Chapter Two

As Geoffrey’s condition improved he grew more demanding. It meant that Christine and Aunt Josephine could never be out of the house together, because Mr Cope would not answer the spare-room bell, even if he heard it.

They nursed him as kindly as they could, but it was very trying having Geoffrey in the house. Christine was glad to get off to work after she had washed him and made his bed in the morning. She had taken his car to the garage on Sunday night when it was raining, and walked back with Timmy across the Common, cold and wet and feeling martyred, and hoping Geoffrey would pay the garage bill. She did not drive the car any more.

Margaret was away from Goldwyn’s all that week, which put more work on to Christine. Stocktaking was drawing near, and Mr Parker was working his old bones up to a small panic about it. He would call Christine into his office a hundred times a day to ask her something she had told him six times already.

On Wednesday, while she was searching through the shelves at the back of the department for an old novel that had not been wanted for years, a man came diffidently up to her. He was wearing a light raincoat over tan-coloured trousers and his face looked vaguely familiar.

When he asked her if she had got a book called Communism is Amongst Us, she was not surprised to hear him speak American. It was mostly Americans who wanted that kind of book. English people were tired already of reading about the Communist menace. They hoped vaguely to deny its existence by ignoring it, but Americans wanted to probe it out of its terrors.

‘I’ll get it for you in just a moment, sir,’ Christine said. ‘As soon as I’ve finished with this customer.’

Then she remembered who he was. He was the American naval officer who had sat beside her on the bench in Grosvenor Square and offered her a cigarette the day Geoffrey cut his head.

He looked more insignificant out of uniform, narrow-shouldered and lightweight and a little lost, standing in people’s way between the counters, looking about him with his black brows drawn down. She watched him while she was wrapping up the novel for the customer before him, and wondered whether to risk reminding him that they had met.

When she found him the book about Communism, he said: ‘Thanks a lot for your trouble’, and was so pleasant about it that she said, before she had time to feel shy: ‘I saw you in Grosvenor Square the other day, didn’t I? We sat on the same bench.’

‘I know it,’ he said, watching her hands as she made up the parcel for him. ‘I was wondering if you would remember.’

Christine found herself wishing that she were not wearing the old skirt and jumper which was all she could be bothered to put on this morning after Geoffrey had been captious about his dressing. Her hair needed washing. She knew it.

The American talked to her for a few minutes about nothing very much, and then she saw a customer walking about helplessly with a book, and said: ‘Excuse me. I’ll have to go.’

‘O.K.,’ he said lightly. ‘I’ll just wander around for a while. This is quite a store you have here.’

‘Better than Saks, Fifth Avenue?’ It was the only American shop she knew.

‘Well, I suppose not, but -’ He meant: Pretty good for London, but did not say it. He was a very polite man, and more at his ease than most of her English male customers, who were apt to be brusquely embarrassed in the act of buying.

Christine went away, and the naval officer stayed in the department, looking at books with the critical and slightly dissatisfied air of all Americans in shops, on the defensive against the salesmanship that pursues them all their lives. Christine saw him looking at her once or twice, and then he went away and out of her life, as customers did.

She told her aunt about him when she got home, and Aunt Josephine said: ‘Romance! A meeting in Grosvenor Square. It sounds like a film with Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding.’ Aunt Josephine loved that kind of film. She loved Ivor Novello, too, and had seen all his shows two or three times, swooning a little in her upper-circle seat.

‘Not romance,’ said Christine. ‘He wasn’t particularly attractive. It was just funny though, meeting him that day, and then him coming into the shop.’

‘Think you could get any nylons out of him?’ Aunt Josephine, though careless about the rest of her appearance, favoured her legs, and saved up to buy sheer silk stockings for them, which she laddered, kneeling to polish the floors.

‘Alice would have, if she’d seen him first,’ Christine said, ‘I was slow. I missed my chance, and I shan’t see him again.’

He was back the next evening, just before closing time. He looked better in his uniform. He stood looking around, and Alice pranced pertly up to him, but he saw Christine and went over to her. It was nearly five-thirty, and the last customers were being hustled gently out of the department. Christine was tired and wanted to hurry home, because Aunt Josephine was waiting to go out.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ she asked briskly. ‘We’re just closing.’ She was piling up books as she spoke, and then she was sorry that she had been offhand, because he looked down at his shiny black shoes and said: ‘Oh, I wasn’t going to trouble you for a book. I just wondered, if you had the time, whether I could take you for a cup of coffee or a drink, or whatever you’d want.’

Christine was surprised. He was looking at her expectantly, with his cap under his arm and his narrow head with the clipped black hair tilted to one side, like a bird. His mouth was pursed up, judging her reaction.

When she said that she was sorry but she had to hurry home, he looked crestfallen, and a little regretful of having asked her. With the clock at five-thirty and the commissionaires beginning to lock the doors, she could not embark on an explanation about Aunt Josephine and Geoffrey, and she was afraid that he thought she was making an excuse because she did not want to go out with him.

If Aunt Josephine had known about it, she would have said: ‘Don’t come home. You might get some nylons’, but that would have meant telephoning and all sort of complications, and, anyway, she had said she could not go.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, feeling a lift of the soul because he had liked the look of her enough to come back. ‘Look, you’ll have to go if you don’t want to get locked in.’ She began to move away, but he still stood there looking at her with deep-lidded eyes that were peculiar because they did not blink.

‘Could you come out another day?’ he persisted, like a man who has set himself a task and means to carry it through. ‘Tomorrow maybe?’

‘All right,’ said Christine, even more surprised than she had been the first time he asked her.

