Agnes Andrews would be sixty before very long, and for many years she had been obliged to wear spectacles with lenses so thick that it wasn’t easy to see the expression in her eyes: you had to rely on the smile or the frown or the patient, neutral look of her mouth. And her husband had to acknowledge that the rest of her was rapidly aging too. There wasn’t much left of her once-lustrous hair except what the hairdresser could salvage and primp; her body sagged in some places and was bloated in others. She looked like what she was: a woman who’d been called Mother in shrill, hungering voices for most of her life.

Long ago, almost beyond memory, she had been a neat, crisp, surprisingly passionate young nurse whose flesh he had been wholly unable to resist. The only minor deterrent, easily ignored from their first night right on up through the night he’d proposed to her (“I love you, Agnes; oh, I love you, and I need you. I need you…”), the only qualifying aspect of his love had been his knowledge that some people—his mother, for one—might think it strange of him to marry a girl of the working class.