‘Yes,’ Chloe said at last. ‘I saw him at Follies.’

‘He was with her, I suppose?’

‘Yes.’

Beatrice ducked her head and the wings of her hair fell forward across her cheek. She was looking down at her hands, the fingers splayed out flat against the dark stuff of her raincoat. They were faintly roughened with gardening, and the only ring was her thin gold wedding band.

‘Strange, isn’t it?’ she said, ‘How fifteen years, three children, all those days and hours and minutes together, awake and asleep, seem to count for nothing now?’ Her voice was muffled and she kept her head bent to hide the tears behind her veil of hair. ‘Stephen’s always been in love with being young. Being young himself, and proving it with endless girls.’

Chloe listened, wishing that she didn’t have to hear. She didn’t care for the image of herself glimpsed through Beatrice’s eyes. Beatrice sensed her stillness and said, ‘I’m sorry. You were one, weren’t you?’ She was sad rather than bitter. ‘He probably hurt you, too.’

‘I deserved it,’ Chloe said grimly.

Beatrice’s attention had already shifted to the thought that was preoccupying her. ‘Pansy Warren is different. I wasn’t afraid of any of the others, but I’m afraid of Pansy. I can cope with her being so beautiful, and likeable, and having all the things she does. It’s her carelessness that frightens me. It makes her invulnerable. Stephen is vulnerable, and God knows, so am I.’ She spread her fingers further apart in her lap. ‘What can either of us do? And how can I compete?’ Beatrice was crying openly now. ‘I don’t want to have to compete for my husband. Do you know, they say that children keep you young? They don’t. They make you old, and then you find that your husband doesn’t want you any more. He’s gone to live with a lovely child who trails him around like an emasculated shadow.’

The bitterness was clear now. Helen and Chloe sat numbly, at a loss for anything to say or do.

So that’s marriage, Helen thought. The exquisite freshness of the morning seemed to turn dark and chilly around her. Once, briefly, she had envied Beatrice at home in her family-warm rectory kitchen. Helen was going to have just that sort of life herself now, in the pleasant security of Mere. And Darcy would never be like Stephen Spurring. She knew without a flicker of doubt that once his promise was made, Darcy would be honest and faithful to her until the day he died.

But still there was no glow in the sunlight, and the breeze felt cold at her back.

What is the matter? Helen asked herself. Is it really true that I’ve promised to marry the wrong man?

Unseeingly she watched the ragged flutter of pink and white blossom as it drifted down around her.