“The car is such an incredible thing, don’t you think?” he was saying. “Not just the engineering. I mean the freedom it represents.”

“Privacy too.”

She was thinking that the whole history of human courtship might have been very different without the opportunities it provided for a man and woman to be alone in a confined space. But this was not perhaps an appropriate matter to discuss in just such a setting.

“You work somewhere around here, don’t you?” he asked as they approached the Orpington War Memorial.

“Not far,” Jean replied. “Petts Wood. It’s very decent of you to run me home when you could be relaxing in the garden.”

“I never relax in the garden,” said Howard. “All I see when I look around are jobs that need doing. Anyway, it’s a pleasure. I hope you’ll come again. It’s so nice for Gretchen to have a friend.”

Jean was surprised and a little embarrassed by this compliment. She had considered herself to be transparently the lonely one among them.

“Gretchen doesn’t strike me as someone who’d be short of friends,” she said.

“Neither of us is what you’d call sociable,” he replied. “You’re the first person, apart from Aunt Edie, who’s been round to tea in ages.”

“We don’t entertain much ourselves. In fact, never. So today has been a lovely treat.”

“For us all.”

This conversation, which Jean imagined as a stately dance, proceeding forward and backward, toward and then away from real frankness, brought them to her turning. Just as she pointed out the house as the one with the red door, it opened and Mrs. Melsom appeared, saying her goodbyes to Mrs. Swinney on the threshold. They both peered at the Wolseley with undisguised curiosity as Howard sprang out to help Jean with her bags.

Damn, thought Jean with a sense of annoyance that she couldn’t quite account for.

“Well, goodbye then . . . Howard,” she said, testing out the sound of his name for the first time.

“Goodbye . . . Jean.”

This week in the garden:

Harvest radishes and beets. Sow lettuce seed. Spray cabbage with salt water to keep caterpillars down. Plant out winter greens, kale, cabbages and broccoli. Hill soil around main crop potatoes. Feed berries with liquid manure. Check fruit trees for woolly aphids; paint any patches with derris.

9

Jean had always assumed Chelsea to be a fashionable district of expensive boutiques and cafés and was therefore surprised to discover among its elegant squares pockets of shabbiness and neglect not much better than slums.

Once, when she was a teenager, she had been invited to lunch by her elderly godmother who lived in a mansion flat in Cadogan Square. Given the courtesy title “Aunt Rosa,” though she was no relative but the descendant of a dynasty of Belgian industrialists, she had taken the young Jean by taxi to lunch at the Anglo-Belgian Club in Knightsbridge. They had vichyssoise and rabbit fricassée—terrible, alien food that Jean had forced down with watering eyes and a bulging throat, all the while conscious that this was a huge treat, and of the envy of Dorrie, who had not been included. Not long after this Rosa had died of an aggressive type of cancer and that was the end of fine dining and rides in taxis.