How It All Began by Penelope Lively

hearing about his struggle to access the tiresome wife, and the aggressive letters from the solicitor. And where his financial headaches were concerned she felt entitled to point out that her own were just as bad, except that for the most part she did not. In Marion’s family it had been considered bad form to talk about money. Admittedly they hadn’t much had to worry about it, if ever. Her mother thought you just took it out of the bank, when needed. She had never really got it into her head that Marion’s business was such, that Marion earned a living; she saw it as “such fun for Marion, so clever of her.”
    A smidgeon of this attitude had perhaps rubbed off onto Marion. Certainly, she found too much discussion of financial problems both tedious and rather ill-mannered. She did not want to hear much more about Jeremy’s skirmishes with the bank, amusing as he could sometimes be. And she definitely did not want to get drawn further into his despondent analysis of what divorce would mean, how he would be ruined, effectively, left with half a house and half a car and half this and half that, and he was not making any attempt to be amusing about this, no way.
    She felt that she was being sucked into things. The implication was that it was after all partly her fault. For heaven’s sake! Jeremy is grown up; he knew what he was doing. The wife is of course being impossible, but that is nothing to do with Marion. People are answerable for their own wives; Jeremy presumably knew Stella’s potential for combustion. No, Marion is not going to be drawn into some situation in which she is allied with Jeremy against the manic Stella. Jeremy is on his own where his wife is concerned. Marion will listen with sympathy, offer advice maybe, when appropriate, but that is all.
    So she hesitated over how to deal with his message. Eventually she called him, still hesitating, and her resistance was immediately undermined by the fervor of his response: “
There
you are. Thank goodness. I’ve been
needing
you.”
    He had had a foul day. A delivery of new stock had arrived with a prized mirror cracked right across. The woman who was going to take that marble fireplace had rung to say she’d changed her mind. Another letter from Stella’s solicitor.
    “So I’ve been dreaming of you—thinking, please, please can I see her this evening. Can I?”
    This is the original Jeremy, the initial Jeremy who was so beguiling and refreshing. He can surface still, putting Marion back at square one, when she walked into the warehouse that morning.
    “All right,” she said. “Yes, that would be nice.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    C harlotte’s nights are not good. Sometimes her hip hurts, sometimes her back; there is no such thing as a comfortable position, and when she has to go to the bathroom she is afraid of waking Rose and Gerry. At home, she would probably go downstairs and make a cup of tea; she longs for the release of home. She falls heavily asleep in the early morning, often, and then she dreams—vivid, surreal dreams in which one scene segues into another like the scenes in
Alic
e—and Carroll must of course have been inspired by the inconstant landscape of dreams, Charlotte has always been sure of that. In these dreams, she is not the Charlotte of today but another, younger Charlotte, and sometimes Rose is there, often a child once more, and always Tom is present, not always as himself, exactly, but simply as a shadowy companion figure who is, she knows, Tom. This morning, she and he are in the house they had in Edgbaston, when both were teaching there, looking out of the window, and all around there is water—water has crept over the road, the garden, is lapping round the walls. And as they observe this a rowing boat appears, manned not by people but by two dogs (very
Alice
). Neither she nor the shadow Tom are surprised by this, but she is wondering if all this water will have affected the electricity. And then the scene melts into another,