The Sea by John Banville

middle age there was hardly a strand of grey in it. We were driving home from the hospital one day when she lifted a length of it from her shoulder and held it close to her eyes and examined it strand by strand, frowning.
    “Is there a bird called a baldicoot?” she asked.
    “There is a bandicoot,” I said cautiously, “but I don’t think it’s a bird. Why?”
    “Apparently I shall be as bald as a coot in a month or two.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “A woman in the hospital who was having treatment, the kind I am to have. She was quite bald, so I suppose she would know.” For a while she watched the houses and the shops progressing past the car window in that stealthily indifferent way that they do, and then turned to me again. “But what is a coot?”
    “That’s a bird.”
    “Ah.” She chuckled. “I’ll be the spitting image of Charlie when it has all fallen out.”
    She was.
    He died, old Charlie, of a blood clot in the brain, a few months after we were married. Anna got all his money. There was not as much of it as I would have expected, but still, there was a lot.
    The odd thing, one of the odd things, about my passion for Mrs. Grace is that it fizzled out almost in the same moment that it achieved what might be considered its apotheosis. It all happened on the afternoon of the picnic. By then we were going about everywhere together, Chloe and Myles and I. How proud I was to be seen with them, these divinities, for I thought of course that they were the gods, so different were they from anyone I had hitherto known. My former friends in the Field, where I no longer played, were resentful of my desertion. “He spends all his time now with his grand new friends,” I heard my mother one day telling one of their mothers. “The boy, you know,” she added in an undertone, “is a dummy.” To me she wondered why I did not petition the Graces to adopt me. “I won’t mind,” she said. “Get you out from under my feet.” And she gave me a level look, harsh and unblinking, the same look she would often turn on me after my father had gone, as if to say,
I suppose you will be the next to betray me.
As I suppose I was.
    My parents had not met Mr. and Mrs. Grace, nor would they. People in a proper house did not mix with people from the chalets, and we would not expect to mix with them. We did not drink gin, or have people down for the weekend, or leave touring maps of France insouciantly on show in the back windows of our motor cars—few in the Field even had a motor car. The social structure of our summer world was as fixed and hard of climbing as a ziggurat. The few families who owned holiday homes were at the top, then came those who could afford to put up at hotels—the Beach was more desirable than the Golf—then there were the house renters, and then us. All-the-year-rounders did not figure in this hierarchy; villagers in general, such as Duignan the dairyman or deaf Colfer the golf-ball collector, or the two Protestant spinsters at the Ivy Lodge, or the French woman who ran the tennis courts and was said to copulate regularly with her alsatian dog, all these were a class apart, their presence no more than the blurred background to our intenser, sun-shone-upon doings. That I had managed to scramble from the base of those steep social steps all the way up to the level of the Graces seemed, like my secret passion for Connie Grace, a token of specialness, of being the one chosen among so many of the unelect. The gods had singled me out for their favour.
    The picnic. We went that afternoon in Mr. Grace’s racy motor car far down the Burrow, all the way to where the paved road ended. A note of the voluptuous had been struck immediately by the feel of the stippled leather of the seat cover sticking to the backs of my thighs below my shorts. Mrs. Grace sat beside her husband in front, half turned toward him, an elbow resting on the back of her seat so that I had a view of her armpit, excitingly stubbled,