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Show 51 Sixteen They have all assembled to meet her, five generations of the same southeast- England sheep-farming family, an assortment of children in whom the giggles are barely suppressed, middle-aged pink-cheeked women given largely to gossip, sturdy young men, red-complexioned from the constant wind and the occasional sun and the continuous pints of ale in the local pub, and even the patriarch figure, now past ninety, is here: an ancient quizzical old man with stark-white hair, who is virtually unable to hear. But his eyes are alert, and they follow Annis; it is clear that the family has explained to him who the visitor is: the daughter of his oldest brother. Annis greets her uncle, and realizes with astonishment that it makes her feel like a child. Her own parents have been dead for years, and without them, she has felt fully adult; but this ancient man is her uncle, her father's brother, a man of her parents' generation, not her own, and she discovers that it makes her feel as if there were some part of life she had not yet discovered, through which she still might go. She wishes it were possible to talk with him, this ancient man, that he were not so hard of hearing, but she cannot, and in the end she can only sit beside him, smiling from time to time, feeling the attention and affection of his continuingly alert gaze. But after the meal, the women of the family slide back into their gossip, and the men sit, infrequently speaking, with large mugs of ale and their strong cigars, and Annis realizes again that she is only remotely related to these people, by blood perhaps but not by more. In the morning, she gets into her |