“Of course she likes us, you oaf. Goes out of her way to meet up with us, asks us to tea . . . It was good, that tea.” The boys had needed a couple of days to assimilate their first independent social occasion. Bicycling had precluded talking on the way home, and when they had got there they had walked in on a domestic row—or rather on their father shouting at their mother, and their mother looking as if she were a thousand miles away, examining some recherché fragment of Greek statuary, perhaps, or some intricate Byzantine mosaic. It has struck Ted suddenly at that moment that he hardly recognised his own mother. Now, the Monday evening, when they were up in Ted’s bedroom supposedly doing their English homework, they could talk about the experience because they had both thoroughly digested it. Ted, the elder, was a confident, sturdy boy, with a lock of dark brown hair falling over one eye. He should have been the one who could best understand the nature of the bond Lydia had begun to forge between herself and them, but in fact this was an emotional area in which he felt uncertain.
