payment page
Summary
Part III: Peacehaven, November 1999
Section 1, from Watching you look out your window at the rain… through …I was sure I saw my husband’s eyes close and his mouth fall open, just for a moment.
Marion remembers her wedding in 1958. Patrick acts as Tom’s best man, which causes a rift between Tom and Roy. A gracious guest, Patrick gives a speech about the couple. Marion spends the night before the wedding with Sylvie, who is now pregnant. Although Sylvie cautions Marion not to rush into motherhood, she says she is looking forward to having the baby to cuddle, and Marion wonders what has become of Sylvie’s professed desire for freedom. Sylvie regrets having implied to Marion that Tom is gay and asks her to forget it, saying perhaps he has changed. After Sylvie says she is looking forward to their caring for babies together, Marion becomes irritated and tells her she has no immediate interest in quitting work or having children. Marion leaves, with Sylvie wishing her good luck as she presses the elevator button.
Tom and Marion spend their honeymoon at the Old Ship Hotel. Although Marion is eager for time alone with Tom, Tom wants instead to behave like tourists visiting Brighton. Because she believes a bride should be timid about sex, Marion agrees. In spite of the rain, they go to the pier. Marion wants to ride down the giant helter-skelter slide together, but at the top, after Marion kisses him, Tom declares he is scared of heights. Marion speaks to him as she would speak to her students, realizing that he will do as she wishes as long as she directs him. They ride down together, overshooting the landing zone and crashing into a fence. After dinner at the hotel, they return to the bedroom, where Marion hopes Tom will undress her, but he seems only to want sleep, frustrating Marion. However, when she comes to bed, he reaches out to her, and they make love. Afterwards, Marion feels both relieved and disappointed.
In 1999, Marion worries that Patrick may not have much time left, and she wants him to hear her story and reconnect with Tom. Tom swims in the ocean every morning and then spends the rest of the day out. When Tom was still working, Marion once asked him what he did with his time and he told her he met strangers, sometimes for a drink and sometimes for sex. In his retirement, Tom avoids being home at the same time as Marion. Marion reveals that she was the one to insist they bring Patrick home from the hospital and that she can see that he still loves Tom.
In 1958, Tom and Marion, now living in separate bedrooms at Tom’s parents’ house, go to Patrick’s cottage on the Isle of Wight for a longer honeymoon. They have sex again, and Marion is hopeful they can get better at it. After four days, Patrick arrives. He is kind to Marion, including her in his walks with Tom. In the evenings, he cooks and leads intellectual conversations. He provokes an argument between Marion and Tom by asking their views on mothers working outside of the home. Tom is vehemently opposed, but Marion would not want to give up teaching if she had a child, a position Patrick defends. On their last day, they tour Queen Victoria’s home on the island. On the tour, Marion catches sight of the two men standing close together, watching each other.
Analysis
The scene of the hen night at Sylvie’s apartment explores the tension between motherhood and freedom. Marion reacts intensely to Sylvie’s suggestion that the two of them will soon be caring for babies together. While Sylvie finds the prospect of motherhood a natural extension of marriage, Marion wants to marry Tom to have Tom, not to become a mother. Marion is confused about the apparent ease with which Sylvie has exchanged the desire for freedom she expressed on her wedding night for contentment in the notion of motherhood. While Sylvie looks forward to cuddling her baby, Marion describes her friend’s changes in the language of “edges blurring,” suggesting that something essential about Sylvie is already being erased by the prospect of motherhood. Ensconced in her high-rise apartment with its new unimaginative furnishings, Sylvie represents the kind of conventional life Marion hopes to avoid. Marion’s rapid exit from Sylvie’s apartment shows her fierce desire to maintain her freedom and escape the world Sylvie seems so happy to have entered.
The contrast between Marion’s expectations for her wedding and the reality of the day illustrates the novel’s emphasis on disappointed hopes. Before the wedding, Marion imagines Tom seeing her in sunlight and finding her radiant, the realization of her longtime dream that Tom will be as attracted to her as she is to him. Instead, it rains heavily, ruining the spring flowers and leaving her soaked and muddy. While others in the church smile to see Marion walk down the aisle, Tom does not turn to her, a sign that he does not feel the natural attraction to her that she feels toward him. Marion expects a tender moment with her father, but he is silent, and she later regrets not finding something to say to him, a missed opportunity for connection. This silence as she moves from her father’s home into marriage with Tom hints at the way she will continue to feel disconnected from the man she is closest to. Although the day is not what she had hoped, Marion persists in telling herself that it doesn’t matter, because she is finally Tom’s wife. However, the gloomy weather and emotionally distant men foreshadow a marriage that continually disappoints.
Marion and Tom’s moment on top of the helter-skelter slide marks an important turning point in the power dynamic of their relationship. Until that moment, Marion has felt relatively powerless. She succeeds in getting Tom’s attention to some degree, but never by directly asking for what she wants. On their wedding day, she wants to go to bed with him at the hotel but cannot find a way to refuse his insistence that they first go to the pier like tourists, even though it is raining. However, when Tom is frightened on top of the tower, she sees that she can get him to slide down with her as long as she tells him what to do in the same calm yet firm voice that she uses to instruct her students. The power dynamic does not shift permanently, and Tom does continue to shape much of their relationship. However, the experience on the helter-skelter does suggest to Marion that it is possible to direct Tom and get what she wants, particularly in moments of high emotion.
Patrick exploits the tension between social expectations for women and Marion’s desires for her own life to sow discord between Tom and Marion. Patrick raises, as a question for debate, the issue of mothers working outside the home. Patrick smiles as Tom and Marion begin to argue, suggesting that he expected they would not agree, as Tom was very close to his stay-at-home mother and Marion is devoted to her career despite the expectations of her family and society. While Patrick may have intended for the argument to destabilize Tom and Marion’s relationship, its primary effect is that Marion becomes more allied with Patrick, who takes her side in the debate. This scene is an example of one moment in the complex relationship among the three of them that Marion and Patrick are more in harmony with each other than with Tom, as they will be again in 1999 when Marion brings Patrick into their home.
