Enduring Love: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

A grief-stricken Jean Logan meets Joe at the door. Following her inside, Joe reflects upon the house’s décor, which he suspects has not changed since the “fifties or sixties.” In the house’s “austerity,” Joe sees not only “the soul of English pragmatism” but “a perfect setting for sorrow.” He follows Jean to a back room, and when she retreats to the kitchen to make tea, he looks around at the books and furnishings, speculating that “Jean or John Logan had surely inherited the house unchanged from parents” and that “the sense of sorrow in the place” perhaps “pre-dated John Logan’s death.”

Returning to the room, Jean confesses that she doesn’t know why Joe has come and that she would prefer not to hear condolences from a stranger. Joe sees in Jean’s appearance “the terms of her bereavement”—her clothes are dirty and her hair “greasy”—and he is unsure of how he should behave in her presence. Jean, Joe reflects, “gives the impression of a stringy kind of independence, and of a temper easily lost.” Deciding on his conversational strategy at last, Joe asks Jean if she wishes to hear any particular details of the ballooning accident in advance of the “coroner’s court,” which remains several weeks away.

Responding with surprising hostility, Jean answers that she does indeed wish to have certain questions answered, but that she doesn’t think she will be told the truth. She confesses that others to whom she has asked these questions have found her to be “mad”—insane—and she begins to cry. Embarrassed, Joe looks away and sees out the window a “brown, igloo-style tent.” He speculates that perhaps Jean’s children have felt the need to flee to it in order to escape their mother’s grief. Turning his attention to Jean Logan again, Joe realizes that what he is seeing on her face is “love” and that he needs immediately to return to London in order to “save” his relationship with Clarissa.

Before he can depart, however, Jean gathers herself and begins to ask the questions she has in mind, telling Joe that there was someone “with [her] husband” on the day of the accident. She asks Joe if “one door or two” were open on the car from which John Logan ran into the field, and she speculates that whoever was with him must have stood and watched what happened from beside that car. Summoning the details of John’s plans for that day (he was supposed to be at a medical conference in London), she insists that John would have had no reason to be in the Chilterns in the first place. Though Joe insists that there has to be “a perfectly innocent explanation,” he isn’t able to offer one, nor is he able to respond to Jean Logan’s anger at the fact that the police will not fingerprint John’s car because no “crime” has been committed.

Producing a shopping bag from the corner of the room, Jean reveals to Joe the remains of a picnic, found in John’s car among his other possessions. With the bag is a woman’s scarf that Jean is unable to identify, and her natural assumption is that the scarf belongs to (and the picnic was for) whomever her husband was seeing in the months before his death. Jean insists that she has to “talk to” the woman in question, yet Joe knows that even the woman’s fingerprints would only be useful if she has a criminal record. When Joe speculates that the woman may very well try to make contact with Jean, Jean states that she will “kill her” if she “comes near this house.” As Jean finishes this remark, her two children, Rachael and Leo, come into the room.