“It’s happiness. Can’t you hear it?”

She put her hand up blindly and found his. “Yes,” she said, in a whisper, because happiness was shy and easily scared off.

He no longer mentioned Gretchen, either wistfully, which would have been awful, or bitterly, which would have been worse. Jean knew that didn’t necessarily mean she was never in his thoughts. A decade of marriage was not easily effaced. But he was not the kind of man who took any pleasure in stoking female insecurity.

The only regrets he expressed were that he hadn’t met Jean earlier and been able to love her for longer. At moments like these, and in the afterglow of lovemaking, when Jean felt Gretchen thoroughly vanquished, she thought perhaps it didn’t matter even if he did still love his wife a little. In her triumph she could afford to be generous.

32

The Grange, home of Kitty Benteen since the closure of St. Cecilia’s in 1947, was a large and rather grand detached house in an acre of wooded garden set well back from the road leading between Keston and Locksbottom. Jean had cycled past the end of the driveway and its high walls on her journey to and from work for nearly a decade without ever giving it a glance.

Brenda van Lingen could hardly have known, when she included the address in her long-delayed reply from South Africa, just how very close to Jean’s “part of the world” it was. Now, as Jean wheeled her bicycle up the gravel drive between the dripping laurels, she felt a tremor of fear and anticipation at the thought of coming face-to-face with the final member of the foursome.

She arrived punctually, as instructed by Kitty’s sister and chief carer, Elsie, with whom the interview had been arranged over the telephone. Jean had been given to understand that Kitty looked forward to the stimulus of new visitors and would be disappointed if kept waiting.

“Is she able to talk comfortably?” Jean asked, embarrassed by her own ignorance.

She had seen pictures of iron lungs in the newspapers and imagined the confinement a living death.

“Talk? Lord, yes, I should say so,” Elsie laughed.

“May I bring a gift? Flowers or something?”

“Perhaps not flowers. Pollen makes her nose run, which is no fun when you can’t wipe it.”

In the end Jean settled on a jar of hand cream, liberated from her drawer of treasures. Elsie had confirmed that this would be quite suitable. Though paralyzed below the chest, Kitty took pride in her hands, and in her brief respites from the iron lung had been known to file and polish her nails a bold shade of red.

At the stroke of four, Jean rang the doorbell and was greeted by Elsie. She was a plump woman of about her own age with blond fluffy hair, pink fluffy slippers and at—and very nearly under—her heels, a white fluffy poodle, which barked excitedly and ran around them in tight circles. Apart from this general impression of fluff, Jean’s attention was caught by a large wooden crucifix on the opposite wall, bearing a painted plaster Christ with rouged cheeks and livid red wounds. There were other paintings on the walls depicting Jesus in better days, surrounded by chubby blue-eyed children, or dazzling a cowering Peter, James and John with the whiteness of his robes.