their sticks to their seats, to listen in alert critical silence, sometimes with the tartan rug they had brought draped across their knees. These fossils, with their knobbly shrunken skulls tipped humbly towards the stage, represented to Florence burnished experience and wise judgement, or suggested a musical expertise that arthritic fingers could no longer serve. And there was the simple thrill of knowing that so many famous musicians in the world had performed here and that great careers had begun on this very stage. It was here that she heard the sixteen-year-old cellist Jacqueline du Pré give her debut performance. Florence’s own tastes were not unusual, but they were intense. Beethoven’s Opus 18 obsessed her for a good while, then his last great quartets. Schumann, Brahms, and then, in her last year, the quartets of Frank Bridge, Bartok and Britten. She heard all these composers over a period of three years at the Wigmore Hall.

In her second year she was given a part-time job backstage, making tea for the performers in the spacious green room, and crouching by the peep hole so that she could open the door as the artistes left the stage. She also turned pages for the pianists in chamber pieces, and one night actually stood at Benjamin Britten’s side in a programme of songs by Haydn, Frank Bridge and Britten himself. There was a boy treble singing, as well as Peter Pears who slipped her a ten shilling note as he and the great composer were leaving. She discovered the practice rooms next door, under the piano showroom, where legendary pianists like John Ogdon and Cherkassky thundered up and down their scales and arpeggios all morning, like demented first-year students. The Hall became a kind of second home–she felt possessive of every dim and dowdy corner, even of the cold concrete steps that led down to the washrooms.

One of her jobs was to tidy the green room, and one afternoon she saw in a waste-paper basket some pencilled performance notes discarded by the Amadeus Quartet. The hand was loopy and faint, barely legible, and concerned the opening movement of the Schubert Quartet No. 15. It thrilled her to decipher finally the words, ‘At B attack!’ Florence could not stop herself playing with the idea that she had received an important message, or a vital prompt, and two weeks later, not long after the beginning of her final year, she asked three of the best students at college to join her own quartet.

Only the cellist was a man, but Charles Rodway was of no real romantic interest to her. The men at college, devoted musicians, fiercely ambitious, ignorant of everything beyond their chosen instrument and its repertoire, never much appealed. Whenever one of the girls from the group started going steady with another student, she simply vanished socially, just like Edward’s footballer friends. It was as though the young woman had entered a convent. Since it did not seem possible to go out with a boy and still keep up with the old friends, Florence preferred to stick with her hostel group. She liked the banter, the intimacy, the kindness, the way the girls made much of each other’s birthdays, and fussed around sweetly with kettles, blankets and fruit if you happened to get the flu. Her college years felt like freedom to her.

Edward and Florence’s London maps barely overlapped. She knew very little of the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, and though she always intended to, she never visited the Reading Room of the British Museum. He knew nothing at all of the Wigmore Hall or the tea rooms in her quarter, and never once picnicked in Hyde Park or took a boat on the Serpentine. It was exciting for them to discover that they were in Trafalgar Square at the same moment in 1959, along with twenty thousand others, all resolving to ban the bomb.

THEY DID not meet until their London courses were over, when they drifted back to their respective family homes and the stillness of their childhoods to sit out a hot, boring week or two, waiting for their exam results. Later, this was what intrigued them most–how easily the encounter might not have happened. For Edward, this particular day could have passed like most others–a retreat to the end of the narrow garden to sit on a mossy bench in the shade of a giant elm, reading and staying out of his mother’s reach. Fifty yards away, her face, pale and indistinct, like one of her watercolours, would be at the kitchen or sitting-room window for twenty minutes at a stretch, watching him steadily. He tried to ignore her, but her gaze was like the touch of her hand on his back or his shoulder. Then he would hear her at the piano upstairs, stumbling through one of her pieces from the Anna Magdalena Notebook, the only piece of classical music he knew of at the time. Half an hour later she might be back at the window, staring at him again. She never came out to speak to him if she saw him with a book. Years ago, when Edward was still a schoolboy, his father had patiently instructed her never to interrupt her son’s studies.

