“I take no credit,” said Jean. “I don’t think I have any knack for selling.”
“I’m not sure I have, either,” Howard admitted. “Which is unfortunate.”
“I think to be a convincing salesperson you have to be a spender yourself. I’m far too careful.”
“I used to like buying toys, but now I’ve got Jemimah I don’t need anything else,” said Margaret piously.
“Oh yes, Jemimah’s been a great success,” Howard said to Jean. “I can’t think how we got by without her. Now, we just sit around bitterly regretting the wasted rabbit-less years.”
Jean smiled. He had such a droll way of speaking that it was a pleasure to be teased by him. She thought again of their first meeting; how awkward and unimpressive she had found him, and how unworthy of his pretty young wife. Now, she felt the good fortune was all on Gretchen’s side. He was by some stretch the nicest man she had ever met.
It also occurred to her that his first impression of her might not have been especially favorable. She had no illusions or anxieties about her own lack of physical beauty; her ordinariness, in fact, grew less irksome with every passing year. It had been dispiriting to be plain at twenty, but by forty it hardly mattered. Time had caught up with most of her prettier contemporaries and those with the most to lose seemed to feel its depredations the hardest.
The arrival of another customer, a woman whose immaculate hair, hat, gloves and fashionable suit seemed suggestive of a promising combination of wealth and vanity, signaled to Jean that it was time to depart. Affecting the air of satisfied shoppers, she and Margaret slipped out with a discreet goodbye.
“I wonder if Mummy’s been all right,” said Margaret, twirling her handbag as they walked down Bedford Street in the direction of Charing Cross. “She promised she’d make spitzbuben for tea.”
“What’s spitzbuben?”
“They’re jam cookies.”
“I’ve learned so many new words today,” Jean mused. “Ormolu. Spitzbuben. I shall need a notebook of my own to keep track of them.”
“You must decide where you want to go on our next outing,” said Jean as they approached 7 Burdett Road. “Maybe the zoo, if you haven’t been recently?”
“I’d like to go swimming,” Margaret said. “But only if you come in the water with me. It doesn’t count if you just sit on the side and watch.”
“I’m happy to go swimming,” said Jean.
“Mummy doesn’t like it, so we never go.”
Maybe it was something to do with being Swiss and landlocked, Jean thought. Although there was surely no shortage of lakes.
She offered this theory to Margaret, who considered it judiciously and then said, “No. She just doesn’t like getting her hair wet.”
At first it seemed as though there was no one at home. The side gate—the usual point of entry—was bolted, but when they rang the doorbell and peered through the stained glass, there was Gretchen coming down the stairs towards them with a basket of ironing under one arm.
“You’re all hot,” said Margaret, disengaging herself from her mother’s welcoming hug.
“Sorry,” she replied a little breathlessly, fanning herself with the skirt of her pinafore. “I’ve been busy.”
“Did you make the spitzbuben?”
Gretchen’s face fell. “Oh no. I didn’t. I got caught up with other things.”
Margaret screwed her face into the most furious knot of displeasure.
“I’ll make them this evening, when I’ve done the ironing,” her mother promised.
“But I wanted to give Jean one.”
“Poor Mummy,” said Jean, feeling that Margaret was being rather unreasonable. Spoiled even, though it pained her to think the word. “She’s been slaving away all afternoon while we’ve been out having tea at Simpson’s.”
“Really—Simpson’s? Margaret, you little monkey! You hardly need spitzbuben as well.”
Margaret looked suitably sheepish. She was a good-hearted girl really, thought Jean, and was easily corrected.
“And we called on Daddy at the shop. We helped him to sell a ruby necklace for twenty pounds!”
Gretchen glanced at Jean. “Oh, did you? That’s a nice idea. I bet he was surprised to see you.”
Jean hoped it was apparent that the nice idea had been all Margaret’s, but it would have been making too much of it, she felt, to raise the matter. She couldn’t linger anyway; there was her mother and the postmortem of the strawberry tea to be faced, so she said goodbye to Margaret, who was eager to get outside and commune with Jemimah.