Throughout her childhood, Constance called the gorse that grew on the hillsides above her house “honey-bottle,” and gathered fistfuls of it despite the spines, so that her hands would smell of it, a smell that seemed to combine oatmeal and hot metal and sun. The smell was somewhat a solace when it came to her devastating shyness, a shyness that so galled her mother that when Constance retreated into sniffing her fingers in public her mother could hardly restrain herself from swatting her daughter’s hands from her nose.
Her older sisters had no such inhibitions and considered Constance a minor mortification, while she understood their high spirits to be a manic display of an unhappiness that their mother viewed as a necessary part of their social success.
She agonized through birthday parties. She refused school games. She perambulated the fringes of family gatherings, setting everyone’s teeth on edge. Her most vivid recollections of childhood seemed unconnected, like lighted rooms scattered across a city, and she had decided that the most painful felt only distantly related to her.
When she hadn’t been absent-minded she had been diffident, and when she hadn’t been diffident she had presented as vacant. It was in no way clear to her how she had evolved into a moderately confident young woman of twenty.