That summer, after finals, his interest was in fanatical medieval cults and their wild, psychotic leaders, who regularly proclaimed themselves the Messiah. For the second time in a year he was reading Norman Cohen’s The Pursuit of Millennium. Driven by notions of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel, convinced the Pope was Anti-Christ and that the end of the world was nearing and only the pure would be saved, rabbles in their thousands would sweep through the German countryside, going from town to town, massacring Jews whenever they could find them, as well as priests, and sometimes the rich. Then the authorities would violently suppress the movement, and another sect would spring up elsewhere a few years later. From within the dullness and safety of his existence, Edward read of these recurrent bouts of unreason with horrified fascination, grateful to live in a time when religion had generally faded into insignificance. He was wondering whether to apply for a doctorate, if his degree was good enough. This medieval madness could be his subject.

On strolls through the beech woods, he dreamed of a series of short biographies he would write of semi-obscure figures who lived close to the centre of important historical events. The first would be Sir Robert Carey, the man who rode from London to Edinburgh in seventy hours to deliver the news of Elizabeth I’s death to her successor, James VI of Scotland. Carey was an interesting figure who usefully wrote his own memoir. He fought against the Spanish Armada, was a noted swordsman, and a patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. His arduous ride north was supposed to gain him great preferment under the new king, but instead he fell into relative obscurity.

In more realistic moods, Edward thought he should find a proper job, teaching history in a grammar school and making certain he avoided National Service.

If he was not reading, he usually wandered down the lane, along the avenue of limes, to the village of Northend, where Simon Carter, a schoolfriend, lived. But on this particular morning, weary of books and birdsong and country peace, Edward took his rickety childhood bike from the shed, raised the saddle, pumped up the tyres and set off with no particular plan. He had a pound note and two half-crowns in his pocket and all he wanted was forward movement. At reckless speed, for the brakes barely worked, he flew through a green tunnel, down the steep hill, past Balham’s then Stracey’s farm, and into the Stonor valley, and as he hurtled past the iron railings of the Park, he made the decision to go on to Henley, another four miles. When he arrived in the town, he headed for the railway station with the vague intention of going to London to look up friends. But the train waiting at the platform was going in the other direction, towards Oxford.

An hour and a half later he was wandering through the city centre in the heat of noon, still vaguely bored, and irritated with himself for wasting money and time. This used to be his local capital, the source or promise of nearly all his teenage excitement. But after London it seemed like a toy town, cloying and provincial, ridiculous in its pretensions. When a porter in a trilby scowled at him from the shade of a college entrance, he almost turned back to speak to him. Instead, Edward decided to buy himself a consolatory pint. Going along St Giles’ towards the Eagle and Child, he saw a handwritten sign advertising a lunchtime meeting of the local CND, and hesitated. He did not much like these earnest gatherings, neither the self-dramatising rhetoric nor the mournful rectitude. Of course the weapons were hideous and should be stopped, but he had never learned anything new at a meeting. Still, he was a paid-up member, he had nothing else to do and he felt a vague pull of obligation. It was his duty to help save the world.

He went along a tiled corridor and entered a dim hall with low painted roof beams and a churchy smell of wood polish and dust through which there rose a low discord of echoing voices. As his eyes adjusted, the first person he saw was Florence, standing by a door talking to a stringy, yellow-faced fellow holding a stack of pamphlets. She wore a white cotton dress that flared out like a party frock, and a narrow blue leather belt tightly fastened around her waist. He thought for a moment she was a nurse–in an abstract, conventional way he found nurses erotic because–so he liked to fantasise–they already knew everything about his body and its needs. Unlike most girls he stared at in the street or in shops, she did not look away. Her look was quizzical or humorous, and possibly bored and wanting entertainment. It was a strange face, certainly beautiful, but in a sculpted, strong-boned way. In the gloom of the hall the singular quality of light from a high window to her right made her face resemble a carved mask, soulful and tranquil, and hard to read. He had not paused as he entered the room. He was walking towards her with no idea of what he would say. In the matter of opening lines, he was reliably inept.

