“I meant to say you’re looking well lately. More . . . sprightly.”
“Sprightly?” Jean’s face fell.
“No, that’s not the word. Relaxed. Healthy. Blooming.”
He was overdoing it now, Jean thought, to compensate for sprightly, the preserve of aging spinsters, immemorially unloved and yet still, somehow, mobile.
“You’ve done your hair differently.”
“Oh well, I just used a hair dryer for once.”
“Anyway, it suits you whatever it is.”
“Perhaps I’m more relaxed now that Mother’s a little better.”
“That’s very good news,” said Roy Drake, who had made regular and sincere inquiries about her health, and even sent her a basket of exotic and out-of-season fruit from Harrods—a luxury she had been too unwell to appreciate.
The previous week had seen some improvement. Penicillin prescribed for a urine infection seemed to have cleared a clouded mind as well. For the first time, Jean had been recognized and welcomed. Conversation had proceeded along rational and predictable lines. The delusions of recent weeks were forgotten.
Although greatly relieved by these developments, Jean couldn’t help wishing that her mother’s memory loss might have been more discriminating. Those dutiful bedside vigils, on top of a day’s work, eating into her precious time with Howard, had all been wiped away along with the pickpockets, Queen Mary and the badgers. And soon, perhaps in a matter of days, she would be home and Jean’s brief taste of freedom would be over, every absence a matter of negotiation and forward planning.
To complicate matters further, Margaret, in a reversal of the previous arrangements, was now living with Howard at Burdett Road and spending weekends with her mother in Luna Street. This solution was accepted by all parties as the most practical and conducive to Margaret’s happiness. She could now walk to and from school with Lizzie, as she had been accustomed to before her removal to Chelsea, and remain at Lizzie’s until Howard got home from Bedford Street.
Once, in the guise of unofficial aunt, Jean had joined father and daughter for dinner, but the awkwardness of taking Gretchen’s place at the table was too much and she never repeated it. She had been unable to exchange so much as a glance with Howard that might betray them, and then withdrawn in lonely frustration to her empty house.
While this situation lasted, Saturday night to Sunday morning was the only opportunity she and Howard had to be together. From the moment they said hello—clinging to each other in the hallway as soon as the front door was closed—time, which had dawdled all week, now hustled them along toward goodbye again. They didn’t go out; the pleasure of small acts of domestic intimacy—sharing a bath, preparing a meal side by side at the stove, putting clean sheets on the bed, smoking the day’s last cigarette in the garden while they looked at the night sky—these were all still delightful.
“Stop, don’t move,” Howard said once as they half sat, half lay on the couch, Jean’s head in his lap. “Listen.”
The record had finished and there was nothing to hear apart from the rasp of the needle on vinyl.
“What?” said Jean.
“It’s happiness. Can’t you hear it?”
She put her hand up blindly and found his. “Yes,” she said, in a whisper, because happiness was shy and easily scared off.
He no longer mentioned Gretchen, either wistfully, which would have been awful, or bitterly, which would have been worse. Jean knew that didn’t necessarily mean she was never in his thoughts. A decade of marriage was not easily effaced. But he was not the kind of man who took any pleasure in stoking female insecurity.
The only regrets he expressed were that he hadn’t met Jean earlier and been able to love her for longer. At moments like these, and in the afterglow of lovemaking, when Jean felt Gretchen thoroughly vanquished, she thought perhaps it didn’t matter even if he did still love his wife a little. In her triumph she could afford to be generous.
32
The Grange, home of Kitty Benteen since the closure of St. Cecilia’s in 1947, was a large and rather grand detached house in an acre of wooded garden set well back from the road leading between Keston and Locksbottom. Jean had cycled past the end of the driveway and its high walls on her journey to and from work for nearly a decade without ever giving it a glance.
Brenda van Lingen could hardly have known, when she included the address in her long-delayed reply from South Africa, just how very close to Jean’s “part of the world” it was. Now, as Jean wheeled her bicycle up the gravel drive between the dripping laurels, she felt a tremor of fear and anticipation at the thought of coming face-to-face with the final member of the foursome.