"Don't go, Anne."
Colin called her back when she would have left them, again after dinner.
"Don't you want Jerrold to yourself?" she said.
"We don't want you to go, do we, Jerrold?"
"Rather not."
Jerrold found himself looking at them all the time. He had tried to persuade himself that what his mother had told him was not true. But he wasn't sure. Look as he would, he was not sure.
If only his mother hadn't told him, he might have gone on believing in what she had called their innocence. But she had shown him what to look for, and for the life of him he couldn't help seeing it at every turn: in Anne's face, in the way she looked at Colin, the way she spoke to him; in her kindness to him, her tender, quiet absorption. In the way Colin's face turned after her as she came and went; in his restlessness when she was not there; in the peace, the sudden smoothing of his vexed brows, when having gone she came back again.
Supposing it were true that they—
He couldn't bear it to be true; his mind struggled against the truth of it, but if it were true he didn't blame them. So far from being untrue or even improbable, it seemed to Jerrold the most likely thing in the world to have happened. It had happened to so many people since the war that he couldn't deny its likelihood. There was only one thing that could have made it impossible—if Anne had cared for him. And what reason had he to suppose she cared? After six years? After he had told her he was trying to get away from her? He had got away; and he saw a sort of dreadful justice in the event that made it useless for him to come back. If anybody was to blame it was himself. Himself and Queenie, that horrible girl Colin had married.
When he asked himself whether it was the sort of thing that Anne would be likely to do he thought: Why not, if she loved him, if she wanted to make him happy? How could he tell what Anne would or would not do? She had said long ago that he couldn't, that she might do anything.