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both ovaries. She was operated upon at once, informed that she was now, regrettably, infertile and sent away to convalesce on one of the futons she had sold to the English couple.
    They were good to her. She was, they said, the age of their eldest daughter, now studying law at an English university Caro had never heard of called Exeter, and that alone aroused their sympathy. They nursed her back to health, found her work in the bookstore of the student centre and then, as a twentieth birthday present, gave her an economy-class return air ticket to London. They had friends and relations in England she could stay with, they said, and she would have a chance to see her life and her country from another perspective. It would help her, they said, to make up her mind. To Caro, it was the most extraordinary present she had ever been given, not just for its generosity but because it appeared to prove that, despite Ken, and despite the operation – whose consequences had as yet hardly dawned upon her – the promise of the Golden Gate Bridge still held good.
    In April 1971, Caro Bliss arrived in England with a modest bag of clothes and a list of addresses. She spent ten days with her benefactors’ relations in a suburban house near Richmond Park, and then went to stay in chaotic student lodgings – a rented farmhouse with lukewarm hot water and intermittent electricity – outside Exeter. The culture shock of both places was immense. Even the language seemed to divide more than it united. For three weeks Caro endured the incomprehensible loud rompings of English students at play – so different, in every way, from the spaced-out laxity of their counterparts at Berkeley – and then, leaving a stilted thank-you note in her simply turned American hand, set off into the mysteries of the English railway system to her third address, a farm in the Midlands.
    It was a big, commercial place, raising pork and beef and growing fruit and vegetables for a series of farm shops. The family who ran it – father, mother, grownup son and two daughters – had known the physicist at Berkeley since she was a girl. The farmer’s wife’s mother, now dead, had been her godmother. They took Caro in as if tall, homeless American girls without particular direction came their way every day of the week and included her, without fuss, in their life and work.
    They didn’t, as the students in Exeter did, talk all the time. They talked when necessary, about subjects that affected their working lives, the life of the farm. This suited Caro. Living, as she had since she was fifteen, on the edges of so many other people’s lives, she had become used not to talking much herself, as if to talk was to thrust herself into the limelight, into the centre of attention in lives that she depended upon for sustenance and thus could not afford to alienate by the wrong sort of behaviour. Even before that, Caro’s childhood had not been an eloquent matter. Her father’s articulateness, such as it was, lay in his painting, her mother’s in an urgent practicality, designed to wrench some kind of reality out of romantic dreams. On this large, efficient commercial enterprise in the English Midlands, Caro found much to recognize as trustworthy. Cautiously, feeling her way through the unaccustomed rhythms of the days and the peculiar food, Caro began, despite herself, to relax.
    Some evenings and at weekends, the son of the house and his girlfriend – a vet specializing in pigs – took Caro with them on outings with the local Young Farmers’ group. She attended lectures on farm management, competitions on stock judging and an enormous number of evenings in the pub where she learned to play darts and failed to learn to like warm, strong English beer. It was often the same crowd, friendly, cheerful and healthy, a youth group of a kind Caro had never encountered before, with scarcely even a nod to urban life. They were