Her gaze was on him as he approached, and when he was near enough she took a pamphlet from her friend’s pile and said, ‘Would you like one? It’s all about a hydrogen bomb landing on Oxford.’

As he took it from her, her finger trailed, surely not by accident, across the inside of his wrist. He said, ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather read.’

The fellow with her was looking venomous as he waited for him to move away, but Edward stayed right where he was.

SHE TOO was restless at home, a big Victorian villa in the Gothic style just off the Banbury Road, fifteen minutes’ walk away. Violet, her mother, marking finals all day in the heat, was intolerant of Florence’s regular practice routines–repeated scales and arpeggios, double-stopping exercises, memory tests. ‘Screeching’ was the word Violet used, as in, ‘Darling, I’m still not finished for today. Could you bear to delay your screeching until after tea?’

It was supposed to be an affectionate joke, but Florence, who was unusually irritable that week, took it as further evidence of her mother’s disapproval of her career and hostility to music in general and therefore to Florence herself. She knew she ought to feel sorry for her mother. She was so tone-deaf she was unable to recognise a single tune, even the National Anthem, which she could distinguish only by context from Happy Birthday. She was one of those people who could not say if one note was lower or higher than another. This was no less a disability and misfortune than a club foot, or a harelip, but after the relative freedoms of Kensington, Florence was finding home life minutely oppressive and could not muster her sympathies. For example, she did not mind making her bed every morning–she had always done so–but she resented being asked at each breakfast whether she had.

As often happened when she had been away, her father aroused in her conflicting emotions. There were times when she found him physically repellent and she could hardly bear the sight of him–his gleaming baldness, his tiny white hands, his restless schemes for improving his business and making even more money. And the high tenor voice, both wheedling and commanding, with its eccentrically distributed stresses. She hated hearing his enthusiastic reports about the boat, the ridiculously named Sugar Plum, which he kept down in Poole harbour. It grated on her, his accounts of a new kind of sail, a ship-to-shore radio, a special yacht varnish. He used to take her out with him, and several times, when she was twelve and thirteen, they crossed all the way to Carteret, near Cherbourg. They never talked about those trips. He had never asked her again, and she was glad. But sometimes, in a surge of protective feeling and guilty love, she would come up behind him where he sat and entwine her arms around his neck and kiss the top of his head and nuzzle him, liking his clean scent. She would do all this, then loathe herself for it later.

And her younger sister got on her nerves, with her new cockney accent and cultivated stupidity at the piano. How were they supposed to do as their father demanded and play a Sousa march for him when Ruth pretended that she could not count four beats in a bar?

As always, Florence was adept at concealing her feelings from her family. It required no effort–she simply left the room, whenever it was possible to do so undemonstratively, and later was glad she had said nothing bitter or wounding to her parents or sister; otherwise she would be awake all night with her guilt. She constantly reminded herself how much she loved her family, trapping herself more effectively into silence. She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start–she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten. Best to keep things simple. She could only blame herself then, when she felt like a character in a newspaper cartoon, with steam hissing from her ears.

And she had other concerns. Should she go for a rear desk job with a provincial orchestra–she would count herself extremely lucky to get into the Bournemouth Symphony–or should she remain dependent on her parents for another year, on her father really, and work the string quartet up for its first engagement? That would mean lodging in London, and she was reluctant to ask Geoffrey for extra money. The cellist, Charles Rodway, had offered the spare bedroom in his parents’ house, but he was a brooding, intense fellow, who gave her fixed, meaningful looks over the music stand. Lodging with him, she would be at his mercy. She knew of a full-time job, hers for the asking, with a Palm Court-style trio in a seedy grand hotel south of London. She had no scruples about the kind of music she would have to play–no one would be listening–but some instinct, or mere snobbery, convinced her she could not live in or near Croydon. She persuaded herself that her college results would help her make up her mind, and so, like Edward fifteen miles away in the wooded hills to the east, she passed her days in a form of ante-room, waiting fretfully for her life to begin.

