As playwright, painter & novelist, Richard Fenchurch has been both successful & rich, but now, in his mid-sixties, he's beginning to fall apart: again. His daughter plucks him from the squalor of his London house & installs him in the old family home, the mansion where he courted his first wife. Here, in a familiar house & in a changed though recognisable landscape, Fenchurch struggles to keep his grip on freedom & sanity, & allows himself to relax into memory. Time is catching up with him, but it is memory that produces the more startling revelation. Fenchurch's love for his wife was real enough
- it was a successful marriage as these things go
- but the old surroundings, both the building & the land itself, bring back to him the irresistibly ardent drive of his passionate affair with Isabella, his fiancee's mother. Returning to fiction after fourteen years, David Storey has created both a sharply comic vision of the indignities of age & a delicately erotic evocation of a youthful & dangerous affair.