Jehane stretched out her hand and drew Nan to her. She could be magnanimous when for once she found her lot coveted. When the baby had been fed and was being laid in its cot, Nan slipped to the window and leant out, gazing across the roofs of Holloway to Hampstead where the sun hung red.
There was no warning. She felt lips on her cheeks, lips violently kissing her ears and neck. She turned with a throaty laugh. “You haven’t done that for ages.”
“Not kissed you? Of course I have.”
Nan shook her head. “Not like that, as though you wanted to. You haven’t done it since we were girls.”
Jehane, half-ashamed of her impulsiveness, looked away. “We’ve been too busy to make a fuss. But the feeling’s been there.”
“I don’t call that making a fuss—and it isn’t because we’ve been busy. We’ve been drifting apart—playing a game of hide and seek with one another.” Then, before Jehane could become casual, “I do so want to be friends.”
“And aren’t we friends?”
“Not in the old sense. We’re hard and suspicious, and doubt one another.”
“Then let’s be friends in the old sense, you dear little Nan.”
Like Peter, when Nan had made up her mind to be tender, no one could resist her. She treated Jehane with sweet envy, because of the baby on her breast. She made believe that Jehane was fragile, and kept her in bed for breakfast. After Barrington had been seen off to business, she went up to help her dress. It was in this hour that Jehane was most confessional. She recalled the dreamy Oxford days, with their desperate dreams of love, when life was unexperienced. She even spoke of the great disillusion that had followed; she spoke in general terms to include all wives and husbands. She spoke of Waffles as he had been, only that she might praise him as he had become. Her fierce loyalty to him, her wilful consistency in shutting her eyes to his faults, was a form of self-respect which never faltered. Nan found a difficulty in pretending that he was all that was claimed for him; they both knew that he was not. Still, she was convinced that he was mending.