Chloe sits with Marjorie and Grace at the bus shelter outside the hospital. It is raining. There are no taxis. No bus appears. Chloe’s blue suède shoes are wet, and darker blue around the sole. Her feet are cold. She shivers. They are silent for a time. Grace is feeling the top of her head.
‘I’m sure I’m pregnant again,’ says Grace presently. ‘I have that funny feeling. And the top of my head is tender when I press. Remember when we saw the baby moving in mother’s tummy? Wasn’t it dreadful? I wish it had been a girl. A girl wouldn’t have killed her. I’m better with girls, anyway. I wasn’t really interested in Piers, actually, only Petra.’
‘It will be a boy,’ says Chloe, ‘if it’s anything. You’re wanting too hard.’
But she doesn’t doubt that Grace is pregnant. Marjorie holds her mother’s handbag in her lap.
‘What shall I do with it?’ she asks. ‘I can’t bear to go through it.’
‘Leave it in the waste bin,’ says Chloe.
‘Just like that?’
‘Yes. Someone who needs it will find it.’ Marjorie puts the handbag in the waste bin. Later, remarkably, someone honest finds it, takes it to the police station, and Marjorie is traced and asked to collect it, and does, and grieves afresh, and blames Chloe, but at the time the gesture holds good.
‘That’s that, really,’ says Marjorie. ‘I wish a bus would come. I’m cold. What a dreadful country this is. There’s nothing to keep me here, now, is there.’
‘If you only believed in the transmigration of souls,’ says Grace, ‘as I try very hard to do, you wouldn’t feel so dismal. Helen was at her best in a beautiful body. If I’m pregnant, I daresay her soul will enter the baby. That’s what it was all about.’
‘God help us all,’ says Chloe.
‘She didn’t say anything before she died?’ asks Marjorie. ‘I should never have listened to you, Chloe. I should never have left her.’
‘She stayed asleep,’ says Chloe. Is she right to lie, or wrong? She will never know.
‘If you want the Frognal house,’ says Marjorie, ‘you can have it.’
‘What for?’ asks Chloe, surprised.
‘To live in without Oliver,’ says Marjorie. ‘With the children but without Oliver. You can let off the top and live off the proceeds.’
‘She’ll never do it,’ says Grace. ‘Give it to Patrick instead.’
‘Certainly not,’ says Marjorie.
A bus arrives. They board it, and sit in a row on the seat next to the door. Marjorie and Grace get off at Earls Court. Chloe goes through to Piccadilly Circus and changes on to a 13 for Liverpool Street. She lies awake most of the night. Neither Oliver nor Françoise disturbs her. Everyone, that night, sleeps in his own bed.
Who’d have thought it?