“Is everything all right?” Jean asked as she slipped into the seat beside him, convinced now that it wasn’t.

“Gretchen has run away.”

She stared at him in astonishment, momentarily lost for words. Of all the many varieties of bad news that were possible, this one had not occurred to her.

“What do you mean? How? Where?”

“I mean she’s left home. She doesn’t want to be married to me anymore.”

There was a roaring, whooshing noise in Jean’s ears and the rushing sensation that comes just before a faint. But she didn’t faint, of course.

“No. Surely not. What about Margaret?”

“Margaret is away on a school trip, so she doesn’t know yet. Which is no doubt why Gretchen chose this week to leave.”

“I can’t believe it, Howard. She must be having some kind of breakdown.”

“Maybe. Though she seems quite collected.”

“But you’ve just been on vacation. Did something happen while you were away?”

“Oh no, it’s been going on much longer than that.”

Jean was aware of her mother, having dismissed the coalman, peering at them through the front window, in agonies of curiosity.

“Shall we drive?” Howard asked.

“Yes, do.”

It was easier to talk while moving, with eyes on the road ahead.

“Do you know where she’s gone?”

“Chelsea, I believe.”

A confused sense of dread, a foggy state of both seeing and not quite seeing, which had assailed Jean from the start of their conversation, now gave way to awful clarity.

“Oh, God,” she said, sick with guilt as if she had deliberately conspired in the betrayal. “Martha.”

“I think I always knew,” said Howard. “Not about Martha herself, but that her aversion wasn’t just to me but to all men. It ought to make it easier. But it doesn’t.”

They were driving through the common now, toward the countryside, with no declared aim other than to keep moving.

“I didn’t know they had even made contact. Gretchen never said.”

“That little painting of the tangerines that you brought back—it had Martha’s address on. I knew Gretchen had got in contact and been to visit her—once—but I thought nothing of it. A reunion of old friends, that sort of thing. But they’ve been meeting in secret since.”

“This is all my fault,” said Jean. “It was me who brought them back together. I never imagined.”

She had a sudden memory of the three of them, Howard, Gretchen and Margaret in the garden; badminton and afternoon tea, dressmaking and piano practice; the ordinary miracles of family life that she had blundered into and destroyed. It had all been an illusion; the real Gretchen was not the happy housewife with the sunny smile but the other one with the stricken expression, guarding her painful secret.

“No one is to blame,” Howard said. His hands on the steering wheel clenched and released. “Except perhaps me for going ahead with the marriage when I knew that she didn’t love me the way I loved her. Suspected it anyway.”