Introduction

"The writing is unobtrusively brilliant. I can't remember enjoying and admiring a new novel more."--Elizabeth Jane Howard, author of Marking Time

"Utterly captures the sense of quiet desperation of ordinary lives . . . and the ways in which life turns on a sixpence."--Kate Mosse, author of Sepulchre

"Hugely funny. . . . But beneath the Wodehousian surface, it is a serious book about men, women and children with complex inner lives trying to find happiness and coping with disappointment."--Daily Telegraph

Laura is a happily married mother of two who begins to question her choices when her first love resurfaces after twenty years. She's forced to compare the passion of that relationship with the domesticity of her suburban life. What if she?d stayed with him? Would she be happier? And what is happiness, really?

Little does she know that many others in her gentrified English village, including a rector who's lost his faith, a frustrated school teacher, and a successful single mother who can?t get over her ex, are struggling with their own personal crises.

Two of William Nicholson's screenplays--Shadowlands and Gladiator--have garnered Academy Award nominations. He is the author of five previous novels and lives in Sussex with his wife and three children.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

She recognizes the handwriting on the envelope. She drinks from her

mug of tea, looks across the kitchen table at Henry, sees him absorbed

in the triage of the morning post. One pile for the bin, one pile for

later, one for now. He uses a paper knife when opening letters. Not

a kitchen knife, an actual slender, dull-edged blade made for the

purpose. The children silent, reading. Rain outside the windows

puckering the pond.

Laura wills the letter to remain unnoticed. It’s been forwarded

from her parents’ address.

‘You know Belinda Redknapp?’ she says.

‘Should I?’ Henry inattentive.

‘One of the school mothers. You rather fancied her. Husband like

a frog.’

‘They all have husbands like frogs.’

The bankers, lawyers, insurance company executives whose children

are their children’s friends, whose wealth makes Henry feel poor.

‘Anyway, she wants to meet Aidan Massey.’

Henry looks up, surprised.

‘Why?’

‘She thinks he’s sexy.’

Carrie pauses her absorbed scrutiny of the Beano.

‘Who’s sexy?’

‘The man on Daddy’s programme.’

‘Oh.’

‘He’s an evil dwarf,’ says Henry. ‘I want to kill him.’

The letter lies by her plate, immense as a beach towel, shouting her

unmarried name: Laura Kinross. She wants to muffle it, mute it, gag it.

Pick up a section of the newspaper, glance at it, lay it down just so. But the desire inhibits the action. She’s ashamed to discover that she means

to leave the letter unopened until Henry has gone. So to mitigate the

shame she makes no move to conceal the envelope, saying to Fate, See,

I’m doing nothing. If I’m found out I’ll accept the consequences.

Jack is interested in the proposal to kill Aidan Massey.

‘How would you kill him, Daddy?’

‘Hello, Jack. Good to have you with us.’

Laura frowns. She reaches out one hand to stop Jack smearing his

sleeve in the butter. She hates it when Henry talks like that. Jack’s

too dreamy, he says.

‘No, how?’

‘Well.’ Henry puts on the face he makes when summoning facts

from his brain. He actually touches one finger to his brow, as if

pressing a button. ‘I’d tell the make-up girl to go on adding makeup

until he couldn’t breathe. Go on adding it until he’s got no features

left. Just smooth and round like a ball.’

Jack is awed silent by the detail.

Henry gathers up the pile of junk mail and takes it to the bin, which

is already so full the lid won’t close. He rams the wad of paper down

hard. This action makes Laura flinch, because now it will be impossible

to remove the bin bag without ripping it, but she says nothing. She is, it

strikes her, lying low.

Henry reaches for his leather bag, which is bursting with printed

matter.

‘Oh, yes,’ he tells Jack, suddenly remembering. ‘I read your

composition. I loved it.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘No. I did. I loved it.’ He leans down for a kiss, Jack back reading

Tintin. ‘I’m off. Love you.’

Laura gets up. She moves slowly because she wants to move fast,

to draw Henry out into the hall, out of sight of the letter. She squeezes

between Carrie’s chair and the dresser, remembering as she does so

that last night Carrie had been in tears.

‘Better now, darling?’ she whispers as she passes.

‘Yes,’ says Carrie.

Laura knows her behaviour is undignified and unnecessary. Surely

the past has lost its power. Twenty years ago almost, we’re different

people, I had long hair then. So did he.

‘When will you be home?’

‘Christ knows. I’ll try to be on the 6.47.’

Rain streaking the flint wall. He kisses her in the open front

doorway, a light brush of the lips. As he does so he murmurs, ‘Love

you.’ This is habitual, but it has a purpose he once told her. Henry

suffers from bursts of irrational anxiety about her and the children,

that they’ll be killed in a car crash, burned in a fire. He tells them

he loves them every day as he leaves them because it may be the day

of their death.

Recalling this, watching his familiar tall disjointed frame even as

he steps out into the rain, Laura feels a quick stab of love.

