Small Pleasures

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-15

Chapters 16-19

Chapters 20-29

Chapters 30-Afterword

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 16-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 16 Summary

In an excerpt from the Echo in a column called “Pam’s Piece,” Jean explores the “comic and tragic” (141) unofficial aunt—a slightly condescending term for an unmarried and childless woman, a type that, the piece observes, has become more common after the war. Yet, Jean writes, women now who are unmarried and childless are educated professionals who manage their own finances—when they function as unofficial aunts, they benefit from time spent with a child, while parents get a break knowing their child is spending time with a good role model, and the child benefits from the relationship as well.

Jean takes Margaret to a concert near Howard’s shop. Though she imagined the experience would be refined and enjoyable for them both, Jean instead finds it boring. They leave early and Jean suggests stopping at a cafe for tea. Jean feels anxiety about the cost and about whether Margaret is having a good time. To ensure that she is, Jean asks Margaret what she’d like to do next. Margaret would really love to surprise her father at his shop. There, Howard is pleased to see them both. Margaret upsells a customer into buying a ruby.

When Jean takes Margaret back home, Gretchen comes down the stairs looking disheveled and sweaty with a basket of unfinished ironing in her arms. To Margaret’s dismay, her mother hasn’t made spitzbuben, Margaret’s favorite jam cookies. Before Jean leaves, Gretchen tells her she’s glad they went to visit Howard and that she’s glad he has a new female friend.

Chapter 17 Summary

In a letter, Gretchen invites Jean to a family outing to visit Howard’s Aunt Edie and pick apples and cobnuts. Jean again asks Mrs. Melsom to come over so her mother won’t spend time alone while Jean is gone. Mrs. Melsom agrees.

Jean is anxious to see Howard. When Sunday arrives, Jean arrives at the Tilburys’ home to find Margaret ill. Gretchen and Margaret stay behind, but Gretchen pleads with Jean to escort Howard to Aunt Edie’s anyway, since she’ll be expecting them. Jean is amazed to spend the day alone with Howard with Gretchen’s approval.

During the car ride, Howard confesses that he and Gretchen haven’t had sex with each other for several years. Howard feels that the much younger Gretchen is not in love with Howard, but only married him because she had Margaret out of wedlock and her mother was dying. Jean is sorry and feels Howard deserves much more happiness. She realizes that she is in love with him.

Aunt Edie’s home and orchard are unkempt and she is eccentric, wearing cat-eye sunglasses over her regular glasses with a yellow sun visor, too. Edie invites Howard to get cider, but he serves them apple brandy instead—Jean is already a bit drunk once they realize his blunder.

Jean, who is wearing trousers and a tee-shirt, tears her clothing and scratches her arms while climbing trees to pick apples, but the experience is “trance-like” (164). When they finish, Jean unpacks a picnic packed by Gretchen—a reality of which she is uncomfortably aware. Edie critiques Gretchen for packing too much food, and Jean appreciates how Howard tactfully defends her, sensing the irony of her falling in love with a married man because of the way he treats his wife. After lunch, Howard and Jean talk a walk and talk about Gretchen and Howard’s agreement that Jean has been a welcome addition to the family’s circle. Howard challenges Jean to a game of tennis, which they play until they must leave.

As they leave, Edie gives Howard an array of gifts for his family and gives Jean an emerald brooch that’s missing a stone, as well as more than her share of apples. Howard offers to fix it. On the car ride home, Howard tells Jean that Gretchen supposes everyone has a secret sorrow, asking what Jean’s might be. At this opportunity, even though it goes against everything she knows about decorum, Jean confides in Howard that she had an affair with a married man, which resulted in a pregnancy and a painful abortion (still illegal at that time in the UK). The procedure may prevent Jean from ever becoming pregnant again. She shares how angry she felt at the doctors who treated her and at Frank. Howard is sorry she had to endure such a tragedy to become the woman she is today.

Chapter 18 Summary

Another “Pam’s Piece” features a recipe for Spiced Apple Cake. As Jean compiles various apple recipes, including this one, for the Echo, she reflects on the conversation she had with Howard, realizing she’s never before shared the truth of her abortion with anyone—her mother knew, but they never discussed it. Howard calls her, interrupting her thoughts, to ask whether he can drop off the repaired brooch Aunt Edie gave to Jean.

As Jean looks herself over in the bathroom, she hears a female colleague crying in the stall. Jean decides not to comfort her, remembering the hours she spent crying in the same stall over Frank. She meets Howard outside of her office building, and he gives her the repaired brooch—which now includes a single emerald surrounded by two opals. As they say goodbye, Jean tells Howard she doesn’t expect him to keep her secrets from Gretchen—but Howard reassures her that he and Gretchen have an understanding and he need not say anything at all.

