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never asked that before. Ursula shook her head and said she supposed he liked it. Most people did.
    â€œI’m sorry, Auntie Ursula, I keep forgetting it upsets you to talk about him. I know I’m always putting my foot in it. I shouldn’t have said that about women working, either, not with Sarah and Hope having such good jobs. You’ll be glad to see the back of me, I’m so tactless.”
    â€œNo, I won’t, my dear,” said Ursula untruthfully. “You’ve been very kind to me. I shall miss you.”
    She gave Pauline a signed first edition of
Orisons
as a parting gift. The jacket with the drawing on it of a young woman on the steps of a Palladian temple was pristine. The book was probably worth three hundred pounds, and she hoped Pauline would realize this and not lend it to people or give it away, as she couldn’t exactly tell her its value.
    â€œWill I understand it?” Pauline asked doubtfully. “Uncle Gerald was so clever.”
    There was nowhere to park the car at the station in Barnstaple, so she got out for only a moment and kissed Pauline, and Pauline said anxiously that she hoped Ursula would be all right on her own. Ursula drove off quickly.
    After driving around and around for about fifteen minutes, looking for a parking space, she finally found one. She walked into the town center and into the first hairdresser’s she saw. It was twenty years since she had been to a hairdresser. In the late seventies, she had started to grow her hair, for what reason, she could scarcely remember. It had been a low point in her life, one of the lowest. They had been at Lundy View House for seven or eight years and the girls were thirteen and eleven, something like that. She had wanted to become a different person, so she had set about losing the weight she had put on after Hope was born and began to grow her hair. Those were two ways in which you could change yourself without it costing you anything.
    She lost fifteen pounds and her hair grew to the middle of her back, but she was still the same person, just thinner and with a plait that she twisted up on the back of her head. If Gerald or the children noticed, they never remarked on it. Her hair was mostly gray now. Salt-and-pepper, they called it. Silver threads among the gold, according to Daphne, who sang the appropriate song. It was wispy, with split ends, and rather alarming amounts came out when she brushed it. She asked the hairdresser to cut it all off, to cut it short, with a fringe.
    When it was done, she had to agree with the hairdresser that it lookednice and that she looked a lot younger. At last, she looked different, having succeeded at what she had been unable to attain twenty years before. The hairdresser wanted to give her an ash-blond tint, but Ursula wouldn’t have that.
    She did her shopping and drove home with the car windows wide-open. Now her hair was short, she wouldn’t have to worry about wind and rain and the plait falling down and pins scattering. Two or three hundred people must have been on the beach by two o’clock. It was warm but not hot, the sun by now being covered by a thin wrack of cloud. Even when the tide was as high as it could go, there was always enough beach, more than enough, for sun-bathers and castle makers and shell collectors and ballplayers.
    Ursula, out for her walk, threaded her way among the recumbent bodies and the picnickers and the children and the dogs and headed south. For some reason, nearly all the people stayed up at the north end of the beach, and after walking for two hundred yards, she was alone. She repeated to herself, as she had often done, the last line of Shelley’s best-known, even hackneyed, verse.
    â€œÂ â€˜The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ ”
    She had learned it at school, along with the other poems children did learn then (though not later, and certainly not now): Masefield’s “Dirty British