Howard led her through the foggy streets to the Strand, where the traffic was crawling along, inch by inch, the streetlamps creating cones of milky light, and they said a hasty goodbye.

The train was even slower than usual, stopping at stations for so long it almost seemed it must have broken down before lurching off again at a stately pace, never quite gathering speed. But even her guilty anxiety couldn’t quite take the shine off the day. The memory of it was all still there to be taken out of its box and inspected from every angle later.

Out in the suburbs the fog had dissolved, leaving just a gauzy halo around the street lamps as Jean toiled up the hill from the station, her smart shoes biting with every step.

She could tell as soon as she came in sight of the house that something was not right. There were no lights on, even though dusk had fallen, and the front room curtains were still open. She fumbled and jabbed her key at the lock with clumsy hands.

“Mother, where are you?” she called into the cold and unlit hallway, but only the hollow scraping tick of the grandmother clock came back in reply.

A chilly draft licked at her ankles and she traced it to the open back door. Peering out into the twilit garden she saw a row of white tea towels swinging stiffly on the washing line and her mother, a pale shape, stretched out on the grass below as though asleep.

27

The arrival of an ambulance in the Knoll on a Saturday evening brought the neighbors to their windows. Jean was conscious of this silent audience gathering to watch the unfolding drama as her mother was carried up the driveway on a stretcher. Their curiosity would have to go unsatisfied for a while longer.

Jean had crouched beside her on the lawn awaiting the ambulance, having fetched her a blanket, a pillow for her head and a hot-water bottle. The ground was damp and her hands icy.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she croaked, looking up at Jean with watery eyes. “It’s terribly cold out here.”

She had been trying to hang out to dry the tea towels—those damned tea towels!—that Jean had left to soak rather than risk splashing her new dress. Somehow in reaching up for the line to hang up the last one she had lost her balance and toppled forward. There was a raised lump on her forehead, puffy with fluid, and pain everywhere that made movement impossible.

Tears leapt to Jean’s eyes as she imagined the frightened cries for help going unanswered while she was dawdling in the fog with Howard. But, at the same time, the clamorous inner voice of self-justification kept up its pleading: why was her mother out in the garden on her own, troubling herself with laundry—a chore she would never bother to attempt while Jean was on hand? And now she probably had a broken hip and double pneumonia, either of which would be enough to carry her off, and it would be all Jean’s fault.