Monsoon Summer [antikvár]

CHATTER 1When I was young, and we were very alone, my mother tried her hardest to make the world seem a nicer, gentier place for me. Once during a terrifying thunderstorm she told me I was not to worry, it was only God moving his fiimiture in heaven, a thought that kept me rigidly awake all night.Another time, in Norwich, where she was taking care of an elderly widower, I saw, on our way home from the cinema, what I now realize were two people having vigorous sex in an alleyway. They were playing trains, she said, and when I said it looked noth-ing like the trains we sometimes played, when we put the soles of our feet together and cycled them round and around, she laughed, or maybe she smacked me. You could never quite be sure with her.But that time, driving to North Oxfordshire on a wet November night, she was fresh out of cheerful things to say. We were going to Wickam Farm, home of Daisy Barker, my godmother, my mother s friend and sometimes employer when all eise failed. Daisy had invited us down "for reasons, we'll discuss when you get here," which was more than fine by me, not just because London, bombed out, boarded up, rationed, was so depressing but because I loved the farm. It was for me a place of refuge, but for my mother, for reasons I didnt understand, a place of shame.Sheets of rain feil on our taxi's windscreen faster than the wipers could keep up; on either side of us, hedges as high as small houses narrowed the world down to wet lanes ahead, gray skies above. It