‘Thanks a lot. I’ll look forward to it,’ he said. ‘Good-bye now.’

He went over to one of the Piccadilly doors, which had been locked by the commissionaire, who was now drawing across the iron grille outside. The American coolly tapped on the glass, as if it were part of the commissionaire’s duty to let him out whenever he wished, and the man unlocked the door for him. He would have done the same for anyone who tapped on the glass, but an Englishman would not have tapped. He would have been distressed to find the door locked, asked for help inside the shop, and been shown out through the delivery entrance in Jermyn Street.

Christine set her hair carefully that night, and asked Aunt Josephine to iron her white blouse with the ruffles. She did not say why, because Aunt Josephine would have cried: ‘Romance!’ and it was not romance. She was just going to have a drink with an almost strange man, who would probably turn out to be a bore. He had undoubtedly only asked her because he did not know anyone in London.

The next morning she put on her grey suit with the white blouse, told Aunt Josephine that she would be late home, and looked forward all day to the evening.

She was enjoying the anticipation more than the reality. She knew that she was dramatizing something that might turn out to be quite dull, but by the middle of the afternoon she began to get a little excited, and to glance towards the street doors, although he would not come for some time yet.

Alice was often fetched from work by young men. Christine seldom was, and certainly never by a stranger about whom she knew nothing. This was something different. This was an adventure. She had quite a lot of friends, and sometimes went on to a cocktail party or out to dinner after work, but after the age of thirty all your friends seemed to be old friends. You did not live perpetually in the expectation of gathering to yourself new people, as you did when you were experimenting with life at twenty.

The American was in the store at five-twenty-five. He was wearing uniform and his rather solemn expression, which eased into a smile when he saw Christine. He did not smile easily. His small, full-lipped mouth weighed up situations before it relaxed to accept them.

‘Hi there!’ he said, as Christine went over to him. ‘Good to see you.’ He behaved as if they were already old friends, which rather damped her spirit of adventure. However, he was there. She had decided by five o’clock that he would think better of it and not come back.

‘I’ll have to go out by the staff door and punch the clock,’ Christine said. ‘Will you meet me there? Do you know where Jermyn Street is?’

‘No, ma’am.’ He shook his head. He wore his cap very straight, and he kept pushing at the knot of his tie, to make sure he looked correct.

It seemed funny to think of anyone not knowing where Jermyn Street was. She told him where to meet her, and shepherded him out of the department before the doors were locked.

‘Who’s the boy friend?’ Alice asked her, while they were getting out their handbags from under the humorous books. ‘What boy friend?’

Miss Burman, collecting paper bags, was listening with pinpoint eyes.

‘The sailor. American, isn’t he? Nice going, Miss Cope.’ Alice went click-click out of the side of her mouth and wiggled her hip.

‘I’m off home,’ Mr Parker informed them, coming out of his office with his Dr Coppelius shuffle. He always said that, as if he could possibly be going anywhere else at that time in the evening. ‘Did you check those Everymans for reordering, Miss Cope?’

‘Yes,’ lied Christine, because he might have expected her to stay and do them tonight.

‘Good girl. Good girl. Well, good night all.’ He lifted the musician’s hat to his women and made for the door.

Christine renovated her face in the cloakroom, put on her grey beret, took it off, put it on again and finally decided to go without it. Most of the crowd had gone by now. She imagined the American standing in uniform by the staff entrance, watching all the girls coming out and being scrutinized by them, bold because they were in pairs or groups and he was standing alone.

Miss Burman had stayed behind to tidy her locker. She pressed up the stairs beside Christine, who wished she would not stay so close. If they went out of the door together she could not introduce the American to Miss Burman, because she did not know his name. She hurried on, while Miss Burman showed the receipt for her pastry to the timekeeper, but Miss Burman caught her up and punched the clock just behind her, and was at her side as they went out of the door.

The American was waiting with his arms held a little out from his sides, one foot on the kerb and one in the road. He stepped forward with a small salute and smiled. When he smiled his eyes closed up, so that you could not see his odd, unwinking stare.

Miss Burman, who had been holding Christine’s arm – she always had to touch the people she was with – let go of it.’ Oh, excuse me,’ she stammered, and melted away, as if she had surprised some clandestine intrigue.

‘Gee,’ said the American, ‘I thought you were never coming. I never saw so many girls in my life.’ They both laughed, and then he suddenly saluted again, stood to attention and was very formal. ‘Commander Vinson Gaegler, United States Navy,’ he announced, as if his name were the most serious thing in the whole world.

‘Oh – thank you. My name is Christine Cope,’ said Christine, quite embarrassed by the sound of her own name, although it was far less embarrassing than his.

‘Well, fine,’ he said, shaking hands as if they had never met before. ‘Now, Miss Cope, where would you like to go? I’m not too familiar with this city.’

She was the native and he the stranger. It was up to her to suggest somewhere, but she was suddenly shy, not knowing what kind of place he had in mind.

‘We could go up to the Air Force club on Park Street,’ he said,’ if you’d like that.’

She would have agreed to go anywhere, since she had no ideas of her own.

‘We’ll get a cab.’

‘It might be difficult, this time in the evening she began, but a taxi was already following his lifted hand to the kerb. That was her first experience with an American of being able to get anything you wanted whenever you wanted it, even in London.

It was one of the new taxis, longer and shinier and less like a horseless hansom.

‘I love these funny old London cabs,’ Vinson Gaegler said.

‘But this is one of the newest ones.’

‘I think it’s marvellous,’ he said, not understanding.

