Jean

Dear Margaret,

By the time you read this we shall both be back home, but never mind. I hope you are enjoying the Forest of Dean and that Jemimah is behaving herself at Lizzie’s. We are staying in a place called Lymington on the edge of the New Forest, which is in fact very old. We could see wild ponies from the train on our way down.

Our hotel has a resident cat, who has her own favorite armchair in the lounge. If you leave your bedroom door open she comes slinking in and goes to sleep on your pillow.

There are at least half a dozen tea shops within walking distance of our hotel and we try a different one each day. None can quite compete with Simpson’s—or homemade spitzbuben.

Your friend,

Jean

Toward the end of the week the weather changed and a series of fronts swept in from the west bringing wintry rain, which kept Jean and her mother indoors. They rose as late as permissible and after a cooked breakfast moved into the lounge, where they played rummy and read the selection of out-of-date magazines. There were a number of other residents, similarly marooned by the bad weather, but the room was large and the arrangement of furniture—remote islands of wing-backed armchairs around low coffee tables, separated by vast expanses of carpet—did not encourage them to mingle. By silent consensus, everyone kept to the seats they had originally claimed, exchanging in passing no more than a nod or smile of fellow feeling at the perversity of the English climate.

Among the mostly elderly clientele were a mother and daughter about ten years older than the Swinneys. The old lady was plump and moon-faced, hard of hearing and lost in confusion. The daughter was thin and round-shouldered with skin ravaged by eczema. The corners of her mouth sagged, and her drooping cardigan, raw, ringless fingers and darned stockings spoke eloquently to Jean of self-denial. In the quiet of the lounge, above the swishing of magazine pages and the slap of playing cards, Jean could hear her patiently answering the same bewildered questions over and over.

“We’re just waiting for the rain to pass . . .” “No, we’ve had lunch. We’re just waiting until it’s stopped raining . . .” “When it clears up. Then we’ll go out,” the daughter said, raking the flaming skin of her arms with chewed nails.

Jean’s mother, who enjoyed trying to listen in on the conversations of other guests and felt entitled to comment on anything overhead, said, “She needs to stop scratching. It’ll get infected.”

The woman glanced up and blushed.

“Mother!” Jean hissed in reproach, shrinking behind the wings of her armchair.

The room was so very hushed that most people spoke only in whispers, leaving the disinhibited few, of whom her mother was one, brutally exposed.

“If this weather’s in for the week we might as well go home tomorrow,” one of the other guests was saying to her husband in a low voice.