Take-over bid by a stranger

This is a novel on a rebarbative theme: incapacity. Not the sort of incapacity one observes in others; rather, incapacity as a curse one suffers on one’s own. Paul Rayment, a man of 60, is flung off his bicycle by an oncoming car and loses part of his right leg. He recovers, more or less, and is returned home to his solitary flat, in the charge of a nurse, Marijana, a Croatian immigrant. He refuses a prosthesis and is reduced to an even lonelier and more circumscribed existence than he had previously experienced. He becomes acutely aware of his childlessness, which torments him. He also becomes aware of Marijana, yearns for her, for her children. In a fit of the only love permitted to him he offers to put her son Drago through college, does not much mind that she seems unaware of his generosity. Her motives, originally benign, remain obscure.