Howard was fiddling with a packet of Lucky Strikes.
“She wanted to go swimming, but she can’t because of keeping the dressing dry. So we’re going to drive down to Aunt Edie’s and have a bonfire in the garden. You could come if you like,” he added, suddenly hopeful.
“I can’t leave Mother two days in a row,” said Jean, pierced with regret. “It sounds fun, though.”
Always her mother, the obstacle to any such spontaneous act.
“She was quite taken with you—Edie.”
He offered her the last of the olives and she took it to please him, wondering if like tea without sugar it was a taste that came with practice.
“I can’t imagine why. All I did was guzzle her apple brandy and almost pass out on her lawn!”
They laughed at the memory—that day seemed long ago now, chased into the past by the dramas of recent weeks.
“That wouldn’t necessarily have counted against you.”
The waiter arrived with the soup and they ate for a while in silence.
“Have you told her about . . . Gretchen?” Jean said presently.
“Yes. I couldn’t keep anything from her; she’s far too sharp.”
“Was she very shocked?”
“No—nothing rattles Aunt Edie.” He laid down his spoon and looked at her. “In fact, she said: ‘Gretchen was never going to make a Tilbury. That other girl would have been much more suitable.’’
“Girl.” Jean shook her head. “I’ll be forty next month.”
“Then we must do something to mark the occasion. There are few enough reasons to celebrate, so we must seize them where we can.”
“We’ve never made much of birthdays,” said Jean. “My uncle in Harrogate sends me a money order and I get a card from Dorrie, but that’s about it. Perhaps I’ll exert myself and bake a cake.”
She remembered as she said this that baking was another area, along with not being forty, in which Gretchen had the advantage.
They finished the soup and the waiter brought them grilled sardines, crisp and crusted with salt and quite unlike the limp and soggy tinned fish that Jean was used to. She had expected potatoes and vegetables as a matter of course, but none were forthcoming and Howard didn’t seem troubled by this omission. Instead, she ate the sardines unadorned by anything but a squeeze of lemon and was surprised to find them not only delicious, but also quite sufficient. She wondered how her mother would react if she took to serving an unaccompanied slab of fish or a pork chop for dinner.
Howard tried to persuade her to have dessert, but she was comfortably full and conscious of passing time. Instead they had coffee, dark and silty in dollhouse-sized cups, with a hard almond cookie, which seemed likely to fetch out a tooth and had to be abandoned for a cigarette instead. Everything about the meal was foreign and unsettling, suggesting that there were, just possibly, different ways of doing things. It was with some surprise that when they emerged once more it was to the fog of a London street rather than a sunny Italian piazza.
“I suppose I must be getting back,” said Jean, already squaring up to the emptiness that would take hold of her when they had said goodbye.
“Must you so soon?” said Howard as they loitered under the restaurant’s awning. “I could swear you only just arrived. Time does strange things when we’re together.”
“And when we’re apart,” Jean agreed, daring to look him in the eye as she said this.
“Let’s walk for a bit,” he said, taking her hand. “With a bit of luck we’ll get lost in the fog.”
Just a few minutes more, Jean promised herself, and then I’ll go home. She could feel the pressure of his hand, gently squeezing hers as they walked through the milky grayness. Other pedestrians, appearing as distant smudges, loomed into focus briefly as they passed before being swallowed up again.
“Where are we going?” she asked at last.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just know that if I stop walking, you’ll leave.”
“But you know where to find me again.”
They had turned into a narrow street, empty of cars, and walked the length of it before realizing it was a dead end, leading nowhere but to the back stairs of restaurant kitchens and a high brick wall at the rear of a theatre. There were empty wooden crates and steel dustbins on the pavement and in the gutter carrot tops and bruised cabbage leaves and other detritus of a fruit and vegetable market. As if given courage by their solitude, he drew her toward him and they stood pressed together for a moment.