“It’s you, too,” she said.

A feeling of peace swept over her as if she had reached the end of a long journey and could now rest.

“I sometimes wondered . . .” she said, drawing him to her so that he lay back with his head in her lap. He looked at this angle and without his glasses quite different, a stranger. “Whether Gretchen was trying to engineer things to throw us together. Did you ever think that?”

“It’s possible. Something like it happened once before with Margaret’s first piano teacher. Gretchen always made me take her home and seemed to find ingenious ways of leaving me alone with her. It was as if I was being given permission to stray. All unspoken, of course. But I wasn’t the least bit attracted to the piano teacher. Or she to me, I might add.”

Jean looked skeptical. The idea that someone could be indifferent to Howard struck her as highly improbable. The woman must have been some kind of imbecile.

“I didn’t think I’d made much of a first impression on you myself,” she said.

“You were rather businesslike and brisk with your notebook,” he smiled. “And then you cut yourself on my coping saw.”

“Yes. I’d forgotten that. You complimented me on my hands.”

“Did I?” He picked one up and turned it over with an appraising glance. “They are rather pretty. I never imagined you’d be putting them to such good use.”

Jean burst out laughing.

“I don’t think I began to notice you properly until that day you came to tea and we played badminton.”

“Now you are making fun of me.”

“Not at all. You were such a good sport.”

“That was a lovely afternoon. And I went home envying your perfect marriage.”

“Ha!”

There was a silence as they separately reflected on the unravelling of that illusion.

“And then I bumped into you at Charing Cross,” Jean went on, “and you insisted on seeing me home. You were so funny; I didn’t want the journey to end, even though we hardly spoke. That was when it started for me.”

“I remember. But it was at Aunt Edie’s that I fell in love with you. I think it was when I saw you sitting in the apple tree. But I couldn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t need to. I felt it, too.”

“The next day was so gray and empty. I was like a child on Boxing Day—all the magic over.”

For Jean it was pure pleasure to reminisce about the painful separation from the safe haven of rapturous togetherness. The sense of security and confidence was quite new to her. All of her dealings with Frank had been tinged with fear—fully justified, as it turned out—that she bored him; that she would do something to incur his anger; that he would leave her for someone younger or prettier.

Howard let out a sigh and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands.

“You look sad,” she said. “Or worried.”