Christine could never ride in a taxi with her feet on the prickly mat without remembering Jerry and how painful it was to the knees when you were kissing on the prim leather seat and slipped off it. She had not kissed anyone in a taxi for years, but she rode in them little enough to think of them still as creatures of the night, their interiors dark buckets of love. It always seemed wrong to be in a taxi in the daylight.

The American sat far away from her in the corner and read out the names of streets. She asked him how long he had been in London.

‘Not too long. Just ten days. The navy flew me in to Bovingdon at eighteen hundred hours, and I came to London and found they had no hotel reservation for me. I had quite a time finding accommodation that night.’

‘Where did you go?’

He named a hotel in which nobody that Christine knew would ever stay. People took a room for one night, or perhaps just a few hours. She smiled, because the American seemed rather proper, and she wondered whether he had known what kind of place he was in.

‘I’m not there now, of course,’ he said, ‘I’m at the Mount Royal.’ He pronounced it wrong, with the accent on the Mount. ‘I like London pretty well,’ he said, ‘but I plan to get out and see some of your country as soon as I get time. I never was here during the war.’

He was easy to talk to, because he gave information without you having to ask for it. All you had to do was to sit in your corner of the taxi and let him talk in his slow level voice.

‘My family originally came from Birming-ham,’ he said. ‘I’d like to get up there some time, and there are a lot of other places I should see.’

Christine wondered whether she ought to offer to take him to Stratford or Blenheim or somewhere, but it might sound too oncoming, even if she only meant it to show that English people were not all standoffish and stuffy.

‘How long are you over here for?’ she asked. ‘I mean, are you stationed here now?’

He leaned forward to read the scale of increased fares pasted under the meter. ‘I’m afraid, with regard to the section I’m with, I can’t tell you that,’ he said carefully, making her feel like a spy, when she was only making polite conversation. It seemed so odd, when England and America were supposed to be allies, that they were perpetually having secrets from each other and setting up complicated organizations to try and find them out.

‘There are many people at your Admiralty here who would like to know just what I’m doing,’ the American said, with some satisfaction.

The taxi stopped at one of the narrow houses in Park Street, which used to disgorge G.I.s with canteen mugs and tin cutlery every day at noon during the war. Inside, Commander Gaegler spun his cap on to a counter and took Christine upstairs to a lounge with an ornate fireplace, whose windows looked on to a small paved garden. It was easy to imagine it as a drawing-room in its private days.

There were two Air Force officers with sleek-haired American girls who laughed a lot, and a spectacled soldier with his wife and two small boys, who had shaved blond heads and drank Coca-Cola through straws solemnly, as if it was a rite.

Commander Gaegler put Christine on a sofa, asked her if she would settle for a martini and rang the bell. When the barman came to take their order, he said: ‘How’s it comin’, Commander’? He was English, but he had been at the club long enough to speak the language.

The drinks were very large and very strong. There was more gin in them than in the martinis Christine made. The American, however, screwed up his lips and said: ‘You can’t get a really dry martini anywhere in London.’

He was more sophisticated here in his own surroundings than he had been in the shop. Christine thought that perhaps she liked him better when he had been diffident and a little lost in the book department.

However, he was easy company, and by the time she had finished the martini Christine began to feel as if she knew him quite well, although she had a suspicion at the back of her mind that if she really had known him quite well, with all their personal information already exchanged, there would not have been so much to talk about.

He asked her questions about herself, and was gratifyingly interested in her answers. She told him about Goldwyn’s and about her family at home and what she had done in the war. She told him about all the animals at ‘Roselawn’.

‘Do you like dogs?’ she asked.

‘Oh sure. My mother has a chihuahua.’

She did not mean that kind of dog, but never mind. He told her about his home town of Kaloomis, Kansas, and about his sister’s marriage to the eldest son of one of the oldest families in town, and about his mother, who wore a badge of the Mothers of the Purple Heart, because her other son had been slightly wounded in Korea.

When Christine looked at her watch, she had been there more than an hour and had had two of the outsize martinis. Probably her nose and her cheeks were shining. She took out her compact. They were.

She powdered her face and said: ‘I must go now. I mustn’t be back too late.’

‘I’ll see you home,’ said the American, getting up with her.

‘Oh no, that’s all right. I live rather far out, you see. It’s much too far. I can get a bus right here at Marble Arch.’ She admired herself for being able to produce so easily the Americanism of ‘right here’. After an hour of his company it came quite naturally.

‘I have a car,’ he said, pleased that he had this to offer her. ‘A brother officer lent it to me while he’s in Germany. We’ll go and collect it, and I’ll run you home.’

She did not want him to take her home, because there would be the difficulty of whether or not to ask him to stay to supper, and what her father would say if he did, and whether there would be enough food, and she remembered that Aunt Josephine was making shepherd’s pie tonight, which was not one of her most successful dishes.

The American had made up his mind, however, so they walked up to a garage at Marble Arch. The car was a beautiful cream-coloured Buick convertible, such as Christine had never ridden in in her life.

She felt wonderful as she drove out to Barnes with Commander Gaegler with his gold braid and his coloured ribbons, directing him and pointing out items of interest, like the Albert Hall and Olympia.

He did not know that to live on Barnes Common was inconvenient and rather suburban. For all he knew, it might have been the grandest place to live in London, and he was delighted with the gorse-scrubbed open space before the house, and with the house itself, which he called an Interesting Old Place, although to Christine it was only shabbily Victorian.

He seemed also to be quite pleased with all the animals. ‘This is real homey,’ he said. He made a noise like tearing silk at the budgerigars and ran his finger-nail along the bars of their cage. The cat that was asleep with its front paws over the fender would not come to him, but Christine’s gregarious dog put its head on his lap, and he stroked it while Christine mixed him a martini, mostly gin, because that was how he said he liked it. She mixed it in a glass jug, as Geoffrey had told her she must, although she would not submit to doing this for Geoffrey.