Back from college, transformed from a schoolgirl, mature in ways that no one in the household appeared to notice, Florence was beginning to realise that her parents had rather objectionable political opinions, and here at least she permitted herself open dissent at the dinner table, in arguments that meandered through the long summer evenings. This was release of a kind, but these conversations also inflamed her general impatience. Violet was genuinely interested in her daughter’s membership of CND, although it was trying for Florence, having a philosopher for a mother. She was provoked by her mother’s calmness or, more accurately, the sadness she affected as she heard her daughter out and then delivered her own opinion. She said that the Soviet Union was a cynical tyranny, a cruel and heartless state, responsible for genocide on a scale that even outdid Nazi Germany and for a vast, barely understood network of political prison camps. She went on about show trials, censorship, absence of rule of law. The Soviet Union had trampled on human dignity and basic rights, it was a stifling occupying force in neighbouring lands–Violet had Hungarians and Czechs among her academic friends–and it was expansionist by creed and must be opposed, just as Hitler had been. If it could not be opposed, because we did not have the tanks and men to defend the north German plain, then it had to be deterred. A couple of months later she would point to the building of the Berlin Wall and claim complete vindication–the Communist empire was now one giant prison.

Florence knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes–clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design–was essentially a beneficial force in the world. It was and always had been for liberating the oppressed and standing up to fascism and the ravages of greedy capitalism. The comparison with Nazi Germany disgusted her. She recognised in Violet’s opinions a typical pattern of pro-American propaganda. She was disappointed in her mother, and even said so.

And her father had just the sort of opinions you might expect from a businessman. His choice of words could be a little sharpened by half a bottle of wine: Harold Macmillan was a fool to be giving up the Empire without a struggle, a bloody fool not to impose wage restraint on the unions, and a pathetic bloody fool for thinking of going cap in hand to the Europeans, begging to join their sinister club. Florence found it harder to contradict Geoffrey. She could never shake off a sense of awkward obligation to him. Among the privileges of her childhood was the keen attention that might have been directed at a brother, a son. Last summer her father had taken her out regularly after work in his Humber, so that she could have a go at her driving licence just after her twenty-first birthday. She failed. Violin lessons from the age of five, with summer courses at a special school, skiing and tennis lessons, and flying lessons, which she defiantly refused. And then the journeys: just the two of them, hiking in the Alps, Sierra Nevada and Pyrenees, and the special treats, the one-night business trips to European cities where she and Geoffrey always stayed in the grandest hotels.

When Florence left her house after midday, after an unvoiced argument with her mother over a trifling domestic detail–Violet did not particularly approve of the way her daughter used the washing machine–she said that she was going to post a letter and would not be wanting lunch. She turned south on the Banbury Road and headed towards the city centre with a vague ambition of wandering through the covered market and perhaps bumping into an old schoolfriend. Or she might buy a roll there and eat it on Christ Church Meadow, in the shade, by the river. When she noticed the sign in St Giles’, the one Edward would see in fifteen minutes, she absentmindedly drifted in. It was her mother who was occupying her thoughts. After spending so much time with her affectionate friends at the student hostel, she noticed, coming home, how physically distant her mother was. She had never kissed or embraced Florence, even when she was small. Violet had barely ever touched her daughter at all. Perhaps it was just as well. She was thin and bony, and Florence was not exactly pining for her caresses. And it was too late to start now.

