Inigo drives his mother Chloe to Egden station. He drives without hesitation or fear, calmly and sensibly, clearly regarding the machine as a useful tool and not as an outlet for any suppressed and disagreeable aspects of his personality.
She cannot think what she has done to deserve this paragon, with his broad shoulders and friendly eyes, smooth olive skin and glossy black springing hair, so like his father in looks but so unlike in temperament, who deals with her affectionately, and his father with a respectful deference only slightly tinged with mockery: who passes his exams, takes drugs in moderation, avoids his enemies and understands his friends, who are multitude; and now not only drives her to the station, but offers to.
Perhaps, she thinks, out of the flat Essex countryside, which to her is featureless to the point of oppression, ripe only for cabbage-growing, air-fields and urban development, Inigo has wrung whatever is calm and good: or else, more like it, has made his own pocket of grace and beauty in which to grow, since God has declined to do it for him.
Even the hedgerows of her childhood have gone now, uprooted in the cause of progress and cabbage-cropping machinery. The sun has gone in. The early promise of the day has gone. The few trees left stand brown and crusty with old creepers: the fields are untidy with the winter’s debris.
What fate, Chloe wonders, has condemned her to live her life in these few square miles of England? First, long ago, as Gwyneth’s daughter, in Ulden, with Marjorie and Grace for friends. Then, after a brief respite, as Oliver’s wife in Egden, ten miles down the railway line.
And where the Egden supermarket now stands, was the cottage-hospital where Grace was born, first and only child of Edwin and Esther Songford. Or so they assumed – Grace had a tendency to deny their parentage, and with it her duty towards them. And not without a withered shred of justification too – for a year or so after Grace’s birth the market town of Egden and its outlying villages rocked to a scandal which closed the cottage-hospital entirely, the elderly and eccentric matron having conceived a fresh scientific system of tagging new babies according to their toe prints, which resulted in confused nurses and almost certain mis-identification of the infants, and the necessary reallocation, more than three years later, of six children amongst six couples, on the strength of blood-tests, physical appearance, established temperament and, of course, parental instinct. To the delight of the press, both national and foreign. Six for sure, and how many others not for sure? It was Grace’s fancy to allocate herself in her mind, throughout her childhood and afterwards, to many a rich and noble couple. The belief that one has been switched at birth is common enough in little girls – and give Grace an inch, like a mad matron, and she’d take an ell, and never wash up for her mother, not even on the help’s day off.
The Songfords lived in Ulden, in a solid Edwardian house called The Poplars. It had a good-sized garden, a wind-break of poplar trees, a swing for the children, a tennis court, large attics. a gardener, a daily, a pantry full of bottled fruits and jams, living rooms with chintzy curtains and squashy sofas, Persian rugs, Chinese carpets, much bamboo furniture, Eastern bric-à-brac, mementos of the Indian army from which Grace’s father had been cashiered, and one small bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia Britannica in twelve volumes, some guide books, an atlas, two novels by Dornford Yates, and three thrillers by Sapper and the Light that Failed by Rudyard Kipling.
It was to this house that Marjorie was evacuated, in 1940, coming on a train which stopped in Ulden by mistake. As for Chloe, she was on the train by mistake and it was only by this first fortunate accident that she and her mother Gwyneth, on her way to a domestic job at the Rose and Crown, were able to alight at Ulden.
When we are children, so much happens by mistake. As we grow older, and see a pattern to things, we are obliged to agree that there is no such thing as an accident. We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the necessary destination.
As for a train which stops at the wrong station, disgorges sixty children at the wrong place, and changes the course of all their lives, what are we to say to that?