I was right about the sea. At Alver Shore, my word, it was darker, and often the color of iron. Sometimes a greasy glint from the low sun gave it a brawny beauty but there was nothing delicate about it ever. A huge gray mole stretched out into the water like an arm but it was breached in several places and you could see the rusting rods inside and the sea roared through these broken innards and reared back and sucked and chopped against the wall. I walked down there over the pebbles, thriving on the noise and the cold salty air.

I never felt so well in my life.

Which was lucky, since I needed my strength for the confounding unfamiliarity of absolutely everything. The beets and rhubarb and the enormous cauliflower on my kitchen table, wet with rain and muddy too, a gift from a parishioner with an allotment. How to tackle them? I had no idea. The martially ordered queues at bus stop and butcher’s. The cars that swished by without honking. People here weren’t just mending their clothes, they were mending the mends: I had nothing shabby enough to fit in, so when I popped to the shops I buttoned my coat to the neck. It took me about a week to learn that for some people in our congregation, my usual way of greeting and making small talk was a disconcerting effusion of fuss and show—embarrassing enough with women but disgustingly flirtatious with men. (For others, people who conducted all conversation at the top of their voices, it didn’t seem to matter so much.) And there was so much to get to grips with in the house. The mangle, the coal bunker, the fireplace, the floors: oh, the floors. That first autumn I was cleaning the kitchen tiles when a neighbor poked her head around the back door. “Oh, bless you, Mrs. Acton,” she said. “Don’t they have mops and buckets where you come from?”

Because I had my skirt hitched up, my feet bare, and I was slapping a big cloth across the floor in wide fan-shaped sweeps, the way I had seen Safa our kitchen maid do at home. “Should I explain,” James said, highly entertained, “that you’ve never cleaned a floor in your life?”