Presently her father came in, and Vinson Gaegler sprang to his feet and was introduced. Christine could see that her father was a little suspicious of him. Who is this Yank? he was thinking. We haven’t heard about him before. He wandered about the room, not looking directly at the guest, and the American was very respectful to him. He offered to mix him a drink, which Mr Cope thought was not respectful, but presumptuous.

Christine got them both sitting down and tried to maintain an easy conversation. She knew that her father was worrying about whether the American was going to be asked to stay to supper. Vinson Gaegler gave him a little brisk information about the American Navy, and Mr Cope grunted in response. He used to be like this when Christine was young, and brought new young men to the house. If they dared to come again, he had been capable of greeting them with: ‘Good God, you here again?’ He thought that was funny, a joking reference to their persistence after his daughter, but the young men did not think so.

During a lull in the talk, when Christine was wondering what she could say to recover the easy relationship she and the American had had at the Air Force club, a piercing shriek came suddenly from above. It was followed by another, and then a reverberating groan. The house was like Nightmare Abbey in a Gothic tale. Christine and the American had sprung to their feet, but Mr Cope remained seated and said: ‘It’s only Geoffrey. The doctor has come to take out his stitches.’

‘It’s my cousin,’ Christine explained to the startled American. ‘He had a slight accident here on Saturday.’ It sounded silly. ‘Christine has had a slight accident’ was what her nurse used to say when she hustled her upstairs to change her knickers.

‘That’s tough,’ he said. ‘I’ll be going. I’m sure you wouldn’t want me here at a time like this.’

‘No, that’s all right. Do sit down and finish your drink. They won’t need me up there.’ By the time she had seen him off and gone upstairs the operation would be over, and she would have sent the American away for nothing.

Geoffrey continued to fill the house with horrible noises. ‘Good God,’ said Mr Cope, getting up, ‘I can’t stand this. It’s worse than a maternity home.’

The American looked at him, surprised that he should have come out of his monosyllabic grunting to say this. Mr Cope went out of the room, calling to his dog, and they heard the front door bang with her father’s slam that sometimes brought a hat down off the stand.

Christine sat down and told the American the story of Geoffrey, and how they had come home late without a key and tried to break into the house. Gaegler did not say much, and she wondered if he was shocked at such goings-on. He did not look the kind of man who would get drunk and cut his head open bungling an easy climb. But you never knew with people. They nearly all got drunk at some time or other and did something ridiculous. Look at Geoffrey.

The American was beginning to make the motions of thinking it was time to go, when Aunt Josephine came in with her head, for some reason, bound up in an old scarf, and a triangular tear in her cooking apron where she always bumped against the corner of the kitchen dresser.

‘That Geoffrey,’ she said in despair. ‘If I ever saw anything like him my name is Artemus Jones. Talk about a cry-baby! You never heard such a noise as he made about a few stitches coming out.’

‘We heard,’ said Christine. ‘Aunt Jo, this is Commander Gaegler of the American Navy.’

‘An American!’ cried Aunt Josephine in delight. ‘Well, I am glad to meet you. Is it the American?’ she asked Christine.

Her niece blushed and made a face at her, which she thought Vinson Gaegler saw. He moved quickly about with his springy step, offering Aunt Josephine cigarettes and chairs, but she was too restless to sit down. She tramped about the room, giving out ejaculations about the frightfulness of Geoffrey and the stupidity of the doctor, who said he must stay a few more days. The American turned his head to watch her with his unwinking tortoiseshell eyes, and Christine wished she knew what he was thinking.

‘You’ve been drinking,’ said Aunt Josephine, picking up an empty glass.

‘Have one,’ said Christine.

‘Certainly I will. Heaven knows I need it.’ She flopped into a chair and ran her big hand over her face, pushing the scarf askew on her head.

The American offered her a cigarette. ‘No, thank you. I – Oh, but a Lucky Strike! The only kind I like. I haven’t had one since my canteen days. Christine, you are clever to bring somebody home with American cigarettes.’

At the bow-fronted cupboard, Christine prayed that Aunt Josephine would not forget herself so far as to say something about nylons.

‘Let me help you.’ Vinson Gaegler came and took over the drinks from Christine as naturally as if he had been in the house many times.

When he had finished she saw that he had made a drink for himself and her as well. She did not want one, but she took it, to let him prove to her that there was nothing in the world like an American martini. Why did every man always think he alone knew how to make a martini?

His visit had been a little sticky up to now, but with Aunt Josephine in the room it became a success. She liked him and he liked her. He did not seem to think her odd, as some of Christine’s friends did. Aunt Josephine was at her oddest when she had had a drink. She became dogmatic now, and started to hold forth about the Atlantic Charter, and the American sat on the edge of a chair opposite her with his knees together, and treated her as if she were the only person in the world.

Christine felt de trop. She hid her drink behind a vase and wondered whether anyone would notice if she picked up the evening paper.

Mr Cope came back and asked if the all clear had sounded. He was not too pleased to find the American still there, but he was hungry, and at the risk of having to invite him to the meal, he asked his sister: ‘What about supper? It’s long past time.’

‘So it is,’ she answered without getting up.

‘No wonder your dishes are always either burned dry or half cooked,’ said Mr Cope, ‘since they never get to the table at the right time.’

Christine hoped they were not going to argue in front of the American. He would not understand.

