Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

Cecilia (Cee) Tallis, recently home from university, is desperate with inactivity. Her childhood friend and Cambridge University acquaintance, Robbie Turner, whom she wants to avoid, is weeding a hedge. Recently graduated with a degree in literature, Robbie has pretensions and presumptions, of going on to medical school with the financial support of Cecilia's father, Jack Tallis. Anxious to get on with life, Cecilia feels she owes her family a last uninterrupted stretch of her attention and must resolve relations with Robbie, whose affection from afar she senses although they rarely speak.

Cecilia enters the formal, high-ceilinged, perfectly appointed drawing room and thrusts her flowers into a Meissen porcelain vase once owned by Uncle Clem, a war hero whose funeral she barely remembers. The casual arrangement will brighten the guestroom for her brother's friend, Paul Marshall, as her mother ordered. Cecilia needs...