Grace Mitchell

Established identity and circumstances

Grace is thirty-six, a Cambridge academic, fellow of Newnham and published poet. She is a scholar of French literature, existentialism and twentieth-century thought. She has taught Steve for two years and is later appointed to lecture on twentieth-century French poetry after the death of a colleague.

She has been married to Peter for approximately ten years. Their marriage ends after Peter’s affair with Ginny and after their long-running disagreement about parenthood. Grace owns the Glisson Road house after Peter transfers his interest as part of the divorce settlement.

Desires, pressures and conflicts

Grace wants intellectual recognition, professional advancement, emotional and sexual renewal, and a child before the end of her fertile years. She initially interprets Steve as an available and desirable combination of lover, research assistant and prospective father. Her desire for a child is genuine, but it is also entangled with grief over her marriage, rivalry with Ginny and anger at Peter.

She is ambitious and self-aware, but her self-knowledge is incomplete. She recognises when she is manipulating others, yet often continues because she believes the objective is justified.

Relationships

With Steve, Grace adopts a mixture of candour, erotic experimentation, practical support and control. She insists that they present themselves publicly as a couple and meet one another’s families. She asks Steve to father her child, but does not initially offer him a conventional long-term commitment.

With Peter, she moves from hurt and resentment to strategic negotiation. Her refusal to expedite the divorce is initially partly spiteful. She later accepts the divorce and the transfer of the house.

With Ginny, Grace is fascinated, threatened and competitive. She regards Ginny as the person who has most deeply marked Steve and is particularly devastated by Ginny’s pregnancy.

With Mavis, she develops an important relationship of mutual appraisal. Mavis initially fears that Grace is exploiting Steve, but the two women eventually reach an accommodation. Grace’s later use of Mavis’s concealed intelligence role places her in a morally compromised position.

Agency

Grace’s major actions include:

tracking Steve down through Beth;
initiating sex with him;
offering him accommodation and employment;
proposing the child arrangement;
requiring him to meet their families;
involving their families before the relationship is secure;
investigating and interpreting the Berlin operation;
helping Steve through Mavis’s death;
intervening with Sheena;
rewriting her own understanding of the relationship under professional pressure;
falsely implying to Gary that Steve had used force against her;
ending the relationship immediately after the play’s run.

Her false account to Gary is a demonstrated ethical failure. She later confesses, but only after the damage has been done: Gary freezes Steve out, the theatrical relationship is damaged and Steve’s professional standing suffers.

Voice and behaviour

Grace is articulate, erudite, sexually frank and often funny. She can be nurturing one moment and imperious the next. She is comfortable with strategic disclosure, indirect pressure and intellectual reframing. Her language often converts emotion into analysis, which allows her to manage situations but can also distance her from their human cost.

Development

Grace’s development is less a moral improvement than a movement from apparent control to recognition of her own divided motives. She begins by treating pregnancy as a goal that can organise the relationship. By the end she admits that she wanted sex and emotional renewal more than she wanted the child, and that her decision to have a child with Steve was partly a move in her struggle with Peter.

Her apparent ending of the relationship is not free choice in a simple sense. She is being blackmailed or pressured by Sheena, though the narrative also makes clear that she had begun to tire of the arrangement before Sheena’s intervention.

Knowledge and concealments

Grace knows more about intelligence work than she initially tells Steve. She knows that Mavis’s job is not administrative, recognises the likelihood that the Berlin accident was not accidental, and understands the risks of surveillance.

She conceals from Steve:

her prior collaboration with British intelligence;
her relationship with Sheena’s institutional world;
the extent of Sheena’s pressure;
her developing obligation to cultivate Müller;
her decision to end the relationship;
the fact that she has already begun to withdraw emotionally.

She is not a wholly reliable interpreter of other characters. Her descriptions of Steve, Ginny, Jude and Mavis are often perceptive but also shaped by jealousy, fear and professional self-interest.

Position at the end

Grace has ended her relationship with Steve and must cultivate Müller. She remains professionally ambitious and is positioned to gain from Müller’s presence in Cambridge, but at the cost of betraying Steve and suppressing her own reproductive plans. She is also aware that she has damaged her friendship with Gary and may never recover Steve’s trust.