If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I would talk to people whose existence I had forgotten years before and they would ask me about my marriage (failed a decade ago, a relationship that had slowly frayed until eventually, as they always seem to, it broke) and whether I was seeing anyone (I wasn't I was not even sure that I could, not yet), and they would ask about my children (all grown up, they have their own lives, they wish they could be here today), and work (doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. It was time, I knew, to drive to my sister's bustling, cheerful house, all tidied and stiff for the day. It didn't seem to be any part of who I was now.

I'd lived in that place, for a while, as a teenager. I stared at the house, remembering less than I had expected about my teenage years: no good times, no bad times. The new people had made my mother's tiny balcony into a two-storey sunroom. I had forgotten that the bricks of the house were chocolate brown. I pulled up into the driveway, observing the way they had built out on the mid-seventies architecture. It would always be the new house in my head. The new house, the one my parents had built at the bottom of the garden, between the azalea bushes and the green circle in the grass we called the fairy ring, that had been sold thirty years ago. The old house, the one I had lived in for seven years, from when I was five until I was twelve, that house had been knocked down and was lost for good. I thought of turning around, then, as I drove down a wide street that had once been a flint lane beside a barley field, of turning back and leaving the past undisturbed. I had been driving towards a house that had not existed for decades.

The ocean at the end of the lane novel