‘Shepherd’s pie can wait for hours,’ Aunt Josephine said. ‘But why don’t you go and get it out yourself, if you’re so famished, though how you can be after the lunch you ate –’

‘I don’t want to burn my hands, thank you. I can never find a cloth in that disorderly kitchen of yours.’

‘Why is it, Captain,’ Aunt Josephine asked Commander Gaegler mistily, ‘that men can’t stand to touch as hot things as women can?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said seriously. ‘Could it be it’s something to do with the pigmentation of the skin?’

‘How clever you are!’ said Aunt Josephine embarrassingly. ‘Christine, I wish you would always bring home clever people like this. It does me good.’ The American looked more than ever like James Stewart in a coy situation.

‘It’s the gin that’s done you good,’ said Christine shortly, thinking as she said it that she probably ought to be all sweetness, and flutter round her aunt for the American’s benefit.

But did she really care what he thought? He had taken hardly any notice of her since they came home, and he was certainly rather smaller and slighter than a man should be, and it was doubtful whether he had a sense of humour.

It had been exciting being taken by a strange American in uniform to have drinks in an American club, but when you got him home, where you had to be just your family self and could not play at being whatever you wanted you to be, it palled a little.

‘You’ll stay and have supper with us, I hope, Captain?’ Aunt Josephine was saying, while her brother made faces at her behind the American’s back.

‘Thanks a lot,’ he said. ‘I appreciate your offer, but I really should be going. I have a date tonight.’

No, Christine thought, he was not exciting. For all that he had picked her out and come back to the store to see her again, he seemed to have small interest in her as he took his leave in the hall and said: ‘I’ve been so happy to meet you.’ Absurd, then, of Christine to find herself thinking, as she closed the front door: Who has he got a date with? A girl?

At supper, Aunt Josephine and Mr Cope discussed the American ad nauseam, and when Christine went up with Geoffrey’s cheese, he said: ‘I hear you’ve got yourself a new boy friend. Congratulations.’

‘I hear you were a brave, brave boy having your stitches taken out,’ she retaliated. ‘Congratulations on that.’

‘I suffered the agonies of the damned,’ he said. ‘No one knows what I endured.’

‘We all do,’ she said. ‘We heard you enduring.’

When she went back to the dining-room, Aunt Josephine said, folding her napkin in a way that creased it more than if she had left it crumpled up: ‘Well, I liked him, Christine dear. He and I got on fine, and I hope you’ll bring him home again.’

‘I thought you were a bit tight,’ said her brother.

‘He did mix the drinks very strong,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘I like Americans.’

‘I can’t see why they have to wear uniform all the time,’ he grumbled. ‘They have this mania for dressing up. And all those medals. It’s ridiculous. Two months in the potato squad and you’ve got a chestful of ribbons. Fruit juice, they call it.’

‘Fruit salad,’ said Christine. ‘Well, anyway, don’t worry. I don’t suppose I shall see him again.’

He rang her up on Saturday evening to ask her if she would drive out to the country with him on Sunday. He seemed to take it for granted that she was free, and because she had not expected to hear from him again, she was surprised into saying Yes at once.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll call for you around eleven-thirty. I have to go to Mass first.’ Catholics always made a point of telling you they were going to Mass, or had just been to Mass, as if no one else ever went to church.

‘Eleven-thirty then,’ he said. ‘Good-bye now.’ His telephone manner was clipped and utilitarian, as if he were more accustomed to using the telephone for business than for conversation. Except that he said, after they had said good-bye: ‘Just a moment. Tell me something. Why did your aunt ask: “Is it the American?”’

‘I can’t imagine. Did she?’ Christine tried to sound cool.

‘Well, skip it. I just thought–’

‘Good-bye,’ said Christine. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

So he had thought she had liked him well enough to be enthusiastic about him at home, did he? Christine did not think she was going to like him if he was going to be conceited.

When he arrived on Sunday, however, you could not help liking him, for he had brought, rather shyly, a large box of food for them from the Navy commissary. They took the box into the kitchen and unpacked it on the table among Aunt Josephine’s preparations for Yorkshire pudding. There was a ham, and tins of bacon and sausages and butter, and chocolate, and packets of Lucky Strike for Aunt Josephine. It was really very kind of him. He watched their delight as they unpacked, like a Red Cross worker bringing bread to starving war victims. He was pleased with himself for giving so much pleasure. He had brought a box of cigars for Mr Cope, and Christine slipped away into the study to warn her father not to say he did not smoke them.

As she came out there was a violent banging on the front door. She opened it, and Clement and Jeanette fell into the hall.

‘There’s a super American car outside the gate! It’s huge! Absolutely super! Come out quick, you must see it!’

‘I have,’ she smiled, wanting to kiss them, but unable to catch their darting, exciting bodies. ‘I’ve been in it too. It can go more than a hundred miles an hour if it wants, and you don’t have to change gear.’

‘Gosh!’ they breathed, as if they had glimpsed heaven.

‘What’s occurred, Chrissie?’ asked Roger, coming up the path and jerking his head towards the Buick. ‘Got yourself a rich boy friend at last?’

She wished that they could have seen Vinson Gaegler first in uniform. Roger and Sylvia were so critical, and he looked better in uniform than in the overpadded tweed jacket and smooth-textured slacks that he wore today.

The introductions went off quite well. Americans always knew how to make conversation to new people straight away, without standing about awkwardly. The children were already well disposed to him because of the car, and he pretended that he had brought candy just for them, although he could not have known they would be there.

‘Candy means chocolate and sweets,’ said Jeanette, who had an American airman of her own at Farnborough. ‘I know.’ They rushed off to the kitchen, jostling their grandfather as he wandered in from his study.