Within minutes of stepping out of the sunshine into the hall, it was clear to Florence she had made a mistake coming indoors. As her eyes adjusted, she looked about her with the vacant interest she might give the silverware collection in the Ashmolean. Suddenly a North Oxford boy whose name she had forgotten, a gaunt, twenty-two-year-old boy with glasses, came out of the darkness and trapped her. Without preamble, he began to outline for her the consequences of a single hydrogen bomb falling on Oxford. Almost a decade ago, when they were both thirteen, he had invited her to his home in Park Town, only three streets away, to admire a new invention, a television set, the first she had ever seen. On a small, grey, cloudy screen framed by carved mahogany doors, a man in a dinner jacket sat at a desk in what looked like a blizzard. Florence thought it was a ridiculous contraption without a future, but forever after, this boy–John? David? Michael?–seemed to believe she owed him her friendship, and here he was again, still calling in the debt.

His pamphlet, two hundred copies of which were under his arm, set out Oxford’s fate. He wanted her to help him distribute them about the town. As he leaned in she felt the scent of his hair cream wrap itself around her face. His papery skin had a jaundiced gleam in the low light, his eyes were reduced by thick lenses to narrow black slits. Florence, incapable of rudeness, settled her face into an attentive grimace. There was something fascinating about tall thin men, the way their bones and Adam’s apple lurked so unconcealed beneath the skin, their bird-like faces, their predatory stoop. The crater he was describing would be half a mile across, a hundred feet deep. Because of radioactivity, Oxford would be unapproachable for ten thousand years. It began to sound like a promise of deliverance. But in fact, outside, the glorious city was exploding with the foliage of early summer, the sun was warming the treacle-coloured Cotswold stone, Christ Church Meadow would be in full splendour. Here in the hall she could see over the young man’s narrow shoulder murmuring figures moving about in the gloom, setting out the chairs, and then she saw Edward, coming towards her.

Many weeks later, on another hot day, they took a punt on the Cherwell, upstream to the Vicky Arms, and later drifted back down towards the boathouse. Along the way they parked among a clump of hawthorns and lay on the bank in deep shade, Edward on his back chewing a stalk of grass, Florence with her head resting on his arm. In a break in the conversation they listened to wavelets pattering under the boat and the muffled knock as it swung against its tree-stump mooring. Occasionally a faint breeze brought them the soothing airy sound of traffic on the Banbury Road. A thrush sang intricately, repeating each phrase with care, then gave up in the heat. Edward was working at various temporary jobs, principally as a groundsman for a cricket club. She was giving all her time to the quartet. Their hours together were not always easy to arrange, and all the more precious. This was a snatched Saturday afternoon. They knew that it was one of the last days of full-blown high summer–it was already early September, and the leaves and grasses, though still unambiguously green, had an exhausted air. The conversation had returned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other.

In answer to the question Edward had put several minutes before, Florence said at last, ‘Because you weren’t wearing a jacket.’

‘What then?’

‘Um. Loose white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, tails almost hanging out…’

‘Nonsense.’

‘And grey flannel trousers with a mend in the knee, and scruffy plimsolls starting to come out at the toes. And long hair, almost over your 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 light-hearted 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 towards. A month ago they had told each other they were in love, and that was both a thrill and afterwards, 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 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 towards 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 self-consciously wacky, a reminder of how much she longed to be away from this place. Even as school-girls, she and her friends had regarded the students as an embarrassment, as puerile invaders of their home town.

She tried to concentrate harder. His clothes had been unusual, but what she had noted was the face–a 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 heard–the 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 her–she 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 stone-floored 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 speaking–all 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 north-eastern 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 south-western tip, south of Beacon Hill, where one day a motorway torrent of cars and trucks would surge down through a cut in the chalk towards 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 channelled to the house from the Northend road in September of that year, just as the London Blitz was beginning.

Lionel Mayhew was the headmaster of a primary school in Henley. In the early mornings he cycled the five miles to work, and at the end of the day he walked his bike back up the long steep hill to the heath, with homework and papers piled up in a wicker basket on the front handle-bars. In 1945, the year the twin girls were born, he bought a second-hand car for eleven pounds in Christmas Common, from the widow of a naval officer lost on the Atlantic convoys. It was still a rare sight along those narrow chalk lanes then, a motor squeezing past the plough horses and carts. But there were many days when petrol rationing forced Lionel back on his bike.

