Enduring Love: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

As he stares at Jean Logan’s children, Joe reflects on his and Clarissa’s history with kids. Though Joe has “never looked after a child for any length of time,” he has been assured by Clarissa that he “would have made a wonderful father,” and the two of them have spent many weekends with Clarissa’s nieces, nephews, and godchildren. Nevertheless, Joe feels an “uneasiness” whenever he is in the presence of a child. Such a proximity makes him recall his own childhood, during which he often pitied adults and felt the need to “conceal the fun” he would have as soon as he was away from them.

With these thoughts in mind, Joe appraises the Logan children and tries to see himself through their eyes: he is “yet one more dull stranger in the procession lately filing through their home.” Rachael, Joe decides from looking at her, is “about ten” years old, while her brother, Leo, is “two years younger.” With the children is a nanny, and Joe reflects that the children have “an appealing scruffiness about them” and don’t, unlike their mother, “look crushed” by their father’s recent death.

Staring back at Joe, Leo declares, apparently in response to his mother’s assertion about the missing woman, that “it’s completely wrong to kill people.” When Joe replies that Jean has merely been using a common expression, the conversation shifts to whether it is wrong to kill and eat horses. Rachael joins the discussion, and the three of them enter a brief and child-like debate about cultural norms (“in China it’s polite to burp after a meal”) and whether any absolute moral rules exist. As Leo climbs onto her lap, Jean Logan asserts again that she “ha[s] to find” the woman who was with her husband, and she enlists Joe in the business of questioning the others who were present at the scene.

Joe tentatively agrees to help, realizing that he will be “in a position to censor the information and perhaps save the family some misery.” He reflects on Rachael and Leo’s precocious moral reasoning and decides that they would agree with his determination to lie were they to understand the situation fully. For the children’s benefit as well as Jean’s, Joe states loudly that John Logan was “a very determined and courageous man” and that, by refusing to let go of his rope, Logan “put the rest of us to shame.”

As Joe finishes these remarks, Jean Logan begins to respond. She agrees that her husband was brave, but she insists simultaneously that he was “very, very cautious,” as well, and that he “never took stupid chances.” In Jean’s mind, John must have held onto the rope longer than everyone else because he knew that the woman accompanying him was “watching.” He was forty-two, Jean insists, and he “couldn’t accept it.” Thus, he was killed not by bravery but by foolhardiness and a determination to show off for a younger lover.

Joe reflects to himself that only grief could “devise” such a “narrative,” and he tells Jean not to believe such an elaborate “hypothesis.” As he speaks, he notices the children dancing around the room, and he hears Leo remark that, in the game he and his sister are playing, “she’s the queen and I only come out when she gives the signal.” This seemingly random remark immediately jogs Joe’s memory. The business about a “curtain” and a “signal” that he has been trying to remember has to do with Buckingham Palace, he now recalls. King George V was stalked by a Frenchwoman in the years after World War I, and the Frenchwoman became convinced, in her madness, that the king was sending her “signals that she alone could read,” using the “curtains” of Buckingham Palace as a means of communication. The illness from which the Frenchwoman suffered was called de Clerambault’s syndrome.

As Joe prepares to leave, Jean Logan gives him the names and telephone numbers of the other accident witnesses, whom she means for him to contact. Joe thinks again of the story of King George and his insane devotee, and he realizes that Jed Parry must be suffering from the same condition, which causes the sufferer to feel delusions of love. Determined to research the condition further, Joe shakes the children’s hands, steps out of the house, and returns to his car for the drive back to London.