Page "Thinks ..." Paragraph 10

Meanwhile, Helen tries to focus on her work.

The students she has to teach are a small, friendly and ambitious group who meet on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

Her class is to a large extent about their work in progress, mainly novels which they started during the preceding term.

When Sandra Pickering, one of the students, belatedly submits some chapters from the novel she is writing, Helen immediately recognizes one of the male characters as having been modelled on her late husband Martin.

As Helen herself has based a character in her novel The Eye of the Storm on Martin, she is about to accuse Sandra Pickering of plagiarism when, to her dismay, she finds out that the girl used to work for the BBC some years ago, that she knew Martin, and that she actually had an affair with him.

( Sandra knows, and writes about, intimate details such as what he preferred doing immediately after sex.

) Gradually it dawns upon Helen that her husband must have had a whole succession of young lovers, with everyone except herself knowing everything, or at least suspecting a lot, about it, while she herself, only mildly promiscuous during her student days, was never unfaithful to him.

At this point Helen decides to never again shed a tear for him and get on with her own life instead.

In this new light, not even Messenger's advances seem so monstrous any more.