【正文】
paleblue machine lasted him thirtythree years, until his the vantage of adulthood, and with some retrospective guilt, his son loved him for this grand the life of a smalltown solicitor, absorbed by matters of conveyancing and probate, settled on Henry Beard an even greater weekends, he mostly cared for his roses, or his car, or golf with stolidly accepted his loveless marriage as the price he must pay for his was about this time that Angela Beard began a series of affairs that stretched over eleven Michael registered no outward hostilities or silent tensions in the home, but, then, he was neither observant nor sensitive, and was often in his room after school, building, reading, gluing, and later took up pornography and masturbation full time, and then , at the age of seventeen, did he notice that his mother had retreated, exhausted, to the sanctuary of her heard of her adventures only when she was dying of breast cancer, in her early seemed to want his forgiveness for ruining his then he was nearing the end of his second year at Oxford and his head was full of maths and girlfriends, physics and drinking, and at first he could not take in what she was telling lay propped up on pillows in her private room on the nineteenth floor of a towerblock hospital, with views toward the industrialized salt marshes by Canvey Island and the south shore of the was grownup enough to know that it would have insulted her to say that he had noticed that she was apologizing to the wrong that he could not imagine anyone over thirty having held her hand and squeezed it to signal his warm feelings, and said that there was nothing to was only after he had driven home, and drunk three nightcap Scotches with his father, then gone to his old room and lain on the bed fully dressed and considered what she had told him, that he grasped the extent of her lovers in eleven Colonel Beard had had all the excitement and danger he could stand by the age of had to have lovers were her desert campaign against Rommel, her D Day, and her them, she had told Michael from her hospital pillows, she would have hated herself and gone she hated herself anyway, for what she thought she had done to her only went back to the hospital the next day and, while she sweatily clung to his hand, told her that his childhood had been the happiest and most secure imaginable, that he had never felt neglected or doubted her love or eaten so well, and that he was proud of what he called her appetite for life and hoped to emulate