Having been warned by Christine, he did not say: ‘Good God, you here again?’ but: ‘I have to thank you for the cigars. It was extremely kind of you, Captain er –’

‘Gaegler,’ said the American, not correcting him about the rank.

‘Of course. Excuse me. I’ve been working. Just an absent-minded author. You know what writers are.’

Everyone laughed, as they always did at Mr Cope when he became literary, and the American looked from one to the other wishing to join in the joke, but not understanding.

The children were cross because Christine was going out for the day. ‘Just when we come,’ they said, sucking at bars of chocolate marshmallow and kicking the furniture. ‘And you said you were going to teach us how to bowl a legbreak.’

‘Christine was captain of the eleven at school,’ Sylvia explained to the American, which left him more mystified than before.

She and Roger were also disappointed that Christine was going out to lunch. ‘Got something better to do this Sunday, eh?’ said Roger, when she came back from getting her coat. ‘Well, I don’t blame you when the chap has a car like that. Cuts out the English boy friends a bit, doesn’t it, Miss Cope? Well, so long, you two. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do – and that gives you plenty of scope.’ He winked at Vinson Gaegler, who laughed with him, eager to join in the fun and be one of the family.

‘Your folks are swell,’ he told Christine, as he started the engine and turned the car on the sandy road, his thin, knuckly hands grappling the big steering-wheel.

‘I’m glad you liked them,’ she said. ‘I feel bad in a way about going out, because we’re usually together on Sundays. Poor Geoffrey was a bit peeved too, because I’d promised to finish a chess game.’

‘You’re very good to your family,’ he said. It was his first personal comment about her.

‘Not really, but we get along all right.’

‘I like to see a family all together,’ he said, taking a corner on the wrong side. ‘My goodness, will I ever learn to drive on the left? My parents are divorced. It doesn’t help.’

‘I thought you were a Catholic –?’

‘Yes. My father is, but he didn’t think too much of it when it came to going off with a chippy. That broke up the home somewhat. And to tell you the truth, none of us are too close. I think it’s wonderful to be in a family home like yours.’

‘You must come another Sunday and have lunch with us,’ Christine said politely. That was the sort of invitation you could throw out, and not have to abide by if today did not go well.

‘I’d appreciate that very much,’ he said.

They drove down the Portsmouth road. The American wanted to go to a hotel that another officer had recommended. He expected that she would know of it, and she felt that she ought to. It felt odd to be piloted through one’s own country by a foreigner.

When they turned off the main road he knew the way exactly. He had looked it up on a map before he started out, and drawn a little chart for himself. He was evidently a methodical and efficient man. He drove fast but well, and slowed down strictly through towns and villages.

‘You’re the first person I’ve ever driven with who’s stuck to thirty miles an hour in built-up areas,’ Christine said.

‘But that’s the speed limit. I’ve got a book of your traffic laws.’

‘I know, but no one ever does it. If the police do stop you, you can always say you didn’t see the sign. They don’t believe you, but they let you off the first few times.’

He thought that funny. ‘Gee,’ he said, ‘back home the cops are tougher than that. They’ll fine you right on the spot without a trial. You don’t fool with them if you want to keep out of jail.’

He sounded as if he admired that, and he had laughed at the English police, so Christine said: ‘Sounds like the Gestapo to me. I suppose America has to have police like that, to stop them going back to the lawless jungle we discovered.’

‘Now don’t let’s be like that,’ he said, looking straight ahead. ‘We’re supposed to be friends, remember?’

She did not know whether he meant he and she, or England and America. ‘I was only joking,’ she said. ‘I like Americans awfully. I always have.’

‘It’s odd,’ he said. ‘You know it? Plenty of English people say that, yet they can’t be with an American more than a certain length of time without starting to goad him. Same thing happens the other way around. I suppose it’s because we’re each trying to disguise the fact that we admire each other a hell of a lot.’

The hotel was a converted country house, standing by itself in a rolling park that had been partly ploughed up for crops during the war and would never get back to its mellowed pasture again. The formal garden had been maintained, and there was a putting course on the lawn in front of the gravel sweep. The interior was gracious and not too chintzy, attractive to the American, but a little sad to an English person who could imagine it as the private home it could never be again.

He took her straight to the bar, which was in what used to be the gunroom. A few rifles and an old blunderbuss still stood in the racks to make the bar picturesque, and two stags’ heads and an assortment of stuffed game stared frozenly from the walls.

The American ordered drinks quickly. Alcohol seemed very necessary to him, and he did not speak until drinks came. He looked critically at the size of the glass, downed half his drink and then looked round more happily.

‘Chuck was right,’ he said. ‘This is quite a place. All the atmosphere you want. I wonder if the family left these hunting trophies behind when they sold the place.’

‘Oh, that isn’t hunting,’ said Christine, wishing to enlighten rather than correct. ‘Hunting is only what you do with hounds. Foxes and hares and otters, and drag hunts with aniseed. This is shooting.’

‘Mm-hm.’ He did not pay much attention. In America, shooting was called hunting, and that was that.

An elderly manageress in creased black silk, with a tilt to her hennaed head that hinted at better days, came to ask them if they were taking lunch, because it was quite ready. She meant that if the kitchen staff did not get off on time they would give notice, but the American ordered another drink and they stayed in the bar for quite a time before they went into the diningroom.

It was a dignified, high-ceilinged room with panelled walls and french windows leading to the rose garden. The small restaurant table and wooden chairs looked as out of place as village children at the annual party in the baronial hall.

