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Show 52 car; she says the cheerful goodbyes of ordinary hospitality, but with her larger farewell she is silent. She does not see the old man, almost twenty years older than she, again. There are other branches of the family to visit as well, equally eager to greet her, but equally involved in their own intertwined interests. She cannot tell them what she has really come to say, for that would somehow affront the workings of these families, and constitute a breach of that rural decorum they so carefully preserve. Increasingly frequently, she finds herself driving alone through the countryside, through the narrow lanes, barely wide enough for a single car, in between the hedgerows. She studies their composition: at their root lie ancient stone walls, upon which moss has flourished and seeds have sprouted; here a soil has formed, and now large bushes, sometimes full trees, grow from the tops of these old stone walls, their roots reinforcing, anchoring them ever more firmly into the English countryside. In the country with which she is familiar, fields are divided by a single rail fence, sometimes a clean stone wall; these are replaced when they fall, but here the barriers between one field and the next show centuries of growth, decay, continued growth. She drives further into the countryside, stopping when she is tired at old country inns, small, low-ceilinged, wooden-beam buildings, where exhausted travellers have recovered themselves since 1190, or 1377, or 1537. At one, she orders a pitcher of tea and drinks it alone, thinking back of the people who have sat on this same bench as she, warming themselves at this same hearth as she, not only last week, or last year, not even in the previous decade or in the small |