She felt unable to tell them she was grateful for the experience. She just smiled politely and did her best to avoid conversation.
This life was an intense one, without compromise. It was currently minus seventeen degrees, and she had nearly been eaten by a polar bear,
and yet maybe the problem with her root life had partly been its blandness. She had come to imagine mediocrity and disappointment were her destiny.
Indeed, Nora had always had the sense that she came from a long line of regrets and crushed hopes that seemed to echo in every generation.
For instance, her grandfather on her mother’s side was called Lorenzo Conte.
He had left Puglia – the handsome heel in the boot of Italy – to come to Swinging London in the 1960s.
Like other men in the desolate port town of Brindisi, he’d emigrated to Britain,
exchanging life on the Adriatic for a job at the London Brick Company.
Lorenzo, in his naivety, had imagined having a wonderful life – making bricks all day,
and then of an evening he would rub shoulders with The Beatles and walk arm-in-arm down Carnaby Street with Jean Shrimpton or Marianne Faithful.
The only problem was that, despite its name, the London Brick Company wasn’t actually in London.
It was based sixty miles north in Bedford, which, for all its modest charms, turned out not as swinging as Lorenzo would have liked.
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