It's popped up again: Jeremy finished his last Braille cell,replaced the embossed leather-bound tome on the shelf,took off his glasses and squinted into the adjacent shaving mirror,noting the nascent double chin,the slightly thicker lineaments,the flecks of grey in hair which had once sheened in the midday sun,and wondered for the first time where was his home,his space.Never before had he felt rejected,yet he didn’t belong with the Bambers;they had been too old for child-rearing and unable to offer the physicality and vibrancy a fractious boy needed,and as the young Jeremy grew his new parents in his eyes became guilty of more than omission,as June’s moralizing gaze gave vent to the execrations that would be his downfall. Jeremy had not belonged with them,he had not belonged with the landed gentry of Gresham’s,and he did not belong with the murderers,rapists and nonces with which he shared a roof,some of whom would slit his throat for twopence as he turned his back to make a telephone call from the booth at the side of the stairwell.
Jeremy tried to understand this insidious alienation as he looked round his cell staring at objects he would normally only notice cursorily: the eclectic mix of staples and appurtenances,the blue coffee mug, the plastic spoon and damp sugar sachet,the pocket-comb standing perhaps incongruously with the Turkish horse hair shaving brush,or was this hybrid somehow fitting of Jeremy’s sum life experience? Jeremy had clung on to the materialism which adoption had brung,somehow dulling the senses of his natural separation, the chain of events unleashed as this first umbilical chord had been cut.
As Jeremy dimmed the light he thought of his natural mother,and wondered whether she had been pressurized like Sheila into forsaking her child,wondered as to the societal pressures which forced the severance of the familial bond,triggering Jeremy’s immunity to all outside forces as he became mentally removed from all reality,cocooned in a make-believe world where artificial stimulants filled this vacuum:a world where June the wife,not mother never knew the meaning of the phrase “charity begins at home”as she arranged the carnations and calla lilies at the Church altar,and the well-intentioned yet workaholic Nevill affirmed the truth of the saying “a rich man’s charity can be a cold business”.For the first time Jeremy weighed his father’s opprobrium as his thoughts turned three hundred miles south to the doings of his natural father.
As Major Leslie Marsham closed the red moreen curtains on Hampton Court Green on the eventide which the scarlet setting sun did attest had arrived,his countenance became a little more heavy,as he thought just for a moment how life might have been,had his firstborn never been dissevered,and as he deposed the latest newspaper on the white deal table and ascended the Tudor staircase with a slightly more weary step than usual he dismissed such thoughts,and entered the bedchamber where Juliet was waiting for him.
