while Lionel lit his pipe at last, and Edward, with the adaptability of his years, continued to make the quiet transition from shock to recognition. Of course, he had always known. He had been maintained in a state of innocence by the absence of a term for her condition. He had never even thought of her as having a condition, and at the same time had always accepted that she was different. The contradiction was now resolved by this simple naming, by the power of words to make the unseen visible.
Brain-damaged
. The term dissolved intimacy, it coolly measured his mother by a public standard that everyone could understand. A sudden space began to open out, not only between Edward and his mother, but also between himself and his immediate circumstances, and he felt his own being, the buried core of it he had never attended to before, come to sudden, hard-edged existence, a glowing pinpoint that he wanted no one else to know about. She was brain-damaged, and he was not. He was not his mother, nor was he his family, and one day he would leave, and would return only as a visitor. He imagined he was a visitor now, keeping his father company after a long absence overseas, gazing out with him across the field at the broad roads of buttercups parting just before the land fell away in a gentle incline toward the woods. It was a lonely sensation he was experimenting with, and he felt guilty about it, but its boldness excited him too.
Lionel appeared to understand the drift of his son’s silence. He told Edward that he had been wonderful with his mother, always kind and helpful, and that this conversation changed nothing. It simply recognized that he was old enough to know the facts. At that point the twins came running into the garden, looking for their brother, and Lionel only had time to repeat, “What I’ve said changes nothing, absolutely nothing,” before the girls were noisily among them, and then pulling Edward toward the house to deliver an opinion on something they had made.
But much else was changing for him around this time. He was at Henley grammar school and was beginning to hear from various teachers that he might be “university material.” His friend Simon at Northend, and all the other village boys he ran around with, went to the secondary modern, and would soon be leaving to learn a trade or work on a farm before being called up for National Service. Edward hoped his future would be different. Already there was a certain constraint in the air when he was with his friends, on their side as well as his. With homework piling up—for all his mildness, Lionel was a tyrant on this matter—Edward no longer roamed the woods after school with the lads, building camps or traps and provoking the gamekeepers on the Wormsley or Stonor estates. A small town like Henley had its urban pretensions, and he was learning to conceal the fact that he knew the names of butterflies, birds, and the wildflowers growing on the Fane family’s land in the intimate valley below the cottage—the bellflower, chicory, scabious, the ten kinds of orchis and hellebores, and the rare summer snowflake. At school such knowledge might mark him out as a yokel.
Learning of his mother’s accident that day changed nothing outwardly, but all the tiny shifts and realignments in his life seemed crystallized in this new knowledge. He was attentive and kindly toward her, he continued to help maintain the fiction that she ran the house and that everything she said really was the case, but now he was consciously acting a part, and doing so fortified that newly discovered, tough little core of selfhood. At sixteen he developed a taste for long moody rambles. It helped clear his mind to be out of the house. He often went along Holland Lane, a sunken chalk track overhung with crumbling mossy banks that ran downhill to Turville, and then walked down the Hambledon Valley to the Thames, crossing at Henley into the Berkshire downs. The term “teenager” had not
Brain-damaged
. The term dissolved intimacy, it coolly measured his mother by a public standard that everyone could understand. A sudden space began to open out, not only between Edward and his mother, but also between himself and his immediate circumstances, and he felt his own being, the buried core of it he had never attended to before, come to sudden, hard-edged existence, a glowing pinpoint that he wanted no one else to know about. She was brain-damaged, and he was not. He was not his mother, nor was he his family, and one day he would leave, and would return only as a visitor. He imagined he was a visitor now, keeping his father company after a long absence overseas, gazing out with him across the field at the broad roads of buttercups parting just before the land fell away in a gentle incline toward the woods. It was a lonely sensation he was experimenting with, and he felt guilty about it, but its boldness excited him too.
Lionel appeared to understand the drift of his son’s silence. He told Edward that he had been wonderful with his mother, always kind and helpful, and that this conversation changed nothing. It simply recognized that he was old enough to know the facts. At that point the twins came running into the garden, looking for their brother, and Lionel only had time to repeat, “What I’ve said changes nothing, absolutely nothing,” before the girls were noisily among them, and then pulling Edward toward the house to deliver an opinion on something they had made.
But much else was changing for him around this time. He was at Henley grammar school and was beginning to hear from various teachers that he might be “university material.” His friend Simon at Northend, and all the other village boys he ran around with, went to the secondary modern, and would soon be leaving to learn a trade or work on a farm before being called up for National Service. Edward hoped his future would be different. Already there was a certain constraint in the air when he was with his friends, on their side as well as his. With homework piling up—for all his mildness, Lionel was a tyrant on this matter—Edward no longer roamed the woods after school with the lads, building camps or traps and provoking the gamekeepers on the Wormsley or Stonor estates. A small town like Henley had its urban pretensions, and he was learning to conceal the fact that he knew the names of butterflies, birds, and the wildflowers growing on the Fane family’s land in the intimate valley below the cottage—the bellflower, chicory, scabious, the ten kinds of orchis and hellebores, and the rare summer snowflake. At school such knowledge might mark him out as a yokel.
Learning of his mother’s accident that day changed nothing outwardly, but all the tiny shifts and realignments in his life seemed crystallized in this new knowledge. He was attentive and kindly toward her, he continued to help maintain the fiction that she ran the house and that everything she said really was the case, but now he was consciously acting a part, and doing so fortified that newly discovered, tough little core of selfhood. At sixteen he developed a taste for long moody rambles. It helped clear his mind to be out of the house. He often went along Holland Lane, a sunken chalk track overhung with crumbling mossy banks that ran downhill to Turville, and then walked down the Hambledon Valley to the Thames, crossing at Henley into the Berkshire downs. The term “teenager” had not
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