572
PARTISAN REVIEW
buildings, and their maintenance, the colony of budding artists and
their supervision. It turned out that she was the divorced wife of the
owner of these properties, and the mother of a son shortly to be
twenty-one, Jane's elder brother by ten years or so. She had been
running this place because "poor Oliver simply doesn't have a clue,
he never had, poor sweetie," but was looking forward to relin–
quishing the burden the very second her son took over, when she
would revert to her own true nature and inclination, which was to
make stained glass windows. J ody listened to all this with more than
her usual feelings of being alien. She could not begin to understand
why this woman had been prepared to spend her life as a sort of
caretaker for a divorced husband . Without much recompense , it
seemed, for she did remark that the estate could not afford to pay her
much in the way of a salary, not if there was to be anything decent
for Paul (the nearly twenty-one-year-old son) to inherit.
Jody, who was sitting across the table from her hostess-soon
to be, at least intermittently, a neighbor-inquired (though with the
feeling that this would strike everyone as the sort of remark only to
be expected from her) what she got out of it all?
Briony broke bread comfortably between the fingers of her left
hand, holding her wine glass in her right, and smiled. She bestowed
on Jody a regard due to the outside world (outside these islands),
noblesse oblige, and said. "This is a good place to be. I've enjoyed it.
I enjoy doing it. It's rewarding." And she sat looking through the
oblong gap between grey stone buildings where the fields could be
seen ascending a sharp slope to a wood, brown glistening soil
already ploughed for the winter crops.
"Well," said Jody stubbornly, facing Briony whom she very
much liked, although they were so different, one so smart and shiny,
one so homely and work-used, "if it were me I'd feel I'd been made
use of. You don't. Couldn't your - ex-husband have made ar–
rangements for the estate to be run? When you leave here, what will
you have to show for it all?"
Briony's nod acknowledged the justice of this. "Well, Paul has
had a very nice place to come to for his holidays. And all his friends .
Jane adores it - and her friends . . . " Here she smiled affectionately
atJane, who returned an unwilling smile that acknowledged she had
to admit the truth, even when bound to criticize the grownups . "You
can't have everything," Briony summed up at last. "I know I could
have been first-class at my job-the stained glass, but I'll be good
enough. And I've enjoyed everything here."
