Four Years

A young Irish immigrant finds his family establishing a new life in the leafy suburb of Bedford Park, where red‑brick houses and a towering horse‑chestnut tree promise a genteel escape from Dublin. The narrator watches the neighborhood’s pretensions—co‑operative stores with faux‑historic panes, a public house named after Chaucer’s Tabard, and a newly built church whose “kneelers” hang on pegs—while sensing a loss of the earlier Pre‑Raphaelite enthusiasm that once animated the streets. The surroundings feel both charmingly village‑like and oddly out of step with the bustling metropolis beyond.

Amid this setting, the narrator wrestles with a cultural shift: his father, once a Pre‑Raphaelite painter, now turns to quotidian portraiture, and a new generation of artists dismisses the old masters in favor of stark realism. Torn between reverence for poetic tradition and the relentless push toward modernity, he clings to a personal, almost liturgical faith formed from verses and images. As he begins to encounter peers who share his doubts, the story unfolds as a meditation on art, identity, and the uneasy transition from youthful idealism to adult disillusionment.