“No. Surely not. What about Margaret?”
“Margaret is away on a school trip, so she doesn’t know yet. Which is no doubt why Gretchen chose this week to leave.”
“I can’t believe it, Howard. She must be having some kind of breakdown.”
“Maybe. Though she seems quite collected.”
“But you’ve just been on vacation. Did something happen while you were away?”
“Oh no, it’s been going on much longer than that.”
Jean was aware of her mother, having dismissed the coalman, peering at them through the front window, in agonies of curiosity.
“Shall we drive?” Howard asked.
“Yes, do.”
It was easier to talk while moving, with eyes on the road ahead.
“Do you know where she’s gone?”
“Chelsea, I believe.”
A confused sense of dread, a foggy state of both seeing and not quite seeing, which had assailed Jean from the start of their conversation, now gave way to awful clarity.
“Oh, God,” she said, sick with guilt as if she had deliberately conspired in the betrayal. “Martha.”
“I think I always knew,” said Howard. “Not about Martha herself, but that her aversion wasn’t just to me but to all men. It ought to make it easier. But it doesn’t.”
They were driving through the common now, toward the countryside, with no declared aim other than to keep moving.
“I didn’t know they had even made contact. Gretchen never said.”
“That little painting of the tangerines that you brought back—it had Martha’s address on. I knew Gretchen had got in contact and been to visit her—once—but I thought nothing of it. A reunion of old friends, that sort of thing. But they’ve been meeting in secret since.”
“This is all my fault,” said Jean. “It was me who brought them back together. I never imagined.”
She had a sudden memory of the three of them, Howard, Gretchen and Margaret in the garden; badminton and afternoon tea, dressmaking and piano practice; the ordinary miracles of family life that she had blundered into and destroyed. It had all been an illusion; the real Gretchen was not the happy housewife with the sunny smile but the other one with the stricken expression, guarding her painful secret.
“No one is to blame,” Howard said. His hands on the steering wheel clenched and released. “Except perhaps me for going ahead with the marriage when I knew that she didn’t love me the way I loved her. Suspected it anyway.”
“Howard, you are too hard on yourself,” Jean protested, tears springing to her eyes.
“She told me she had never really stopped loving Martha, even though she never expected to see her again.”
“That was cruel of her.”
“She didn’t mean it to be. She said she loves me too, and I believe her.”
“But what about Margaret? Gretchen would never do anything to hurt Margaret and she must know this surely will.”
“She’s beyond reason. Her feelings for Martha have driven out all other considerations.”
“But people deny their feelings all the time,” Jean said. “Isn’t that what parenthood is all about—sacrificing your happiness for your children’s?”
“I suppose she would say that’s what she has been doing these ten years—and she can’t do it anymore.”
“You are so reasonable, Howard. You should be raging and storming and demanding that she comes home.”
“I did try a version of that,” he admitted. “But it’s hard to rant at someone who is already on their knees, weeping their apologies. I felt like a brute.”
This image of Gretchen, abject and pleading, was too much for Jean.
“Don’t,” she said with a sense of guilt that was out of all proportion. “This is all my doing. I’ve brought this chaos into your lives.”
She felt a powerful and irrational hatred for Martha, her filthy kitchen, her pretensions to art, her scarlet lipstick, her scheming. And as she contemplated the wreckage of this once happy marriage, a dark corner of her soul registered that Howard himself was now, if not legally, then at least morally free, and her heart bounded with selfish joy.
“Well, if she’s gone to stay at Martha’s she won’t stick it for long. The place is a slum,” she said with uncharacteristic spite.
It was impossible to imagine the poised and fastidious Gretchen at home among that clutter.
“Really?” Howard’s face fell and Jean immediately regretted her remark. Of course it hardly flattered him to know what a reduction in circumstances she was running to. “I just can’t imagine her being happy there,” Jean added lamely.