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Cassandra, Thor and Deborah were all crowded into the back. Cassandra, immediately behind the Vicar, noticed that his neck, above his collar, had grown thicker and redder, and that he had a real bald patch amongst the iron-grey curls. This was normally not noticeable, because of his great height; he was still a very handsome man. When he had turned the car out into the main streets, with a great deal of swelling shoulder-muscles and creaking of seats, he said, ‘I’m glad you were able to come. I think it was necessary. This was all completely unexpected, I understand, and a great shock to your mother.’
    Julia looked out at grey Newcastle, trolley wires and blackened churches. Carrick’s café, where her first packet of cigarettes and ice-cream in one of those grained silver goblets had been symbols, more or less fantastic, for the real, sophisticated city life she was going to lead. The Theatre Royal, all pillars and round lamps on iron chains, where coming out from a pantomime in a cinnamon velvet dress with a lace collar, and a silver purse dangling on a ring from one finger, she had imagined herself one of a furred and scented London crowd about to go on to dance in some night club, vaguely wicked, vaguely risky. She still didn’t know very much about night clubs, but was able whole-heartedly to enjoy being part of a crowd outside a London theatre in the dark simply by remembering her own feelings at ten, eleven, or twelve in the cinnamon dress. I was hungry for life, she thought, wherever I lookin these streets I remember wanting something; they were images of London. She looked sideways at Cassandra, who had certainly shared this dream, and wondered what she was thinking.
    Thor said, ‘Can you tell us, Mr Merton, what we must expect? I think we should know what to expect. We were told nothing definite.’
    Cassandra thought, he finds it easier to be a son-in-law – more natural – than I do to be a daughter.
    ‘Well —’ said the Vicar, turning a corner.
    ‘Yes,
please
, we need to know,’ said Julia, warmly.
    ‘Well —’ said the Vicar, ‘it was a bad stroke. It would be wrong of me to tell you that he is certainly dying. But Dr Moore told me that – as things seem, as things seem – it is unlikely he will recover. Or, if he
does
recover – he will not be strong again. You know that he is paralysed completely, and can’t speak? That may, of course, improve to a certain extent. But I don’t think you should hope too much.’
    ‘I see,’ said Thor. ‘Thank you. And my mother?’
    ‘Bearing up splendidly,’ said the Vicar. ‘Splendidly. Very calm. I think it’s telling on her. But she is splendid.…’
    ‘She would have to be,’ said Julia. ‘She wouldn’t know what else to be.’
    ‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that she expects perhaps too much of herself.’
    He likes summing people up, Cassandra thought. He always has. He liked to have authority to understand and judge other people. Nevertheless, he did it quite well. Her mother’s life was largely a faithful attempt to draw on strength not apparently available, in the hope that the expectation would create it. She was a woman who would take on any duty, and accept any misfortune, on this basis, and then through sheer effort of will preserve a climate of calm around an increasing struggle. So she had survived war, and refugees, and her husband’s imprisonment, and Cassandra’s own defection, simply by assuming that nothing else was possible. Well, Cassandra thought, if strength had not been given, something else had.A kind of toughness in defeat. She thought of her mother’s square, thick body, her square corsets, her horn-rimmed glasses on their long chain, her sensible hands and sensible shoes. Her strength was a shell’s strength, that was the trouble; it provided a shell’s simple invulnerability. A layer of hardened scales. And slowed her movements. Cassandra, angry with herself for thinking in this way at this time