1.   Birkin’s phrase “for a time” punctuates the description of how his job has created for him a nice reality inside the church and makes his life outside in the town a dream (31).  What punctures this comfortable picture?

2.   Read the visit to Emily Clough (pp. 34–36) closely.  Why does Carr include it in the story?  How is the episode told?  What do you think of the way Kathy suggests the idea: “Let’s call and see Emily Clough; she’s dying of consumption…We can give her the cornflowers Edgar’s picked for Mam”?  How do Kathy and Edgar treat Emily and her illness?  How does Emily herself handle dying?  What effect do Emily’s statements (such as “I’ve heard about you,” “Who was there today?” and “I like your straw hat, Kathy.  Let me try it on.”) have against her condition and her physical description?  What is the point of the eye contact between Emily and Birkin at the end of the passage?  What connection is there between this girl and this man?

3.   Compare the three house visits given in quick succession: Sunday dinner with the Ellerbecks, visiting Emily Clough, and calling at the Keaches’ vicarage.  How is the narrator greeted at each?  What tone does he use in describing the interior and what takes place there?  How does he portray himself while there? 

4.   Consider the affinity between work and art.  Mr. Ellerbeck’s carving at Sunday dinner is described as an artwork, and he an artist, having learned from his father the butcher (32).  Later, the narrator admires the “magnificence” of Aunt Rose’s oil-lamp whose mundane utilitarian function does not preclude its being the “chieftest glory” in the room (33).  Are there similar mergings of usefulness and aesthetics, of profession and passion, or of necessity and adornment elsewhere?

5.      Approaching Reverend Keach’s house, Tom Birkin calls the surroundings a garden, making it sound even Edenic (36).  Once at the house, how does he portray the building and its effect on him and on the Keaches?

6.   What link does Birkin reach for in sympathizing with Alice Keach as she recounts her horrifying nightmare (38)?  Notice the telling of each experience.  How is the language and/or tone in “the house had become a compression chamber” (37), for example, different from “a really big shell exploded” (38)?  What means, literary and psychologically, does Birkin use in verbalizing his war and post-war experience?  What strategy gives him the wherewithal to cope with “black depression” by saying that being homeless saves him from it (39)?

7.   “Almost everything has some purpose” seems to be Birkin’s philosophy.  What is the purpose of the giant cat appearing with “a fluttering song-thrush clamped in its bloody jaws” (39)?

8.   Consider the rose Sarah van Fleet that “keeps on blooming” (40) and that is featured on the cover of this novel in relation to Robert Herrick’s famous call to “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”  What other images are used to speak about time in the story?  Most of the time the narrator seems to want this summer “to go on and on” (41), but when Kathy is let out of school, he thinks her “for a month” is “far too long” (42).  How else is time viewed?  How is time a meaningful part of his profession?

9.   How does Carr convey Birkin’s healing?

10. Explore the contrast between the country and the city.

11. In the acquaintance game that Birkin and Moon have going where they each show off their ability to read unknown individuals made intimate through their work, what is revealed about “art and heart” (50) and the connection between life and relic?

12. After Birkin’s revelation about the fate of the mural painter, Moon warns him, “Mind your own step, then” (64).  What biblical resonance does this have, considering the content of the painting on which both men are working?  Why does Alice Keach appear in the story immediately after this caution, asking “Do you believe in hell”?