In the early nineteen fifties, his homecoming routines were hardly typical of a professional man. He would take his papers straight away into the tiny parlour by the front door that he used as his office and set them out carefully. This was the only tidy room in the house, and it was important for him to protect his working life from his domestic environment. Then he checked on the children–in time, Edward, Anne and Harriet all attended the village school in Northend and walked back on their own. He would spend a few minutes alone with Marjorie, and then he would be in the kitchen, preparing the tea and clearing up breakfast.

It was only in this hour, while supper was cooked, that housework was ever achieved. As soon as the children were old enough, they helped out, but ineffectually. Only the exposed parts of the floors not covered in junk were ever swept, and only items needed for the next day–mostly clothes and books–were tidied. The beds were never made, the sheets rarely changed, the handbasin in the cramped, icy bathroom was never cleaned–it was possible to carve your name in the hard grey scum with a fingernail. It was difficult enough to keep up with immediate needs–the coal to be brought in for the kitchen stove, the sitting-room fire to keep going in winter, semi-clean school clothes to be found for the children. Laundry was done on Sunday afternoons, and that required lighting a fire under the copper. On rainy days, drying clothes were spread over the furniture throughout the house. Ironing was beyond Lionel–everything was smoothed out with a hand and folded. There were interludes when one of the neighbours 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 organise.

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 labourer, with milky blue eyes and sandy hair and a short military moustache. He was too old to be called up–he was already thirty-eight 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 friends–those 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 unremarkable fact of her derangement. She was a ghostly figure, a gaunt and gentle sprite with tousled brown hair, who drifted about the house as she drifted through their childhoods, sometimes communicative and even affectionate, at others remote, absorbed in her hobbies and projects. She could be heard at any hour of the day, and even in the middle of the night, fumbling her way through the same simple piano pieces, always faltering in the same places. She was often in the garden pottering about the shapeless bed she had made right in the centre of the narrow lawn. Painting, especially watercolours–scenes of distant hills and church spire, framed by foreground trees–contributed much to the general disorder. She never washed a brush, or emptied the greenish water from the jam jars, or put away the paints and rags, or gathered up her various attempts–none of which were ever finished. She would wear her painting smock for days on end, long after a painting bout had subsided. Another activity–it may have been suggested once as a form of occupational therapy–was cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them into scrap-books. She liked to move around the house as she worked, and discarded paper clippings were everywhere underfoot, trodden into the dirt of the bare floorboards. Paste brushes hardened in the opened pots where she left them on chairs and window ledges.

Among Marjorie’s other interests were bird watching from the sitting-room window, knitting and embroidery, and flower arranging, all pursued with the same dreamy, chaotic intensity. She was mostly silent, though sometimes they heard her murmuring to herself as she carried through a difficult task, ‘There…there…there.’

It never occurred to Edward to ask himself if she was happy. She certainly had her moments of anxiety, panicky attacks when her breathing came in snatches and her thin arms would rise and fall at her side, and all her attention was suddenly on her children, on a specific need she knew she must immediately address. Edward’s fingernails were too long, she must mend a tear in a frock, the twins needed a bath. She would descend among them, fussing ineffectually, scolding, or hugging them to her, kissing their faces or doing all at once, making up for lost time. It almost felt like love, and they yielded to her happily enough. But they knew from experience that the realities of the household were forbidding–the nail scissors and matching thread would not be found, and to heat water for a bath needed hours of preparation. Soon their mother would drift away, back to her own world.