There were only a few people lunching, because the season had scarcely begun. One of the couples had two small boys, evidently on a day out from a local boarding-school. They were very little boys, with button noses and slicked-back hair and dangling legs that would have looked more at home in shorts than in their long school uniform trousers. Their parents were too old for them. The father looked bored and the mother ate carefully, having trouble with her teeth and the rhubarb pie.

An elderly couple were obviously residents, for they had sauce jars and a packet of crispbread and a bottle of medicine and a half-empty bottle of Empire wine on their table. The two other people in the room were young and meekly self-conscious. They spoke in whispers, not watching each other eat, and trying not to look as if they enjoyed the food. They might be honeymooners, adventuring into more expensive places than they were used to, but secretly regretting that they had not stuck to the teashops where they had done their courting.

Christine did not know whether the American would enjoy watching and commenting on people in restaurants, so she said nothing, while he studied the menu.

‘The chicken sounds the safest,’ he said, with the experience of one who has spent two weeks in England. ‘How would that suit you, Miss Cope?’

‘Please don’t call me that. It reminds me of the shop.’

‘All right, Christine,’ he said. ‘Soup then, and the chicken? And we could try their apple pie.’

The waitress was setting tables for dinner at the other end of the room. He finally caught her eye; and when she had taken the order, Christine asked: ‘What shall I call you then? Vinson is a sort of difficult name. I couldn’t call you that.’

‘It’s a family name,’ he said a little stiffly. ‘I’m proud to bear it.’

It was another of these rather difficult moments when one of them unintentionally offended the other by having a different point of view. An American did not see anything odd in being called Vinson. Their minds went away from each other, but he brought them together again by saying: ‘Some of my friends call me Vin. I wish you’d call me that.’

‘Sounds like a bath cleaner,’ she said and laughed. ‘I like it,’ she added quickly before her laugh could push his friendliness away again. ‘Well, here’s to you, Vin.’ She raised the glass of water which he had asked the waitress to pour.

‘Here’s to us,’ he said, and she dropped her eyes in sudden dismay before the brown-and-amber gaze of his. Don’t try and tie me down, her thoughts fluttered. Don’t let’s start all that. We’ll never be anything to each other, and I can’t be bothered to play the game of pretending that we might.

When she looked up his eyes had moved away, and after that he was friendly and quite casual towards her. They had coffee in the sunny drawing-room and looked at magazines, and Christine tried to explain the jokes in Punch to him. The manageress, who roamed uneasily through the house like a family ghost, came in and told them a long story about when she had been to America with her husband, now, alas, passed away with the full glory of a military funeral.

They escaped from her and went out to the putting course. Vinson started by letting Christine win the first two holes, but when he saw that she was quite skilful he competed seriously against her and was pleased when he won.

They stopped for tea on the way home. The evening was warm and smelled of summer. Cresting a hill, they saw London lying before them in a clear sea of sunset, remote as a mirage.

When they reached streets and people again, Vinson said: ‘You’ll come and have dinner with me, won’t you, Christine?’

‘I can’t very well. I’m not dressed for it.’ She was wearing a tweed suit with a yellow sweater, which would not be suitable for the kind of place he might want to go.

An Englishman would have said: ‘What does it matter?’ scarcely noticing what she wore, and leaving her to bear any embarrassment that might arise; but the American, trained to take women seriously, said: ‘I see your difficulty. We’ll go to the club then. I can get you a steak there, a real steak like you can’t get anywhere else.’

It sounded better than going home to family cold supper and the remains of the day’s washing-up to be done, and Geoffrey disgruntled because he had not had his game of chess and Aunt Josephine did not make his bed tightly enough.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘but don’t think I’m accepting only from greed. I seem to have done nothing but eat all day.’

‘It’s been a good day, hasn’t it?’ He turned to look at her with his black eyebrows raised.

She said: ‘Oh yes, lovely,’ and he seemed relieved, and said: ‘I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I wanted you to.’

It was too early to eat, so Vinson suggested that they should go up to his hotel room, where he had a bottle of whisky. If Christine said no, it would have looked as if she feared he had designs on her, so she went up to his room with him, hoping that he had not.

He was very proper. He poured out whisky and showed her his colour photographs and made it seem so unlike a bedroom that she did not have to avoid looking at the bed, but could even sit on it and take off her shoes.

They talked for a while. They were friendly together. Vinson suddenly said: ‘You’re very kind to me. Why are you so kind?’

‘Why? Because I like you, I suppose.’

‘Do you? I certainly hope you do.’ He was standing in the middle of the room, poised on the balls of his feet, and she thought then that if she had given the smallest sign he would have come over to the bed. She got up, pulling down her skirt and wanting to hitch her suspenders.

‘Well, I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘What about that steak?’

He took his eyes off her and went quietly to get her coat.

The steak was enormous. It was so big and garnished with so many fried potatoes and onions that it had to be on an oval dish instead of a plate. When it was set in front of Christine she thought it was for the two of them and began to cut it in half, but another oval dish the same size was set in front of Vinson, who attacked it without surprise. Christine was left with half the steak on her plate, and she said that she wished she could put it in a paper bag and take it home for the dogs. Vinson laughed, to make sure that this was only meant to be a joke.

The roads were empty when he took her home, and he drove fast, enjoying the car and not speaking much. When they stopped outside the badly hung gate of ‘Roselawn’ and he said he would not come in, she thought, as she turned to him to say good-bye: Oh dear, now he will try to kiss me, and I don’t want him to. I shan’t know whether he is only doing it because he thinks he ought, and I’ve got indigestion.

