(1980 - Hamish Hamilton Limited)

Dedication:

For M.T.W.F
utterly and entirely

Michael and Caroline Lambert have loved one another for seventeen years and they have loved their home, Hamble House, a farmhouse built in stone with a whitewashed brick facade. Hamble lies just below Melbury, an ancient hilltop town in the West Country of England. Michael runs a bookshop in Melbury, Caroline is a painter. They have five children. From May to October is a random span in their lives. One summer. The sense of place is powerful, the sense of season vivid.

Family is a structure within which individuals struggle and hope, claim and concede. To be apart and yet share. To be individual and yet committed to partnership. Family seeks and needs harmony, an organic active harmony that allows and is flexible, a harmony that can sustain dilemma and change and crisis. At the outer edge of the family structure there are the ramparts of in-laws, aunts and uncles and particular family friends. Michael's mother Flavia lives in exquisite simplicity not far from Hamble House. She sees and knows everything. She counsels and observes. There is Michael's father Harold Lambert, retired company director, and his second wife, the American Tilly Slater. There is Monica, highly successful designer who has been at Art School with Caroline. Monica is powerful, attractive and intelligent, with the certainty that marriage is a stunting liaison for both parties. Monica deeply mistrusts Caroline's approach to both her work and her family life. And there is Giles Ferguson. Giles is unattached. He has farmed, now he deals in pictures. He is interested in Caroline and her work. He is aware of her frustration as an artist and her vulnerability as an individual. It is Giles who enables Caroline to work alone and undisturbed in an isolated cottage in France.