Birmingham

Birmingham enters the story as the destination of a drive to Jim’s parents’ home—and as the place where an urgent bodily crisis turns a family visit into an enduringly awkward memory. The city is defined here not by a broad portrait of its streets but by one domestic arrival, whose embarrassment helps explain why Laura Joyce experienced Jim’s family differently from her own.

The journey to Jim’s parents

Laura and Jim travel along the M6 towards his parents’ place in Birmingham when Laura suddenly needs a toilet. Jim says they are nearly there, and she tries to endure the journey rather than stop at a service station. As they reach his parents’ cul-de-sac, he gives her his keys so she can run ahead; he directs her to the bathroom at the top of the stairs, first door on the left, believing his parents will still be at church.

An arrival gone wrong

Laura reaches the house, fumbles with the Yale key, rushes upstairs while pulling down her trousers, and suffers a severe bout of diarrhoea. The relief of having made it to the toilet is immediately overtaken by discovery: Jim’s father is sitting in the bath beside her, holding a flannel over himself and a limp newspaper in his hand. His parents had not gone to church; they had prepared an extravagant Sunday roast instead. The visit continues as an awkward family occasion, made more uncomfortable by the circumstances of Laura’s arrival.

Family memory and contrast

The Birmingham visit becomes part of the memory Laura associates with Jim’s family, a relationship she recalls as having been sullied from the start. That recollection contrasts with Jim’s place among the Joyces: at Laura’s family meals, he is treated as an intriguing outsider, and the family hangs on his words. Laura had alternated between bringing Jim and her friend Tyler to those meals, partly because she did not want Jim to displace Tyler and because Tyler had few opportunities to go out for dinner. In retrospect, Laura admits that meals with Jim were easier. Birmingham’s significance is therefore intimate rather than panoramic: one visit to Jim’s family crystallizes the unevenness between the ease he found with hers and the discomfort she felt with his.