Eight years after the family's return to the USA, Bob Gravatt, Teresa's father, dies in an automobile accident on Interstate 24 close to a USAF base in Kentucky. After the accident Teresa's mother Abigail moves to Richmond, Virginia, to stay with Bob's parents. lt is an arrangement forced on them all, and it is difficult to make it work. Abigail starts drinking heavily, runs up debts, has a series of rows with Bob's parents, and eventually remarries.
Teresa now has two new stepbrothers and a stepsister, but no one likes anyone. It's not a happy situation for Teresa, or even, finally, for her mother. The remainder of Teresa's teenage years are hard on everyone around her, and things do not look good for her.
As she grows into an adult, Teresa's emotional upheavals continue. She goes through heartbreaks, failed romances, relocations, alienation from her mother, also from her father's family; there's a long livein relationship with a man who develops steadily into an alcoholic brimming with denial and violent repression; there is a short period living alone, then a longer one of sharing an apartment with another young woman, then finally arrives the good fortune of discovering a city scheme that funds mature students to take a degree course.
Here her adult life begins at last. After four years of intensive academic work, supporting herself with secretarial jobs, Teresa earns her BA in information studies, and with this lands a prize job with the federal government, in the Department of Justice.
Within a couple of years she is married to a fellow worker named Andy Simons, and it is on the whole a successful marriage. Andy and Teresa live contentedly together for several years, with few upsets. The marriage is childless, because they are both dedicated to their careers and sublimating all their energies into them, but it's the life they want to lead. With two government incomes they gradually become well off, take expensive foreign vacations, start collecting antiques and pictures, buy several cars, throw numerous parties, and wind up buying a large house in Woodbridge, Virginia, overlooking the Potomac river. Then one hot June day, while on an assignment in a small town in the Texas panhandle, Andy is shot dead by a gunman, and Teresa's happiness abruptly ends.
Eight months later, life is still in limbo. She knows only the misery of sudden widowhood, made infinitely worse by a deep resentment about the circumstances in which Andy was killed, and a lasting frustration at the failure of the Department of justice to give her any substantive information about how his death occurred.
She is now fortythree. A third of a century has slipped by since the day Megan died, and in the cold light of hindsight the years telescope into what feels like a summary of a life, a prologue to something else she does not want. Everything that happened led only to the moment of bereavement. Teresa is left with the generous payouts from Andy's insurance policies, their three jointly owned cars, a large house echoing with unwanted acquisitions and treasured memories, and a career from which she has been granted the opportunity to take temporary leave on compassionate grounds.
In the dark of a February evening, Teresa finally takes up her section chief s offer of leave.
She drives to john Foster Dulles Airport in Washington DC, deposits her car in the longstay parking garage, and flies American Airways on the overnight plane to Britain As she looks eagerly from the window, while the aircraft circles down towards London Gatwick in the morning light, Teresa thinks the English countryside looks dark and rainsodden. She doesn't know what she had been expecting, but the reality depresses her. As the plane touches down her view of the airport is briefly obscured by the flying spray thrown up from the runway by the wheels and the engine exhausts. February in England is not as cold as February in Washington, but as she crosses the airport's concrete concourse in search of her rental car, the weather feels to Teresa more damp and discouraging than she wanted or expected.
She drives away into England, fighting back these initial feelings of disappointment. She is nervous of the twitchy handling of the small car, a Ford Escort, uncomfortable too with the impatient speed with which the rest of the traffic moves, and the erratic and apparently illogical way the intersections have to be negotiated.
As she becomes more familiar with the car, she casts quick glances away from the traffic and round at the countryside, looking with intense interest at the low hills, the winter~ bare trees, the small houses and the muddy fields. This is her first trip back to England since she left as a child, and in spite of everything it begins at last to charm her.
She imagines a smaller, older, more tightly constructed place, different from the one she knows, spreading out, not in endless stretches of featureless country, as in the US, but in concentrated time: history reaching behind her, the future extending before her, meeting at this moment of the present. She's tired from the long flight, the lack of sleep, the wait at the UK Immigration desk, and so she's open to fanciful thoughts.
She stops in a small town somewhere, to walk around and look at the shops, but afterwards returns to the car and naps for a while in the cramped position behind the steering wheel. She wakes up suddenly, momentarily unsure of where she is, thinking desperately of Andy, how much she wishes he could see this with her. She came here to try to forget him, but in many ways she had been doing better so long as she stayed at home. She wants him here. She cries in the car, wondering whether to go back to Gatwick and take the first flight home, but in the end she knows she has to see this through.
The short afternoon is ending as she drives on south towards the Sussex coast, looking for a small seaside town called Bulverton. She keeps thinking, This is England, this is where 1 come from, this is what 1 really know. But she has no remaining family in Britain, no friends. She is in every way a stranger here. A year ago, eight months ago, what was for her a lifetime ago, she had never even heard of Bulverton on Sea.
Teresa arrives in Bulverton after night has fallen. The streets are narrow, the buildings are dark, the traffic pours through on the coastal road. She finds her hotel but sits outside in the car for a few minutes, bracing herself At last, she collects together some of her stuff and climbs out.
A brilliant white light suddenly surrounds her.
CHAPTER 2
a
Her name was Amy Colwyn and she had a story to tell about what had happened to her one day last June. Like so many other people in Bulverton, she had no one to tell it to. No one around her could bear to hear it any more, and even Amy herself no longer wanted to say the words. How many times can you express grief, guilt, missed companionship, regrets, remembered love, lost chances? But failing to say the words did nothing to make them not thought.
Tonight, as so often, she sat alone behind the bar at the White Dragon with nothing much to distract her, and the story played maddeningly in her mind. lt was always there, like music you can't get out of your mind.
'I'll be in the bar if you want me,' Nick Surtees had said to her earlier. He was the owner of the hotel,
