When Madge tells Alan she is in love with her German, he is outraged. Words frighten Alan. She was contagious. But she foxed me. These are quiet lives and she portrays them without narrative pyrotechnics.
Tragedy comes in subdued guise and brings no sense of release.
What happens is that Alan's father dies of a heart attack brought on partly by marital jealousy, partly by his family's indifference and, most immediately, by Alan's exasperated lapse into candor to tell him that mother has no lover and only leaves the house at night to sit in the station waiting room. Alan sees no intention behind her words and there may have been none. He was always one who didn't want to know. Murderers in Mrs. Bainbridge's novels are never brought to book. But censoriousness boomerangs.