With its grassy splendor, the Lake District was an ideal place for a marital reconciliation, she thought. She hadn’t seen him in almost a year. He was flying from Boston to Manchester, then catching the train.In the ladies’ room at Booth’s, next to the station, she fussed over her hair and her eye makeup in a way she never had when she and Jack started out together, in the sixties, when her hair was long and straight. Now she used hair mousse and eyeliner. She no longer knew how to interpret the face she saw in the mirror.If it were 1967 again and she knew what she knew now, how would she behave? She liked to imagine herself as a young woman, going north to begin graduate school, but this time she would be carrying confidence and poise as effortlessly as wheeling ultralight luggage. If she had had a sense of proportion back then, would she have married Jack?She bought a fat double-pack of Hobnobs. She remembered how much Jack had liked those oat biscuits when they were in the Lake District together, long ago—rambling amongst sheep and bracken through the Furness Fells.