‘I think that letter may be from Nick,’ she says.

‘Nick?’ His head turning back. Such a sweet funny face, droll as

Stan Laurel, and that fuzz of soft sandy hair. ‘Nick who?’

‘Nick Crocker.’

She sees the name register. A family legend, or possibly ghost.

‘Nick Crocker! Whatever happened to him?’

‘I’ve no idea. I haven’t opened the letter yet.’

‘Oh, well.’ Henry shakes open an umbrella. ‘Got to rush. Tell me

this evening.’

Nothing urgent in his curiosity. No intimation of danger. His footsteps

depart over the pea-beach gravel towards the Golf, parked in front

of the garage that is never used for cars. Laura goes back into the

kitchen and harries the children into readiness for the school run.

She’s glad she told Henry, but the fact remains that she left the telling

to the last minute. She had known it in the same moment that she

had recognized the handwriting. She would open the letter alone.

A dull roar in the drive heralds the arrival of Alison Critchell’s

Land Cruiser. This immense vehicle parts the falling rain like an ocean

liner. Laura stands under an umbrella by the driver window conferring

with Alison on the endless variables of the run. Jack and Carrie clamber

in the back.

‘Angus is staying late for cricket coaching. Phoebe may be having

a sleepover at the Johnsons. Assume it’s on unless I call.’ The litany

of names that bound Laura’s life. ‘Assume the world hasn’t ended

unless you see flaming chariots in the sky.’

‘What if they cancel the chariots?’

‘The bastards. They would, too.’

The wry solidarity of school-run mothers. Laura confirms all she

needs to know.

‘So it’s just my two at five.’

She waves as they drive off. Carrie is demanding about the waving.

Laura must wave as long as they remain in sight. The car is so wide

it creates a hissing wake through the spring verges, and the cow

parsley rolls like surf. The drenched morning air smells keen, expectant.

Who is it who loves the month of May? ‘I measure the rest of my

life by the number of Mays I will live to see.’ Henry, of course, ever

death-expectant. How could he have slipped so far from her mind?

Seated now at her work desk in what was once the dairy Laura Broad

addresses the day ahead. Deliberate and unhurried, she makes a list

of people she must call and things she must do. The letter lies unopened

before her. This is how as a child she ate Maltesers. One by one she

would nibble off the chocolate, leaving the whitish centres all in a

row. Then pop, pop, pop, in they would go one on top of the other,

in an orgy of delayed gratification. Even so it sometimes seemed to

her as she tracked the precise moment of pleasure unleashed that

there was a flicker of disappointment. Here I am, whispered the

perfect moment. I am now. I am no longer to come.

She studies her list. ‘Call Mummy about Glyndebourne.’ Does

being organized mean not being creative? ‘Laura possesses the ability

to achieve set tasks,’ a teacher wrote when she was thirteen years

old. Even then she had felt the implied criticism: a follower not a

leader. A natural aptitude for cataloguing. Henry said once, ‘You’d

make a good fanatic.’ He can be surprisingly perceptive. No, that’s

unfair. Henry is capable of great perception; only he isn’t always

looking. He never notices what I’m wearing.

‘Tell me when you’re wearing something special and I’ll comment

on it,’ he says.

‘But haven’t you got eyes? Can’t you see?’

Apparently not.

Back then she had bought her clothes in charity shops. It’s easy

when you’re young.

She phones her mother.

‘This weather!’ her mother says. ‘I’m praying it’ll clear by Saturday.

Diana says it’s going to get worse.’

4 william nicholson

Saturday is the opening night of the Glyndebourne season. They’re

all going, Laura and Henry, her sister Diana and Roddy, courtesy of

their loving parents.

‘Don’t listen to Diana, Mummy. You know she hates it when people

are happy.’

This is true. Diana the ambitious one, Laura the pretty one. Some

quirk in the sibling dynamic dictated from an early age that Diana

takes life hard, and requires the world to reflect this. But she has her

good moments, she can be loyal and generous. Never so loving as

when Laura is miserable.

‘We can picnic on the terrace, I suppose. What will you wear?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Laura. ‘I haven’t thought.’

‘Diana’s bought something from a shop in St Christopher’s Place.

I forget where, but she sounds terrifically pleased with it.’

‘How’s Daddy’s back?’

‘Pretty hellish. I have to put his socks on for him in the morning.

Doctors can’t cure backs, you know. They just shrug their shoulders.’

What will I wear? Laura wonders as she puts down the phone. She

reviews her wardrobe in her mind’s eye. Her current favourite, a

green Ghost dress, is too light for a chilly May evening. As for her

beloved vintage Alaia, the truth is she no longer has the figure for it.

Not bad for forty-two and two children, but there was a time when

she could fit into anything.

Maybe I should zip up to London tomorrow.

This idea, suddenly planted, blossoms fiercely. There’s barely time

between school runs but it can be done. Glyndebourne opening night

is a grand affair, and it’s not often she gets a chance to dress up these

days. There was a time when she turned heads.

