She was aware of her fiery-red face and the sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her cotton blouse clung damply to her back. She pushed her sticky hair off her face impatiently with the back of her arm. Up on the patio she could see Gretchen, cool and elegant in primrose yellow, pouring glasses of water for the thirsty players from a crystal jug—another item brought out for guests, no doubt.
“We must have a rematch sometime,” Howard was saying.
She recognized this for a piece of conventional politeness, but Margaret was immediately eager.
“Yes. Tomorrow. After school.”
The two adults laughed, acknowledging the impossibility of a life governed by reckless spontaneity.
“Miss Swinney doesn’t want to come over here again tomorrow just to entertain you!” said Howard, ruffling Margaret’s hair.
“How do you know? You haven’t asked her!”
“Because she has a life of her own to live.”
In fact, Jean could hardly think of anything she would rather do than play badminton with Howard and Margaret.
“But you’re grown-ups. You can do anything you want to.”
“Where on earth did you get the idea that grown-ups can do what they like?” asked her father with an expression of incredulity. “Not from me or your mother, that’s for certain.”
“They don’t have anyone bossing them about all the time,” she said. “They just do all the bossing.”
In perfect illustration of Margaret’s theory, there was a rattling at the side gate and Lizzie’s mother appeared, bristling with impatience, to chase up her errant daughter.
“We agreed five o’clock, young lady,” she said, tapping her watch face as Lizzie slouched up the garden to join her.
“See what I mean?” hissed Margaret after the visitors had been waved off.
“That was unfortunate timing,” Jean laughed. “But adults don’t get to do what they want all the time, or even most of it.”
“There’s this thing called Duty,” Howard explained.
Whenever Jean pictured Duty it was as a woman, tall and gaunt, with long hair scraped back into a bun, and gray, drooping clothes. For some reason she wore a pair of men’s lace-up shoes, the better to kick you with, perhaps.
“It usually means doing the thing you don’t want to but know you must,” she said.
“Like piano practice?”
“Yes. Or in my case, mowing Mrs. Bowland’s lawn,” said Jean, feeling a twinge of disloyalty to poor Mrs. Bowland, who would probably be mortified to think her patch of grass had become such a symbol of servitude.
“Or fixing the Wolseley,” said Howard with a grimace.
“What about you, Mummy?”
They turned to look at Gretchen expectantly. She beamed back at them.
“I must be very selfish, or very clever, because I have everything arranged so I never have to do anything I don’t want to.”
Jean experienced the same stirring of unease that had first troubled her at the hospital. While the three of them had been talking she had glanced up the garden and been shocked to see a look of utter desolation come over Gretchen’s face when she believed herself unobserved. The fit of melancholy, or whatever it was, had lasted a few seconds; as soon as Margaret called her name, she had snapped to attention, rearranging her features into the brightest of smiles.
Jean took the pause created by Lizzie’s departure as the signal that it was time to make her own farewells. Although the Tilburys pressed her to stay a little longer, and Jean was in no hurry to get home, it was deeply ingrained in her that to overstay an invitation to tea beyond 6 p.m. was an affront to all that was civilized and she declined.
She couldn’t decide whether the Tilburys were conventional people who set much store by these rules; it was hard to tell with Gretchen being foreign and she struggled to picture how they would spend their evening when she was gone. Listening to the radio perhaps, or quietly reading the Sunday paper while Margaret played the piano in the next room. Howard’s time was possibly claimed by paperwork from Bedford Street, and Gretchen might withdraw to her workroom and proceed with her pattern cutting. None of these potential narratives quite convinced her; she would have to get to know them better.
“Did you come by bicycle?” Gretchen asked as Jean gathered together handbag, shoes, cardigan and began to reassemble herself.
“No. Bus.”
It had been two buses, in fact, taking the best part of fifty minutes including the wait in between.
“Well, Howard will give you a lift home. The service on Sundays is terrible.”