2015

2015 is the novel’s late-life present, bringing Lucas back to London from North Carolina as his mother Barbara is dying. The return makes time tangible: Lucas arrives jet-lagged and anxious, carrying decades of family history and the prospect of his mother’s death, while earlier years surface as memories that complicate any simple idea of home or a clean break with the past.

Lucas’s return to London

The 2015 thread opens with Lucas waking queasy and confused after the long journey. He is fifty-six, and he has left North Carolina after roughly thirty hours of travel because Barbara is dying. He expects to remain until the business is finished, including the literal reduction of his mother’s remains to ashes. His arrival is therefore both a return to a familiar city and an approach to an irreversible parting. London does not immediately feel like home. Back in the city, Lucas experiences his American life as preposterous and dreamlike, and regards the American version of himself as a cardboard cut-out over which he has had little control. The distance between his life in the United States and his return to London makes belonging uncertain rather than settled; even the word home becomes a question rather than an answer.

Earlier years carried into the present

The novel’s 2015 present is set against earlier points in the family’s history. In 1957, Edwina first saw Ollie Treadaway in the canteen at Goldsmiths’ art college. She wore a grey polo-neck jersey and black-and-white houndstooth pedal pushers; Ollie, a nineteen-year-old student from Ireland, was bundled into a navy Guernsey. The scene establishes a much earlier beginning to the family history that Lucas encounters in old age, nearly six decades later. A remembered scene from March 1981 offers a sharp contrast between family celebration and the later weight carried by the past. The twins are turning twenty-one and coming home for a weekend; a Sunday lunch is being prepared, and Lucas is also expected. Alicia makes a chocolate cake, Edwina brings out the best china, and blue-and-white hyacinths scent the room. In the present, photographs from that day have been removed from their frames and put away in the Welsh dresser. Their questions about who belongs in the pictures, and what the images reveal, show how a once-celebratory family moment has become difficult to look at.

2001 and the course of recovery

Lucas’s recollection of September 11, 2001, supplies another measure of time passing. During the weeks before the attacks, he repeatedly came close to calling his dealer or buying vodka. He watched the Twin Towers fall from the window of his own high-rise apartment, sank to his knees, and wept. The event’s public scale did not erase his private struggle; instead, the weeks that followed became a turning point in his recovery. Seeing a city begin to heal strengthened Lucas’s resolve to stay clean. His reflection distinguishes his struggle from the deaths of those killed that day: he had a choice, whereas they did not. Set beside his return in 2015, this memory makes recovery part of the life he brings back to London, not a finished chapter detached from it.

The function of 2015 in the narrative

The year gathers different kinds of time into one frame: Edwina’s meeting with Ollie in 1957, the twins’ birthday in 1981, Lucas’s recovery after 2001, and his return as Barbara approaches death. These periods are not presented as interchangeable recollections. The birthday photographs preserve a past that raises painful questions, while Lucas’s memory of 2001 records a change in his ability to choose life. His 2015 journey, by contrast, places him beside a death he cannot prevent. That contrast gives the present its particular force. Lucas has returned to London while questioning whether his life in America was truly his, but the evidence does not offer a settled resolution to that uncertainty. Instead, 2015 holds home, estrangement, recovery, and bereavement together: the past is neither safely over nor simply repeated, and the impending loss of Barbara makes the time left with family immediate.