Copyright

First Houghton Mifflin Harcourt edition 2013

Copyright © 1964 by Margaret Drabble

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

First U.S. edition in 1965 by William Morrow & Co.

Originally published in Great Britain in 1964 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

eISBN 978-0-544-28691-7
v1.1013

Dedication

For Adam and Angelica

1

WHILE I was watching the advertisements on television last night, I saw Sophy Brent. I have not set eyes on her for some months, and the sight of her filled me with a curious warm mixture of nostalgia and amusement. She was, typically enough, eating: she was advertising a new kind of chocolate cake, and the picture showed her in a shining kitchen gazing in rapture at this cake, then cutting a slice and raising it to her moist, curved, delightful lips. There the picture ended. It would not have done to show the public the crumbs and the chewing. I was very excited by this fleeting glimpse, as I always am by the news of old friends, and it aroused in me a whole flood of recollections, recollections of Sophy herself, and of all that strange season, that Garrick year, as I shall always think of it, which proved to me to be such a turning point, though from what to what I would hardly like to say.

Poor old Sophy, I allowed myself to say, thinking that she would not much like being on a cake advertisement; and then I remembered the last time I had said Poor old Sophy, and that in any case, she would have earned a lot of money from that tantalizing moment. There is perhaps something finally unpitiable in Sophy, just as there is in me. We are both in our ways excellent examples of resilience, though I seem obliged to pass through many degrees of meanness on my way, whereas she just smiles and wriggles and exclaims and with a little charming confusion gets by. I like Sophy. I cannot help liking Sophy. And if there is a defensive note to be detected in that assertion, I am not in the least surprised.

That chocolate cake vision made me think back, as I said, over the whole lot, right back to the very beginning, to the occasion when I first realized that David was really intending to go to Hereford. I had just finished putting Flora to bed, and I came downstairs, splashed and bedraggled from her bath, to find David nursing the new baby and drinking a glass of beer. He had poured some stout for me, which was the only thing he would let me drink. When I appeared he handed the baby over quickly, and as I sat down and prepared to feed him, wondering if I would ever get him to wake at a less exhausting time, Dave spoke.