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.
H e 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 northeastern end of the Chilterns, the London end, thirty miles away, had been in-vaded 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 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 handlebars. In 1945, the year the twin girls were born, he bought a secondhand 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 plow 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 straightaway into the tiny parlor 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
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.
H e 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 northeastern end of the Chilterns, the London end, thirty miles away, had been in-vaded 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 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 handlebars. In 1945, the year the twin girls were born, he bought a secondhand 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 plow 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 straightaway into the tiny parlor 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
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