Free Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes Page B

Would the box affect her Periodicity of Recurrence?
    When Jean got home, she surprised herself by turning again to Mrs. Barrett’s little maroon book. She turned to the chapter called The Fundamental Pulse, serious now, to find out what the promised deed would be like. Some people, she read, thought of it as a simple wave pattern of crests and hollows; but it was more complicated than that. “We have all,” the author of Our Ostriches explained,
at some time, watched the regular ripples of the sea breaking against a sandbank, and noticed that the influx of another current of water may send a second system of waves at right angles to the first, cutting athwart them, so that the two series of waves pass through each other.
    Jean hadn’t ever been to the seaside, but she tried to imagine the pattern of cross-ripples. She heard gulls squawk and saw untrodden sand. It all sounded quite pleasant. Quite pleasant, but not very important. Maybe it was just funny?
    Uncle Leslie wasn’t at the wedding. Uncle Leslie had done a bunk. Jean’s parents were there, and Michael’s tall, long-nosed mother, who was either awkward or patronizing, Jean couldn’t decide, and a policeman friend of Michael’s who was best man and who whispered to her beforehand, “If I’m the best man why areyou marrying the other fellow?” (which Jean didn’t think was an appropriate remark), and a cousin of Michael’s from Wales who had come down specially; but Uncle Leslie wasn’t there. One small family marrying into another small family: seven people who didn’t know each other very well trying to judge the right degree of celebration for a mufti wedding in wartime. Uncle Leslie would have ignored the niceties and insisted on a knees-up; he might have made a speech or done some tricks. Perhaps she missed him more because as a child she had planned to marry him. His absence seemed a double desertion. But then, Uncle Leslie had done a bunk.
    This, at any rate, had been her father’s interpretation of events. Uncle Leslie, having lived in England all his life, had caught a boat to New York shortly after Chamberlain’s return from Munich. Leslie’s summary of the facts, in a much debated letter from Baltimore, ran as follows: Chamberlain had proclaimed peace in our time, Leslie realized he wasn’t getting any younger and had decided to see the world, not long after he got to America the war had quite unexpectedly broken out, he was (just) too old to serve in uniform, there wasn’t any point in bringing another mouth to feed all the way across the Atlantic, the best thing to do was send food parcels as soon as he’d got set up in a job, and of course, he’d join the American army if the Yanks got involved in the kerfuffle, always assuming they’d have him.
    Father’s summary of the facts to Mother was rather different: I always knew your brother was a bit of a spiv, too old for the army stuff and nonsense what’s wrong with the Home Guard or firewatching or working in a munitions factory, not that your brother ever liked getting his hands dirty or using a spot of elbow grease, just because he sends food parcels he thinks that makes it all right, what’s for dinner tonight Mother a little bit of Conscience Pie followed by a slice of Conscience Pudding, well we may as well eat the stuff it’ll only go bad, but what does he mean by sending our Jean fancy underwear she’s only just had her plait cut off, I won’t see my daughter wearing things like this when the bombers are coming over it’s not decent, if he joins the American army I’llswim the North Sea, perhaps our Hero of the Stratosphere on my right would like another slice of Conscience Pudding, it may taste sour but there’s no point letting it go to waste.
    In the first two years of the war they ate a lot of Conscience Pie. Father confiscated the underwear but handed it over to Jean when she married. This was Uncle Leslie’s only wedding present; she had written to give him the