It was only a ten-minute ride from the offices of the Echo in Petts Wood to Jean’s home in Hayes and even at this time of day there was little traffic. The sun was still high in the sky; there were hours of daylight left. Once she had seen to her mother there might be time for some gardening: ground elder was coming in under the next-door fence and menacing the bean rows; it required constant vigilance.
The thought of puttering in the vegetable patch on a summer evening was infinitely soothing. The lawns, front and back, would have to wait until the weekend, because that was a heavy job, made heavier by an obligation to do her elderly neighbor’s grass at the same time. It was one of those generous impulses that had begun as a favor and had now become a duty, performed with dwindling enthusiasm on one side and fading gratitude on the other.
Jean stopped off at the parade of shops that curved down the hill from the station to complete her errands. Steak and kidney would take too long but the thought of eggs for supper again had a dampening effect on her spirits, so she bought some lamb’s liver from the butcher. They could have it with new potatoes and broad beans from the garden. She didn’t dawdle over the rest of her list—the shops shut promptly at five-thirty and there would be disappointment indoors if she returned home without the shoes or the medicine, and utter frustration for herself if she ran out of cigarettes.
By the time she reached home, a modest 1930s row house backing on to the park, her cheerful mood had evaporated. Somehow, in transferring the waxed paper package of liver to her tartan shopping bag she managed to drip two spots of blood on the front of her dust-colored wool skirt. She was furious with herself. The skirt had not long ago been cleaned and she knew from experience that blood was one of the most tenacious stains to treat.
“Is that you, Jean?” Her mother’s voice—anxious, reproachful—floated down the stairs in response to the scrape of her door key, as it always did.
“Yes, Mother, only me,” Jean replied, as she always did, with a degree more or less of impatience in her tone, depending on how her day had gone.
Her mother appeared on the landing, fluttering a blue air-mailed letter over the banisters. “There’s a letter from Dorrie,” she said. “Do you want to read it?”
“Maybe later,” said Jean, who was still taking off her headscarf and divesting herself of her various packages.
Her younger sister, Dorrie, was married to a coffee farmer and lived in Kenya, which might as well have been Venus as far as Jean was concerned, so remote and unimaginable was her new life. She had a houseboy and a cook and a gardener, and a nightwatchman to protect them from intruders, and a gun under the bed to protect them from the nightwatchman. The sisters had been close as children and Jean had missed her terribly at first, but after so many years she had grown accustomed to not seeing her or her children in a way that their mother never would.
“Is there something nice for supper?” Having noticed the paper bag containing her mended shoes, her mother began a slow and wincing descent of the stairs.
“Liver,” said Jean.
“Oh good. I’m ravenous. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”
“Well whyever not? There’s plenty of food in the larder.”
Sensing resistance, Jean’s mother backtracked a little. “I slept rather late. So I had my oatmeal instead of lunch.”
“So you have eaten something, then?”
“Oh, I don’t call that eating.”
Jean didn’t reply to this but took her purchases into the kitchen and deposited them on the table. The room faced west and was warm and bright in the early evening sun. A fly fizzed and bumped against the windowpane until Jean let it out, noticing as she did so the specks and smears on the glass. Another job for the weekend. They had a woman who came in to clean on a Thursday morning, but she seemed to Jean to achieve very little in her allotted hour, apart from gossiping to her mother. But this was a chore of sorts, Jean supposed, and she didn’t begrudge her the five shillings. Not really.
While her mother tried on the newly mended shoes, Jean took off her skirt and stood at the sink in her blouse and slip, inspecting the spots of dried blood. In the curtained dresser she located a box of rags—the earthly remains of other ruined garments—and, using the severed sleeve of a once-favorite cotton nightgown, began to dab at the stain with cleaning spirit.
“What are you doing?” said her mother, peering over her shoulder.
“I got blood on it,” said Jean, frowning as the rust-colored patch began to dissolve and spread. “Not mine. The liver, I mean.”