“I’m sure she can learn. It’s just a secretarial job, Moira.”
“But—”
“I really don’t have any more time to discuss this. Please move your things out of the drawers this afternoon, and we’ll start afresh with the new setup tomorrow.”
He reached into his cigar box, signaling that the conversation was over. Moira stood up, putting out a hand to steady herself on the edge of his desk. Bile rose in her throat, blood thumped in her ears. The office felt as if it was collapsing on her, brick by brick.
He put the cigar into his mouth, and she heard the sharp snip of the clippers as they sheared off the end.
She walked slowly toward the door and opened it, hearing the sudden hush in the outer office that told her others had known this was taking place before she had been told.
She saw Marie Driscoll’s legs, stretched against her desk. Long, spindly legs in ridiculous colored tights. Who on earth would wear royal blue tights to an office and expect to be taken seriously?
She snatched her handbag from her desk and made her way unsteadily through the office to the ladies’, feeling the stares of the curious and the smirks of the less than sympathetic burning into the back of her blue cardigan.
“Moira! They’re playing your song! ‘Can’t Get Used to Losing You’ . . .”
“Oh, don’t be mean, Sandra.” There was another noisy burst of laughter, and then the cloakroom door was closing behind her.
Jennifer stood in the middle of the bleak little play park, watching the frozen nannies chatting over their Silver Cross prams, hearing the cries of small children who collided and tumbled, like skittles, to the ground.
Mrs. Cordoza had offered to bring Esmé, but Jennifer had told her she needed the air. For forty-eight hours she had not known what to do with herself, her body still sensitized by his touch, her mind reeling with what she had done. She was almost felled by the enormity of what she had lost. She couldn’t anesthetize her way through this with Valium: it had to be endured. Her daughter would be a reminder that she had done the right thing. There had been so much she had wanted to say to him. Even as she told herself she had not set out to seduce him, she knew she was lying. She had wanted one small piece of him, one beautiful, precious memory to carry with her. How could she have known she would be opening Pandora’s box? Worse, how could she have imagined he would be so destroyed by it?
That night at the embassy he had looked so pulled together. He couldn’t have suffered as she had; he couldn’t have felt what she had. He was stronger, she had believed. But now she couldn’t stop thinking about him, his vulnerability, his joyful plans for them. And the way he had looked at her when she had walked across the hotel lobby toward her child.
She heard his voice, anguished and confused, echoing down the corridor behind her: Don’t do this, Jennifer! I’m not going to wait another four years for you!
Forgive me, she told him silently, a thousand times a day. But Laurence would never have let me take her. And you, of all people, couldn’t ask me to leave her. You, more than anyone, should understand.
Periodically she wiped the corners of her eyes, blaming the high wind or yet another piece of grit that had mysteriously found its way into one. She felt emotionally raw, acutely aware of the least change in temperature, buffeted by her shifting emotions.
Laurence is not a bad man, she told herself, repeatedly. He’s a good father, in his way. If he found it hard to be nice to Jennifer, who could blame him? How many men could forgive a wife for falling in love with someone else? Sometimes she had wondered whether, if she hadn’t got pregnant so quickly, he would have tired of her, chosen to cut her loose. But she didn’t believe it: Laurence might not love her anymore, but he wouldn’t contemplate the prospect of her existing somewhere else without him.
And she is my consolation. She pushed her daughter on the swing, watching her legs fly up, the bouncing curls flying in the breeze. This is so much more than many women have. As Anthony had once told her, there was comfort to be had in knowing you had done the right thing.
“Mama!”
Dorothy Moncrieff had lost her hat, and Jennifer was briefly distracted by the search, the two little girls walking with her around the swings, the spinning roundabout, peering under the benches until it was located on the head of some other child.
“It’s wrong to steal,” said Dorothy, solemnly, as they walked back across the play park.
“Yes,” said Jennifer, “but I don’t think the little boy was stealing. He probably didn’t know the hat was yours.”
“If you don’t know what’s right and wrong, you’re probably stupid,” Dorothy announced.
“Stupid,” echoed Esmé, delightedly.
“Well, that’s possible,” Jennifer said. She retied her daughter’s scarf and sent them off again, this time to the sandpit, with instructions that they were absolutely not to throw sand at each other.
Dearest Boot, she wrote, in another of the thousand imaginary letters she had composed over the past two days, Please don’t be angry with me. You must know that if there was any way on earth I could go with you, I would do so . . .
She would send no letter. What was there to say, other than what she had already said? He’ll forgive me in time, she told herself. He’ll have a good life.
She tried to shut her mind to the obvious question: How would she live? How could she carry on, knowing what she now knew? Her eyes had reddened again. She pulled her handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed them again, turning away so that she wouldn’t attract attention. Perhaps she would pay a quick visit to her doctor, after all. Just a little help to get her through the next couple of days.
Her attention was drawn to the tweed-coated figure walking across the grass toward the play park. The woman’s feet tramped determinedly forward with a kind of mechanical regularity, despite the muddiness of the grass. She realized, with surprise, that it was her husband’s secretary.
Moira Parker walked right up to her and stood so close that Jennifer had to take a step backward. “Miss Parker?”
Her lips were tightly compressed, her eyes bright with purpose. “Your housekeeper told me where you were. May I have a quick word?”
“Um . . . yes. Of course.” She turned briefly. “Darlings? Dottie? Esmé? I’ll just be over here.”
The children looked up, then resumed digging.
They walked a few paces, Jennifer positioning herself so that she could see the little girls. She had promised the Moncrieffs’ nanny she would have Dorothy home by four, and it was nearly a quarter to. She pasted on a smile. “What is it, Miss Parker?”