That’s Our Helen, but Who’s this Michael!
This entire story is constructed around whether or not Helen Turrell is raising a son or a nephew. It is never made exactly sure—not entirely explicitly spelled out—but the entire purpose of writing a story about the ambiguity of a character’s parentage without the truth being the option that is hidden from view seems kind of pointless. So suffice to say that more than likely Michael is Helen’s son and not the nephew she claims. Which makes an early metaphorical portrayal of her deeply ironic:
“Helen was as open as the day, and held that scandals are only increased by hushing then up.”
The Hard Times
Michael purposely estranges himself from Helen upon finding out at a very early age that she has betrayed to another something he felt was shared only between them in the deepest of confidences. The full depth of the emotional passion this betrayal stimulates in the young boy is characterized through a metaphorical comparison with climactic intensity:
“`Why did you tell? Why did you tell?’ came at the end of the storm.”
Getting Past the Hard Times
A brief bout with mortality in the form of a bad case of measles offers reunification following the hard times. This end to the emotional estrangement in turn creates a quick delineation of history allowing the narrative to jump ahead a decade in a metaphorical instant:
“The terms at his public school and the wonderful Christmas, Easter, and Summer holidays followed each other, variegated and glorious as jewels on a string; and as jewels Helen treasured them.”
Helen’s Hell
Helen’s trip across the Channel to locate Michael’s gravesite becomes a hellish trip into a kind of underworld populated by women on the verge of nervous breakdowns standing in stark comparison to her own standoffish, almost professional attitude to conducting the unpleasant, but seemingly necessary deed. In between an encounter with one mother overcome with maternal grief and another woman overcome by a more complicated set of emotions, the metaphorical imagery of her own emotional state is set in metaphorical stone:
“Tea in a crowded mauve and blue striped wooden structure, with a false front, carried her still further into the nightmare.”
The Cemetery
Upon reaching the cemetery where Michael’s waits, Helen is overcome by the sheer enormity of it all. The graveyard is still under construction and the size and state become a sight capable of contextuality only through the figurative abilities of metaphorical imagery:
“All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her.”
