“You are probably worn out from looking after me. I’m sorry I’m such a nuisance.”
“Oh, you’re not really,” said Jean, moved by her mother’s forlorn tone. She gave her freckled, knobbly hand a squeeze, noting the contrast with her own small, delicate fingers. “Don’t say that.”
“At least I’m not as bad as that old dear at the hotel.” She cheered up at this recollection of someone else’s greater misfortune. “If I ever get like that you must put me in a nursing home.”
“You know very well you’d hate that,” Jean replied, unable to take much comfort from the comparison. As far as she was concerned, the only thing that divided them was the distance of a few years.
“Well, I don’t want to become a burden.”
“Don’t think like that. We get along all right, don’t we?”
“I try,” her mother replied ambiguously. “If you’re not going to eat that, I might as well have it.”
She steered the lamb’s heart onto her plate with the tip of her knife.
“Please do,” said Jean, looking away to avoid witnessing the first incision.
“Perhaps we could have a fire tonight, now that the clocks have been turned back. I made some spills.”
They usually tried to wait until All Souls’ Day before lighting the first coal fire of winter—once having succumbed there was no going back until the following March—but there was a chill to the newly dark evenings now. They had held out longer than most of their neighbors; Jean had noticed the chimneys smoking on her way back from work for the past few days.
“I don’t see why not. The coal bunker’s full.”
“It’s a good thing the chimney’s swept and ready.”
As every year, her mother insisted on getting the sweep round in spring rather than waiting until autumn when the prices might have gone up. She took some pride in this sort of foresight, paying in advance for a far-off future benefit. To Jean’s mind it took a particularly dark outlook on life to greet the arrival of warmer weather by making preparations for the onset of winter.
After dinner had been cleared away Jean filled the coal scuttle and set the fire going with a base of newspaper spills. They settled down together to listen to Paul Temple on the Light Programme—her mother’s favorite. The glamourous Steve, with her creamy voice and her chauffeur and butler and her pre-dinner cocktails with Sir Graham Forbes of Scotland Yard, was like no journalist Jean had ever met, and seemed in fact to be a complete stranger to the typewriter. It was hard to imagine her cycling through the rain to Petts Wood to write a column about prolonging the life of your dusters with paraffin or stiffening a petticoat with sugar water.
She found her attention wandering, soothed by the mellifluous voice of Marjorie Westbury as Steve, imagining, just a few miles away, Howard alone in the house in Burdett Road preparing a simple supper for one. She supposed he could cook, although she had seen no evidence of it. Gretchen had always seemed to be the proper hausfrau, with her Sachertorte and her zopf bread. Perhaps he would stay up in town after closing the shop and eat out, at some cheap establishment in Soho, with nothing to hurry home for.
This picture of Howard, standing at the stove stirring a pan of scrambled egg, or trudging the streets in the cold and dark, was so persuasive that it made her eyes smart. It struck her as monstrously unfair that Gretchen should be enjoying her freedom and the pleasures of a new lover, while she and Howard, out of some misguided sense of decorum, remained aloof and lonely. Even though she has betrayed him, he won’t betray her, she thought sadly. He would never be—what was the word he had used?—“shabby.”
These melancholy reflections were interrupted by the strains of Coronation Scot heralding the end of Paul Temple. Her mother, drowsy from the heat of the coal fire, opened her eyes, blinked and said, “Very good.” If challenged, she would deny that she had been asleep but would be unable to furnish Jean with any details of the plot.
“Oh, I don’t bother about the story,” she would say. “I just like their voices.”
Jean went out to the kitchen to make her a mug of Allenburys and to smoke her last cigarette of the day, noticing on her way an envelope on the front doormat. It had not been there earlier. She picked it up, her heart clubbing in anticipation as she recognized the neat slanted handwriting and the stiff white envelope that she had recently delivered to Gretchen.
Patience, she thought, laying it aside while she put a match to the stove and measured a mugful of milk and water into a saucepan. Bad news could wait, and good news improved with keeping. She lit her cigarette from the stove and at last sat down at the kitchen table to open her letter: