1950s

The 1950s are the period in which Marion Taylor and Tom Burgess court and marry, but the novel’s retrospective structure makes the decade more than a backdrop: it is a contested timetable. Marion feels pressed to marry before she is marked as a woman left behind, while the marriage she enters cannot settle the hidden relationship between Tom and Patrick Hazlewood. Recalled from Peacehaven in 1999, these years return as both lived moments and unresolved history.

Courtship and the pressure of time

As spring approaches, Marion’s impatience grows. Tom has kissed her cheek and held her hand, and they meet at least weekly, usually with Julia Harcourt present, but Marion finds this attention no longer enough. Her mother’s reminders that it is not yet too late sharpen the sense that her prospects are running down. Marion imagines an old clock measuring the time before a woman is judged to have been left on the shelf. Many of her former schoolmates are already married, and she fears being viewed like Julia: a woman alone, earning her own living, reading too many books, and shopping with a trolley rather than a pram. Even as a teacher telling her class the story of Persephone, Marion looks at the bare trees in the playground and thinks that she has waited long enough.

A diary entry dated 5 October 1957 catches a different kind of waiting. After visiting the Argyle Hotel, Patrick Hazlewood records his satisfaction that Tom has agreed to come alone to his flat the following Tuesday. The portrait of Icarus, Tom’s secret smile, and the expected private visit make the prospect feel charged with possibility. The entry places a concealed intimacy alongside Marion’s growing desire for a future secured by marriage; the two forms of anticipation are moving toward different outcomes.

Marriage in 1958

On 12 November 1957, Patrick records Tom’s return on a Tuesday evening at half past seven. Marion’s later account recalls the buzzer sounding while Patrick was eating goulash in his flat, and his heart giving a single DUM-de. The diary’s date and precise hour make the visit part of a recurrent pattern of waiting and return, even as Patrick says he has almost learned not to expect Tom to be there.

Marion and Tom’s wedding took place on 29 March 1958, after an engagement of less than a month. Rain hammered the roof and poured through the gutters. Marion initially imagined it as a baptism into a new life, picturing the water washing away her past; later, she wondered whether Tom had hurried because he wanted the marriage completed before he changed his mind. The wet path outside the church was treacherous beneath her sateen shoes, and the daffodils were battered by the downpour. Her father adjusted her veil with a shaking hand but said nothing. In retrospect, Marion identifies that silent gesture as the last time he could claim to be the most important man in her life.

The spring wedding does not bring the uncomplicated beginning Marion had imagined. During the move into Tom’s parents’ house while they wait for a police house, she sleeps in Sylvie’s old room because Tom says there is no room for a double bed. The separate beds and the short engagement become details through which the older Marion rereads the apparent promise of their new life, measuring the distance between the marriage she wanted and the intimacy Tom could offer.

The decade in ordinary scenes

In early summer 1958, Marion and Julia Harcourt take their school classes on a nature trip from Woodingdean to Castle Hill. The children have spent the week drawing plants and wildlife and learning words such as bugle, orchid, and primrose. Marion admits that her preparation was inspired partly by the things Patrick had pointed out to her and Tom on walks during their Isle of Wight holiday. Everyday teaching and a school outing thus carry traces of the earlier trip and of Marion’s growing connection to Patrick, even before she can fully reckon with what that connection means.

The scene also contrasts Marion’s reserve with Julia’s ease. As the children cross the downs, Julia touches their shoulders, guides them with a hand on their backs, and kneels to speak to them at their level. Marion, who rarely allows herself to touch a child, vows to become more like her. The 1950s are rendered not only through marriage and secrecy but through routines of work, classroom lessons, and friendships that give Marion models for a different way of moving through the world.

Retrospective time and its afterlife

From Peacehaven in November 1999, Marion looks back on the wedding day while watching Patrick at his window in the rain. The present-day weather recalls the downpour of 1958, but she says the wedding seems more real to her than the drab November day around her. The narrative repeatedly lets one time occupy another: the young woman’s hopes are recalled by an older narrator who knows what those hopes could not yet reveal.

Marion’s later visit to Venice makes this temporal return concrete. Travelling alone on an organised opera trip to Verona, she takes a day trip to Venice, a place she and Tom do not speak of because Patrick once took him there. The city fills her with imagined scenes of the two men together, and she wonders whether retracing their route is a pilgrimage or a way of laying the ghosts of 1958 to rest. It proves instead to be a catalyst: soon afterward, she seeks Patrick out and brings him back. The decade’s events therefore remain active in 1999, not as a closed past but as the history that prompts Marion’s late act of care.