“Goodness, how modern. Where’s his wife? Doesn’t she have something to say about this?”

“She’s in no position to, since she has left him,” said Jean in a crisp voice.

“Oh.” Her mother drew out the lone syllable—rich with inference—almost to the snapping point. “Well, be careful. That’s all I’ll say.”

Jean flopped the oatmeal into two bowls and set them down on the kitchen table with some force.

“Quite unnecessary. I’m not in any danger.”

She could feel her cheeks burning. No one else had the power to rile her in quite the same way. When Roy Drake had cautioned her in almost identical terms it had seemed only old-fashioned and endearing. From her mother it was poison.

“He’s still a married man, remember.”

“We are just having lunch. I don’t see why I should have to forfeit his friendship just because his wife has run off.”

“It’s none of my business,” was the wounded rejoinder, and they proceeded to eat their oatmeal in silence.

Before she left for the train, Jean went to Harrington’s to buy a small piece of beef for Sunday, and picked up potatoes and vegetables from the farm shop opposite the church. She couldn’t do any dirty housework in her finery, so she contented herself with ironing and folding the laundered sheets and towels, putting some elderly tea towels to soak in borax, intending to deal with them on her return. Then she made her mother a ham sandwich for lunch, which she left on the side, covered with a linen napkin.

The wintry atmosphere of breakfast had not quite had time to thaw when Jean set off. Their disagreements and subsequent reconciliations always followed a pattern: sharp words; withdrawal for sulking and licking of wounds; silence; frosty civility; concessions on both sides; resumption of friendly relations. On this occasion they had reached the stage of frosty civility and they parted with a cool, “Goodbye then, Mother.”

“Oh. Are you off? Goodbye.”

And then Jean was hurrying down the hill to the station in her smart shoes that pinched, a brisk wind whipping the fallen leaves around her ankles and tugging at the flaps of her drab raincoat, which was shielding the claret-colored dress from the threat of showers.

Howard was in his workshop when she arrived. Through the shop window she could see him in profile framed in the doorway. He was quite absorbed, applying solder to the sawn edges of a silver ring with pointed tweezers, biting his bottom lip with concentration.

It was less than five months since she had first set eyes on him here and yet she found it impossible to recapture the critical detachment of that meeting, when he was just an unremarkable, oldish man who meant nothing. Now, there was no one to compare to him; when he looked up from his work and broke into a smile of welcome it filled her with joy and wonder.

She had worried about this moment: the navigation of hellos and goodbyes was fraught with hazards. But with Howard there was nothing but warmth and kindness and the certainty of some feeling not yet declared, but even so accepted and returned.