She takes up the waiting letter and looks again at the handwriting

that forms her name. A rapid careless scrawl in fine black fountain

pen, effortlessly stylish. Every stroke premeditated, therefore the

carelessness an illusion, an achieved effect. But she hadn’t known that

back then.

She opens the envelope. Headed letter paper, an unfamiliar address

in London. No salutation. No Dear Laura, Dearest Laura, Darling

Laura, nothing. As always.

Well, seems like I’m back in the old country for a few weeks. Drunk on England in spring. Walked yesterday in a bluebell wood so perfect

it tempts my heathen soul to seek a Creator. How are you? Who are

you? Shall we meet and compare notes on the vagaries of life’s journey?

No signature, not even an initial. She smiles, shakes her head, both

touched and irritated that he has changed so little. What right does

he have to assume she remembers? And yet of course she remembers.

She opens the bottom left-hand drawer of her desk, the place where

she keeps the family memorabilia. Birthday cards from the children,

paintings they did in class long ago, letters from Henry. She fumbles

all the way to the bottom, and there finds a sealed envelope she should

have thrown away years ago, but has not. She takes it out and places

it on the desk before her.

The envelope is addressed: ‘For N.C., one day.’

She remembers writing it, but not the words she wrote. Ridiculous

to have kept it for so long.

The flap of the envelope yields easily without tearing the paper.

Inside is a thin red ribbon, a strip of four photo-booth pictures, a

short note in Nick’s handwriting, and her letter.

She gazes at the pictures. In the top one he’s smiling at the camera,

at her. In the bottom one he has his eyes closed.

She starts to read the letter. As she reads, tears come to her eyes.

Dear Nick. I’m writing this not long after you asked me to leave you.

I’ll give it to you when you ask me to come back.

The phone rings. Hurriedly, as if caught in a shameful act, she puts

the envelope and its contents back in the desk drawer.

‘So is it going to rain or isn’t it?’ Diana’s phone conversations

always begin in the middle. ‘God, don’t you hate England?’ view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the Publisher:

1. What is the relevance of the book’s title to the lives of the characters? Are we, the readers, the only ones who can truly understand them? When Alan learns the truth about his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Temple-Morris, does he grasp the importance of this “secret intensity”?
2. At the end of the story, Alan and Henry both find themselves fulfilled. Henry’s fulfillment, however, comes in the form of compromise, while Alan’s revised play is borne out of an unwillingness to compromise. Which is the better model for artistic integrity? Is there any difference between the two, or do they both get the same satisfaction from being comfortable—Alan with Liz and Henry with his wife?
3. In Miles’ last sermon, he says, “What we lack is kindness.” How does his simple philosophy compare with Aiden Massey’s philosophy of “making a deal”? Do these two ideas conflict? When Henry decides to keep working with Aiden, is he attempting to live without resentment? Is Aiden’s acknowledgement of his own persona an act of kindness?
4. Consider the setting of the novel. How is the disappearance of the farmer and the middle-class takeover of the countryside connected with Laura’s life? What is the significance of Nick’s idea of Arcadia, or his interest in “automatic landscape” paintings?
5. Iconoclasm is the subject of Henry’s TV program. Who are the iconoclasts in the novel? According to Henry’s script, Keats’ statement that truth is beauty is naïve. Is there a conflict in the novel between truth and beauty? Do any of the characters find deliverance through truth?
6. What is the role of letters in the novel? After Henry reads the letter that Laura wrote to Nick, does he have a better understanding of her? Is it important that Laura never delivered this letter? Why does Alan initially read the rejection letter only in fragments?
7. How does Jack’s relationship with the “Dogman” change over time? When Jack decides to protect Dogman, does he live by Miles Salmon’s rule of kindness, or does he allow himself enough room to “make a deal” with Toby Clore so that he will remain part of the group?
8. Miles Salmon is a religious figure, yet he has no official religion to preach. What is the importance of his statement that you don’t need to believe in God to have faith in something? When he delivers his final sermon, does he leave the church in bitterness, or is he happy to have been completely honest with his parishioners?
9. History is an important factor in the novel. Henry is fascinated by the fact that history never actually disappears, and that the very places he sees everyday were part of this flow of history. But his disillusionment comes from the fact that things do not necessarily get better over time. Compare this belief with his dissatisfaction over the turn his career has taken. Also, consider the private history between Nick and Laura. When Nick returns, do they re-live the past, or does Laura’s accumulated life experience change the situation completely?
10. Throughout the story, sex is presented from many points of view. Henry and Laura have a special arrangement that allows for mutual understanding without any words being spoken. Alan turns sex into art, but when he initially calls the phone sex line, he is acting on a basic human urge. When Henry and Laura have sex at the very end of the novel, does this mark an important change in their relationship? What is the significance of the fact that Liz and Alan do not have sex? What is the role of Guy in the novel, and what does Liz’s relationship with him stand for? Is sex a form of kindness for any of the characters?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author William Nicholson's web site

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