THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 67
vague and shy, thin and awkwardly el-
egant, with a muffled irony—you couldn’t
imagine her in caked boots in the muck
or castrating lambs or perched high in
the driver’s seat of a tractor. Pippa was
embarrassed by these gauche and faintly
theatrical eruptions of veiled feminist
protest, coming so much too late.
Wandering upstairs to her bedroom,
Pippa checked the e-mails on her phone,
then succumbed to the desire to lie down
on the bed with her George Eliot novel.
She couldn’t remember the last time she
had lain down to read during the day—it
was like being a teen-ager, time stretching
out voluptuously in all directions. Dream-
ily, she even half imagined that she could
hear her mother at work downstairs: a
consoling clatter of pans and crockery in
the kitchen, water running in the sink,
voices rumbling on the radio—as if some
substratum of ordinariness were so fun-
damental that it must always be carrying
steadily on somewhere, below all the ag-
itation of change. Though Pippa some-
times asked herself what their mother
had actually done all day, when she was
keeping house. She had seemed so per-
petually worn out and preoccupied, yet
she’d always had help with the cleaning
and ironing, wasn’t much of a cook, dis-
liked entertaining, and had never worked
outside the home. Pippa and Gillian had
managed bigger households more robustly
alongside full-time jobs.
Then Pippa became absorbed in
Maggie Tulliver’s forbidden meetings
in the Red Deeps with wounded, intel-
ligent Philip Wakeham, her efforts to
love him. Pippa urged her on—love
Philip, not handsome, conventional Ste-
phen!—though she’d read the book many
times before, and knew what must hap-
pen. Eventually, she fell asleep, Mag-
gie’s travails merging with her own. She
woke only hours later, in the early af-
ternoon, when someone rang the door-
bell. With a stale mouth and a ghastly
fog in her head, she struggled up and
hurried downstairs, blinking, into the
confusing shadows of the hall. Its tiled
floor was dazzling, spattered with ruby
and emerald and topaz light, beamed
through the stained-glass picture pan-
els in the porch door—a heron among
green reeds, a kingfisher beside a stream,
a swan on its nest.
When she opened the door, a man
in a sleeveless orange vest and shorts
and ragged trainers was leaning against
a porch post, chewing, one foot on the
ground, the other knee jackknifed up in
front of him. He spat out his gum apol-
ogetically and held out a hand, said that
he was Sean, a friend of Evelyn’s, and
he’d come to ask after her. He was lanky
and rangy, good-looking, browned by
the sun. Although he arranged his face
to be exaggeratedly solicitous, the way he
sprawled there and sought out her glance
sympathetically with his own seemed at
first to Pippa provocative
and challenging, insolently
flirtatious; he had the local
accent, slow and suggestive,
even when there was noth-
ing to suggest. For a mo-
ment, she thought he might
be one of those town boys
she remembered from her
past, but he was much too
young for that. Twenty years
younger than she was, prob-
ably, or twenty-five: more like the age of
her oldest son—although he didn’t look
after himself the way Toby did. Sean was
muscled, but not from the gym, and there
was a defiant, leering gap in his grin,
where one of his front teeth was missing.
She repeated to him the familiar lit-
any of their news: that their mother
was mostly sleeping, and when she did
wake she seemed very confused. The
doctors couldn’t predict what kind of
recovery she’d make—they thought the
fall might have been due to a seizure.
Sean asked if there was anything he
could do. Pippa said she didn’t think
so, but it was very kind of him to offer.
“I’m used to doing a few odd jobs
around the place for Evelyn.”
“Oh, I see, you mean for money.”
He stood up on both feet away from
the porch post, frowning as if he were
offended, and said that he was happy
to work for nothing at a time like this.
Pippa was compromised, sorry. “No, I’m
happy to pay, but I don’t think there’s
anything. Though I suppose there is
the strimmer... ”S
o it was that when Gillian and Ser-
ena arrived home, a couple of hours
later, they found the deep peace of Fern
Lodge ravaged by the strimmer’s snarl-
ing and whining, as Sean, shirtless, went
at the long grass in the garden, filling
the air with whirling, glinting dust andshards. It had taken some comradely
effort between him and Pippa to as-
semble the strimmer and go through
the instructions. Then, while it was
charging, she’d made him coffee. Be-
fore he attacked the grass, he’d hacked
away, with a pruning knife he’d fetched
from the shed as if he knew his way
around, at the brambles overgrowing
the flower bed.
Serena heard the strimmer as soon
as she came through the front door, and
took in its implications like
a blow. She walked straight
through the house and
burst out again at the back,
through the French win-
dows in the dining room,
into a scene of devastation:
grass lay in heaps where it
had fallen on the ragged
pale stubble. White-faced,
her black eye makeup in-
congruously gothic in the
strong light, she turned on Pippa in im-
potent fury. “What have you done?” she
shouted. “Why did you spoil our gar-
den? It was the only beautiful thing left
here, and you’ve spoiled it.”
Sean stopped the strimmer respect-
fully, seeing her expression.
“It needed tidying,” Pippa said weakly.
Now, when it was too late, she could
see how graceful the grass had been as
the accompaniment to Serena’s dance
that morning, how it had moved with
her movement. And she saw, too, how
the cutting of the grass might look like
a deliberate affront, a contemptuous
stroke of brute practicality against imag-
ination and spirit. Serena had a way of
construing the most harmlessly neu-
tral acts as provocations. “We couldn’t
just leave it,” Pippa tried to explain.
“But why not?”
Her question couldn’t be answered
without invoking the whole fabric of
everything. Sean looked tentatively be-
tween them. “Should I stop there?”
Serena glanced at him, absorbed still
in her rage against her sister, scornfully
taking in his tan and his naked torso.
“You might as well finish it now!” she
said. “The place is ruined anyway.”
She stormed off; Gillian and Pippa,
left behind in the familiar aftershock of
one of her scenes, made wry faces at
each other. Pippa told Sean to go on
and cut the rest; it was all her fault, not