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while she was sitting beside him. It was a nice green car which she liked, and she was happy to be with him. After all he was her own son, she had reared him, and now he had a good job and was quite successful. She was proud of him. She even longed to touch him, to straighten the collar of his jersey, but didn’t dare to do so: he looked so confident and negligent. Never again would she touch him as she had done when he was young, when he had suffered the turmoils of boyhood and youth, when he had the illnesses common to children, when he had seemed so alone and helpless. It was she however who was now the child and he who was setting out into the wide world. Nevertheless she wished that he would go to church.
    The car, almost like a taxi which she had hired, drew up outside the church, the doors of which were open wide revealing the elders like butlers in black suits waiting with hymn books in their hands like salvers, and smiling genially on all who came in, sometimes bending down deferentially to listen to what someone had to say. Tom leaned over and opened the door of the car for her and watched her as she went towards the church, feeling a strange vexation, as if he were allowing her to set out without help on an adventure which he could not take part in because his mind was hostile to it. For he could not bring himself to go to church, and yet why shouldn’t he? Was his mother less important to him than the integrity of his own mind? He watched her, a stranger, approaching the open door: he saw an elder offering her a hymn book, and then she went into the church in her black coat and disappeared. It was like himself going to school for the first time and his mother watching him, no longer able to go with him, having grown too old, however she might wish to be with him.
    He sat in the car for a long time thinking, for it seemed to him that even this simple action of taking his mother to church and then leaving her at the door was important, was indeed of the greatest importance. The pathos of it disturbed him, so that he felt pity for his mother who was now sitting on her own among strangers, dependent wholly on the furniture and the language of the church itself, on its continuity and its resonance.
    Finally he turned the car away and drove home. When he went into the house Vera was reading the
Observer
. She raised her head briefly and said to him:
    “I suppose it has occurred to you that you’ll have to collect your mother later.” As a matter of fact it hadn’t occurred to him and he felt obscurely angry both at himself and at Vera.
    “It hadn’t,” he said tersely. She looked up at him in surprise as if something in his tone troubled her, but he turned to the
Sunday Times
and to the book page. He spent some time trying to understand the first sentence of a review of a book about psychology, and then glanced up from the paper and looked around him. He couldn’t see Vera behind the
Observer
which was held up in front of her like the open marble bible in a churchyard. There was a smell of cooking from the kitchen, the clock on the wall ticked irritatingly, the print by Hockney stared down at him.
    He turned back to the
Sunday Times
, concentrating on the article with great intensity, and feeling that he was fighting against some preoccupation which he couldn’t identify, but at the same time determined to finish reading the papers before he went to collect his mother. The two of them read in silence except that once Tom said, “I hope she will like the church,” and Vera as if completely understanding his thought said, “I hope so too.”

 
    4
    B EFORE LEAVING FOR school, Vera got into the habit of taking a light breakfast to her mother-in-law in her bedroom, and the latter rose after they had left. She found the house even more silent than her own since it was well away from the noise of traffic. At times she even thought of entering their bedroom to see what it was like, but confined herself to the