These fits may have been caused by some fragment of her former self trying to assert control, half recognising the nature of her own condition, dimly recalling a previous existence, and suddenly, terrifyingly, glimpsing the scale of her loss. But for most of the time Marjorie kept herself content with the notion, an elaborate fairy tale in fact, that she was a devoted wife and mother, that the house ran smoothly thanks to all her work, and that she deserved a little time to herself when her duties were done. And in order to keep the bad moments to a minimum, and not alarm that scrap of her former consciousness, Lionel and the children colluded in the make-believe. At the beginning of meals, she might lift her face from contemplating her husband’s efforts and say sweetly as she brushed the straggly hair from her face, ‘I do hope you enjoy this. It’s something new I wanted to try.’

It was always something old, for Lionel’s repertoire was narrow, 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 make-believe 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 locally–or this was all they ever heard–was 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 her–in 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 brain-damaged. The term was an insult, a blasphemous invitation to disloyalty. Brain-damaged. 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 lifting. Of course it was true, and he could not fight the truth. Straight away, he could begin to persuade himself that he had always known.

He and his father were standing under the big elm on a hot, moist day in late May. After days of rain, the air was thick with the abundance of early summer–the din of birds and insects, the scent of mown grass lying in rows on the green in front of the cottage, the thrusting, yearning tangle of the garden, almost inseparable from the woodland fringe beyond the picket fence, pollen bringing father and son the season’s first taste of hay fever, and on the lawn at their feet, tiles of sunlight and shade rocking together in a light breeze. In these surroundings, Edward was listening to his father, and trying to conjure for himself a bitter winter’s day in December 1944, the busy railway platform at Wycombe, and his mother bundled up in her greatcoat, carrying a shopping bag of meagre, wartime Christmas presents. She was stepping forward to meet the train from Marylebone station that would take her to Princes Risborough, and on to Watlington, where she would be met by Lionel. At home, Edward was being looked after by a neighbour’s teenage daughter.

There is a certain kind of confident traveller who likes to open the carriage door just before the train has stopped in order to step out onto the platform with a little running skip. Perhaps by leaving the train before its journey has ended, he asserts his independence–he is no passive lump of freight. Perhaps he invigorates a memory of youthfulness, or is simply in such a hurry that every second matters. The train braked, possibly a little harder than usual, and the door swung out from this traveller’s grasp. The heavy metal edge struck Marjorie Mayhew’s forehead with sufficient force to fracture her skull, and dislocate in an instant her personality, intelligence and memory. Her coma lasted just under a week. The traveller, described by eyewitnesses as a distinguished-looking City gent in his sixties, with bowler, rolled umbrella and newspaper, scuttled away from the scene–the young woman, pregnant with twins, sprawled on the ground among a few scattered toys–and disappeared for ever into the streets of Wycombe, with all his guilt intact, or so Lionel said he hoped.

This curious moment in the garden–a turning point in Edward’s life–fixed in his mind a particular memory of his father. He held a pipe in his hand, which he did not light until he finished his story. He maintained a purposeful grip, with forefinger curled around the bowl, and the stem poised a foot or so from the corner of his mouth. Because it was Sunday, his face was unshaven–Lionel had no religious beliefs, though he went through the motions at school. He liked to keep this one morning a week for himself. By not shaving on Sunday mornings, which was eccentric for a man in his position, he deliberately excluded himself from any form of public engagement. He wore a creased collarless white shirt, not even smoothed by hand. His manner was careful, somewhat distant–this was a conversation he must have rehearsed in his thoughts. As he spoke, his gaze sometimes moved from his son’s face to the house, as though to evoke Marjorie’s condition more precisely, or to watch out for the girls. In conclusion, he put his hand on Edward’s shoulder, an unusual gesture, and walked him the last few yards to the very end of the garden, where the rickety wooden fence was disappearing beneath the advancing undergrowth. Beyond was a five-acre field, empty of sheep, colonised by buttercups in two wide diverging swaths, like roads.