Chapter 19 Summary

A letter from Dr. Bamber informs Jean that Gretchen and Margaret have missed their most recent appointment for testing and hasn't responded to his follow-up inquiry. Frustrated, Jean comes unannounced to Gretchen’s door while Howard and Margaret are away. Gretchen isn’t home. Jean leaves a short note on the door. As she walks away, Gretchen hurriedly follows to wave Jean down. Gretchen explains that she is tired of being tested and never imagined the process would take so long. To sound kind, Jean offers to accompany Gretchen and Margaret to the hospital on Friday morning.

That Friday, Gretchen arrives at Charing Cross Station with her hair cut short. To Jean, this greatly impacts Margaret and Gretchen’s likeness, just in time for the photograph that will be featured in the article on Gretchen’s pregnancy in the Echo.

Jean wears the brooch to the appointment, testing whether Howard kept it a secret. Gretchen tells Jean how nice it looks. At the hospital, Jean asks the doctors to be more thorough in their explanations so Gretchen is more willing to continue testing, but the power dynamics have tipped in Gretchen’s favor—particularly because the testing is, so far, confirming possible parthenogenesis. Dr. Bamber describes their next test on the proteins in Margaret and Gretchen’s blood, for which the Tilburys had to fast. After their blood is drawn, they are invited to tea and toast. Gretchen asks Jean to take Margaret back to school; Gretchen herself has somewhere else to be. Jean agrees after some protest from Margaret, who’d rather skip school.

Chapters 16-19 Analysis

Jean’s Echo column, “Pam’s Piece,” has several functions in the novel. For Jean, the articles are an outlet for processing her life, though couched in universalism. For example, her sketch of the unofficial aunt draws on her new relationship with Margaret. However, Jean smooths out and downplays the negative aspects of her lived experience; while she finds Margaret boring in real life, her article portrays a family friend’s connection to a child as solely mutually beneficial. These newspaper pieces also continue contextualizing Women’s Identity in 1950s England by commenting on the way womanhood, and motherhood, have changed over time—allowing the novel to juxtapose the dawn of the women’s rights movement to earlier expectations. In the piece about would-be aunts, Jean points out that the unmarried childless women of the day are competent professionals, not sad old maids.

The novel uses some of the conventions of the mystery genre to hint at Gretchen’s hidden life. Clues abound, pointing to suspicious behavior (later explained as her ongoing, but secret, affair with Martha). Unlike earlier in the book, when Gretchen was a domestic paragon, she now seems to be slipping—dropping her domestic duties and enigmatically absent from home at crucial times. We see Gretchen unkempt for the first time, behind on laundry, not making her daughter’s favorite cookies, and unable to take her to school. That these minor changes are treated as deeply significant failures by Jean reveals the impossibility of the standards women are held to.

Gretchen’s small domestic flaws contrast with the much more pronounced deviations from the time’s feminine ideal. Aunt Edie is another woman on the fringes of society, living in a way that isn’t socially acceptable and critical of Gretchen’s rigid perfectionism. Her imprecations show that no matter how well a woman might inhabit the proper role, she’ll still face criticism. A more dramatic slippage occurs during Jean’s second intimate conversation with Howard. Jean’s decision to confide in Howard that she’d had an affair with a married man, got pregnant, and underwent an abortion is bold. The confession marks a key turning point for her character: Though she knows her revelation “violated every code that she had been brought up to live by [...] the urge to tell him was unstoppable. Decorum, secret, self-control were all blown away by the force of this need to confide” (173). Despite an abundance of self-restraint, Jean’s desire for connection, and her need to be understood and known, compel her to open up to Howard to avoid the isolation that is the fate of Mrs. Swinney.

The novel is interested in domestic and public spaces as settings for different kinds of bonds between people. For Jean, other people’s homes are often places to evaluate the Duty, Decorum, and Surveillance of other women. In these settings, she cannot help but judge. For example, in the Tilburys’ house, Jean mostly feels inadequate, criticizing herself for failing to live up to Gretchen’s standards. Meanwhile, in the homes of Aunt Edie and Martha, Jean is sharply observant of the many ways they do not perform femininity, feeling relief that she is more capable of adhering to social mores. In contrast, the novel posits the semi-private spaces offered by vehicles as a place of relative freedom for Jean—in these settings, she feels less compunction to police herself. On the train and in the car, she shares complex and potentially damaging secrets about herself with Howard: her pain at her parents’ divorce, the trauma she endured from her affair, and her fury at the doctors who performed her abortion. For Jean, vehicles are a space where romance can flourish outside of 1950s gender strictures—their modernity enables her to cast aside proper femininity in the pursuit of the authentic self. Howard has a similar response to vehicular intimacy, sharing such potentially shameful details as the fact that his marriage is sexless.