“You are quite right. I’m not blaming Gretchen, by the way. I blame myself. I often wonder if she’d have done better to wait until she met someone she could fully love. But I was there, on the spot, so to speak, when there was a certain amount of urgency to provide Margaret with a father and a respectable upbringing. Her mother certainly thought so.”
“You’re not suggesting she was pressured into marriage against her will?” Jean protested. “Nobody who has seen you together could possibly think so.”
“No, no, nothing as brutal as that. She accepted me gratefully, but now I think I did her a disservice in proposing when she was so vulnerable and her mother was dying. It was hardly a free choice.”
“You talk as if the good fortune was all yours. Because she is young and pretty. But she is lucky to have you, too. Kind, decent men are scarce.”
Of course he was better than just kind and decent, she thought—words that hardly stirred the soul. He was the best man she knew and Gretchen the luckiest woman. But this could not be said.
“Are they?”
“In my experience.”
She could call to mind only three—Roy Drake, Dorrie’s husband, Kenneth, and Howard himself. Even her own father had fallen short in the end. To her dismay she found her eyes beginning to smart, and she turned away and stared out of the window at the green hedgerows until she had mastered herself. It wasn’t sadness that prompted the threat of tears but a general sense of emotional fullness that always accompanied any attempt to discuss her inner life.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Jean,” Howard said. “I’m sure you deserve much better.”
“I don’t know about that. I probably got exactly what I deserved. I seem to be attracted to precisely the sort of man who isn’t husband material. Not my husband, anyway.” She gave a hollow laugh.
“I hope I haven’t upset you,” he said. “I felt I could talk freely to you. I don’t know why.”
“You can. I’m glad you did.”
“I suppose you give the impression that you don’t judge people.”
Jean had never thought of herself in this light before; sometimes, in fact, she caught herself out in some act of lofty disapproval and felt ashamed. Howard’s confident assertion of her goodness made her the more determined to live up to it and be the broad-minded, tolerant person he thought her. I love him, she thought with a kind of wonderment. I never intended to, but now I do. The relief of admitting it to herself and accepting it as a fact that couldn’t be dismissed or changed was like throwing off chains.
“Well, thank you. That’s a nice thing to say,” she said, keeping her voice steady.
It seemed impossible that he wouldn’t notice her transformation, but he just gave her a quick smile and kept his eyes on the road, as a sensible man would.
They had left the suburbs behind now and were driving through the Kent countryside of sunken lanes and hedgerows tangled with honeysuckle and brambles and teeming with butterflies. At Shoreham, a stream ran through the middle of the village. A gang of children was wading bare-legged in the water with jam jars and nets; they turned as one and stared after the car with tribal hostility as it passed over the bridge.
The house was on the edge of the village, in a large, unkempt garden consisting mostly of shaggy lawn, with fruit trees and beds of straggling wildflowers. Beyond the trees a rustic tennis court had been shaved into the grass.
Aunt Edie was reclining on a wooden sun lounger, swathed in shawls in spite of the heat, which by now was shimmering, intense. She was drinking cider from a bottle and reading a Dashiell Hammett. It was hard to see exactly what she looked like, as her face was so crowded; as well as a yellow sun visor, she was wearing a pair of modern cat’s-eye sunglasses over her regular spectacles and had a large sticking plaster across her nose. An elderly spaniel lay at her feet, stirring itself to aim a few dutiful yaps at the visitors before slumping back beside her.
“Hello, Auntie,” said Howard, bending to kiss her powdery cheek. “This is Jean,” was the extent of his explanation for Jean’s substitution for his wife and daughter, and all that Aunt Edie seemed to require.
“You’ll be thirsty, I expect. Help yourself to cider—you know where it is,” she said, waving an arm toward the open back door.
While Howard went to fetch the drinks, Jean spread out the woolen blanket on the tussocky grass and sat, cross-legged, awaiting interrogation, but her hostess was serenely incurious. Jean was glad now of Gretchen’s sun hat, as there was no shade where they sat and the trees were quite useless in this regard, with their lowest branches dipping almost to the ground. She was grateful, too, for the element of concealment, in case her recent upsurge of feeling was readable in her face.