They stood side by side while Lionel lit his pipe at last, and Edward, with the adaptability of his years, continued to make the quiet transition from shock to recognition. Of course, he had always known. He had been maintained in a state of innocence by the absence of a term for her condition. He had never even thought of her as having a condition, and at the same time had always accepted that she was different. The contradiction was now resolved by this simple naming, by the power of words to make the unseen visible. Brain-damaged. The term dissolved intimacy, it coolly measured his mother by a public standard that everyone could understand. A sudden space began to open out, not only between Edward and his mother, but also between himself and his immediate circumstances, and he felt his own being, the buried core of it he had never attended to before, come to sudden, hard-edged existence, a glowing pinpoint that he wanted no one else to know about. She was brain-damaged, and he was not. He was not his mother, nor was he his family, and one day he would leave, and would return only as a visitor. He imagined he was a visitor now, keeping his father company after a long absence overseas, gazing out with him across the field at the broad roads of buttercups parting just before the land fell away in a gentle incline towards the woods. It was a lonely sensation he was experimenting with, and he felt guilty about it, but its boldness excited him too.

Lionel appeared to understand the drift of his son’s silence. He told Edward that he had been wonderful with his mother, always kind and helpful, and that this conversation changed nothing. It simply recognised that he was old enough to know the facts. At that point, the twins came running into the garden, looking for their brother, and Lionel only had time to repeat, ‘What I’ve said changes nothing, absolutely nothing,’ before the girls were noisily among them, and then pulling Edward towards the house to deliver an opinion on something they had made.

But much else was changing for him around this time. He was at Henley grammar school, and was beginning to hear from various teachers that he might be ‘university material’. His friend Simon at Northend, and all the other village boys he ran around with, went to the secondary modern, and would soon be leaving to learn a trade or work on a farm before being called up for National Service. Edward hoped his future would be different. Already there was a certain constraint in the air when he was with his friends, on their side as well as his. With homework piling up–for all his mildness, Lionel was a tyrant on this matter–Edward no longer roamed the woods after school with the lads, building camps or traps and provoking the gamekeepers on the Wormsley or Stonor estates. A small town like Henley had its urban pretensions and he was learning to conceal the fact that he knew the names of butterflies, birds, and the wild flowers growing on the Fane family’s land in the intimate valley below the cottage–the bell flower, succory, scabious, the ten kinds of orchis and helleborine and the rare summer snowflake. At school such knowledge might mark him out as a yokel.

Learning of his mother’s accident that day changed nothing outwardly, but all the tiny shifts and realignments in his life seemed crystallised in this new knowledge. He was attentive and kindly towards her, he continued to help maintain the fiction that she ran the house and that everything she said really was the case, but now he was consciously acting a part, and doing so fortified that newly discovered, tough little core of selfhood. At sixteen he developed a taste for long moody rambles. It helped clear his mind to be out of the house. He often went along Holland Lane, a sunken chalk track overhung with crumbling mossy banks that ran downhill to Turville, and then walked down the Hambleden valley to the Thames, crossing at Henley into the Berkshire downs. The term ‘teenager’ had not long been invented, and it never occurred to him that the separateness he felt, which was both painful and delicious, could be shared by anyone else.

Without asking or even telling his father, he hitch-hiked to London one weekend for a rally in Trafalgar Square against the Suez invasion. While he was there he decided in a moment of elation that he would not apply to Oxford, which was where Lionel and all the teachers wanted him to go. The town was too familiar, insufficiently different from Henley. He was coming here, where people seemed larger and louder and unpredictable and the famous streets carelessly shrugged off their own importance. It was a secret plan he held to–he did not want to generate early opposition. He was also intending to avoid National Service, which Lionel had decided would be good for him. These private schemes refined further his sense of a concealed self, a tight nexus of sensitivity, longing and hard-edged egotism. Unlike some of the boys at school, he did not loathe his home and family. He took for granted the small rooms and their squalor, and he remained un-embarrassed by his mother. He was simply impatient for his life, the real story, to start, and the way things were arranged, it could not do so until he had passed his exams. So he worked hard, and turned in good essays, especially for his history master. He was amiable enough with his sisters and parents, and he continued to dream of the day when he would leave the cottage at Turville Heath. But in a sense, he already had.