Auvergne is associated with a two-bedroom cottage that Edward Mayhew partly owned, a material possession that later becomes part of his family life and retreat into solitude. The novel gives the region little descriptive treatment; its significance comes instead from the changing role of the cottage in Edward’s biography.

The Cottage and Edward’s Property

In his later reckoning with his life, Edward counts a share in a two-bedroom cottage in Auvergne among his modest material achievements. He lists it alongside his tiny flat in Camden Town and two specialist record stores, ventures whose prospects were being undermined by Internet shopping. The cottage is thus introduced not through its landscape or architecture, but as one element in an inventory of the life he has built.

Family Care and Solitude

The narrative later follows Edward back to the cottage in 1980, when he moves there to care for his father, whose Parkinson’s disease is rapidly advancing. After his father dies at home in 1983, Edward remains in the cottage as a tenant, while his sisters become its legal owners. At first he uses it as a bolt-hole from Camden Town; in the early 1990s he moves there to live alone. The place consequently shifts from shared property to a setting for caregiving and then withdrawal, marking the practical, unceremonious shape of Edward’s later life.