The Apple by Michel Faber

parents were guilty of infringements galore. For instance: my mother had given birth to me, her first child, in her early thirties; this was most bizarre, even Biblically far-fetched. In fact, according to some of my schoolmates, it was simply impossible. Surely she must have been married before, and left behind a brood of strapping children, in order to begin afresh with a new man? I summoned up the courage to ask Mama if Papa was her first husband.
    ‘Of course he is,’ she said with a grin. ‘And he’ll be the last, I promise you.’
    ‘But what were you doing before?’
    ‘Exploring the world.’
    ‘Like explorers in Africa?’
    ‘Exactly like explorers in Africa. Except not in Africa.’
    ‘Where, then?’
    ‘I’ve told you where, many times.’
    ‘But why weren’t you married?’
    She peered into the distance, as if trying to spot a landmark lost in mist.
    ‘I wasn’t ready.’
    ‘All other women get married when they’re young.’
    ‘That’s not true. Think of Aunt Primrose. She’s never been married at all.’
    ‘She’s a spinster.’
    ‘My, my, that’s a word I never taught you. And there was I, thinking they teach you nothing at school except how to sing “Rule Britannia”.’
    ‘I learned “spinster” from Freddy Harris.’
    ‘He’s a stupid boy. You’ve got more brain-power in a hair that falls off your head than he has inside his whole skull.’
    Which gave me a new conundrum to worry about: did one lose tiny amounts of brain-power every time one’s hairs fell out? Was that why very old, bald people tended to be daft?
    ‘Why did you stop exploring?’ I asked my mother.
    ‘I haven’t stopped,’ she said. ‘I’m exploring more than ever. This is the strangest country of all.’
    I couldn’t disagree with her there.
    * * *
    Intimate as we were, I didn’t tell Mama that another boy had taught me a different word for what Aunt Primrose was: unnatural . Aunt Primrose lived with us in our house. She had always lived with us, even in Australia, even before I was born. She was a good five years older than my mother but, looking at photographs of her now, I can appreciate what I had no conception of then: that she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. More beautiful, certainly, than my mother, who, although she had big blue eyes, also had a slight double chin, a slightly protruding brow, and unruly, fleecy blonde hair. Aunt Primrose was blessed with perfect features, an exquisitely sculptured neck, chocolate brown eyes, a glossy swirl of dark hair that stayed obediently in place. A few decades earlier, she might have been a muse for the Pre-Raphaelites, although they would have insisted she wear a figure-hugging velvet dress with an embroidered bodice. The Edwardian years were not conducive to such things.
    It was a bad time for women’s fashions, to be frank. My mother customarily wore what just about every female of her class wore: a plain white blouse, cut wide and shapeless, to accommodate the unsupported bosom which hung low, muffled by undergarments, so that her torso resembled a pigeon’s. Her blouse she tucked into an ankle-length grey skirt reined in tight at the belt. In my toddler years, I remember her looking fantastically impressive in fox furs, but shortly after arriving in England, she came home from a mysterious public meeting (she was always attending mysterious meetings) and declared that killing foxes was wicked. That was the end of the big cuddly pelts I’d adored. Instead, she took to wearing a long black woollen coat that had all the style of a cabhorse’s feedbag. Inside the house, she wore her hair in a continually unravelling bun; out of doors, she wore a hat that could have served as a cushion on a piano stool.
    Aunt Primrose, by contrast, was always immaculately tailored. So why did my schoolmates regard her as unnatural ? Because her tailoring was masculine, that’s why. She favoured formal suit jackets and frock coats, altered slightly to give a