He did not try to kiss her. He got out of the car, came round the back and opened the door for her. He shook hands and accepted her thanks politely. She was glad that he had not kissed her, but when he had gone she felt a little deflated. As she went into the house she realized that he had not contemplated kissing her, had not wanted to kiss her, and the sunny day fell away behind her in discouragement as she went to the kitchen to find the bicarbonate of soda, tiptoeing past the drawing-room, so that Aunt Josephine should not call out: ‘Come and tell us about your day!’

On Tuesday afternoon Vinson came into the shop and said that since he was just passing by he had come to see if she would care to meet him for a drink after work. Christine had to refuse, because Geoffrey was to be allowed his first outing tonight, and she was to take him. He would not be driven in Mr Cope’s car, so she would have to hurry home and get his own car from the garage.

When she told him this, Vinson did not register disappointment. He dropped the invitation quickly, as if he had never made it.

They talked for a while rather stiltedly, as if they hardly knew each other, and Christine found it hard to believe that she had spent a day in the country with him and had sat on his bed chatting and drinking whisky. He asked dutifully after her family, and was carefully solicitous about Geoffrey’s health, although he had never met him.

The book department was busy, and she did not want to stand talking to him. He was in uniform, and the eyes of her assistants were on him, Christine excused herself, and he went away without smiling, briskly, as if he were bent on going to find someone else to have a drink with him.

After that he did not telephone, and he did not come back to the shop. Alice said: ‘What happened to that handsome sailor of yours, Miss Cope? We don’t seem to see so much of him these days.’

She rattled on. Alice was always talking. You could not stop her. When she could not talk to the other assistants she talked to the customers, and they did not always like it.

‘You given him the chuck, Miss Cope?’ she went on. ‘I’ll have him, if you don’t want him.’

‘He’s gone away,’ said Christine.

‘Oh dear, what a pity. I thought it was so nice for you.’ She looked down on Christine from her height of nineteen years and a different boy friend for every day of the week.

Margaret was back at work now, pale and disappointingly reluctant to discuss the baby. Christine always told her everything, but she found herself not telling her about Vinson Gaegler, in case Margaret should ask what had become of him.

Christine often wondered what had become of him. She wondered for two weeks, and then decided that he had gone back to America.

Geoffrey went home at last, wearing a broad piece of sticking plaster rakishly over one eye.

‘Chaps in the office will think I’ve been in a fight,’ he said, not displeased that he should be thought the young devil he was not.

He was delighted to go home, which was natural enough, if a little ungrateful. His good-byes were brief. He had never learned how to say thank you properly, but the next day roses arrived for Christine and an azalea plant for Aunt Josephine, without a card, but from the most stylish flower shop in London, which would obviously be Geoffrey’s choice.

‘Well now, you see,’ said Aunt Josephine, fussing delightedly over the plant and trying it in half a dozen places in the kitchen to see where it would be happiest, ‘perhaps you have maligned poor Geoffrey after all. This is really very pleasant of him.’

‘It was you who was always maligning him, and saying you would rather nurse a wardful of old men with bladder trouble,’ Christine said. ‘Why don’t you put that plant in the drawing-room where everyone can see it?’

‘It’s my plant and I want to see it, and I’m more often in the kitchen than anywhere else, with the drudging life I lead.’

‘Look here, Aunt Jo, you know I’d help you more if only you’d let me, but you always think no one can do anything right except you.’

‘Nor they can,’ said Aunt Josephine, pushing a questing cat away from the azalea. ‘You never clean your saucepans.’

‘Oh, I do! It’s you who always leaves the sink piled up with pots and pans until finally you’ve nothing left to cook with.’

‘I won’t argue with you,’ said her aunt. ‘Answer the bell, there’s a good girl. That will be Rhona, I expect. Did I forget to tell you? She telephoned this afternoon to say she was coming to see you.’

Rhona had been Christine’s crony at school. Unlike most of her other school friends, who had disappeared soon after into the limbo of marriage to dull men and chit-chat about the price of baby foods, Rhona had remained close when they were first grown up and even after her marriage to an ambitious and rather common man, whom Christine and Rhona used to laugh at when they were single girls together.

Christine did not laugh at him now, because he was Rhona’s husband, but Rhona still laughed at him, mainly for that reason.

When they had talked to Aunt Josephine for a while, they went upstairs to ruffle through Christine’s wardrobe to see whether there was anything that would do for Rhona. They were about the same size, which comforted Christine, for Rhona did not look too fat, and was much admired.

They had been wearing each other’s clothes for years, and before Rhona was married they often shared boy friends as well, and had to be careful that they did not both wear the same dress with the same man. Not that it would have mattered, because Christine’s clothes looked different and smarter on Rhona than they did on her, and she could not wear Rhona’s jaunty dresses with the same élan.

Rhona pulled out a paisley silk dress that Christine had no intention of letting her have, and squirmed before the mirror, trying to see her back view in it.

‘You don’t want this,’ she stated.

‘I do. You’re not having it.’

‘I look better in this thing than you ever did.’

‘I like it, and I’ve only had it about a month –’

‘You’d look far nicer in that green of mine with all the buttons. I’ll swop it for this. Dan says the green is the wrong colour for my skin, and he does know about clothes, if nothing else.’

‘How is he?’ asked Christine. ‘Look, you can have this red blouse if you like. I’m sick of it.’

‘Thanks.’ Rhona had her head in the wardrobe again. ‘Dan? Oh, he’s much about the same. That’s his trouble. He’s got nothing left to surprise me with any more. Even when he’s being mean I know just what he’s going to say.’

She turned round, holding a white organdie evening dress against her. ‘Look, here’s this old thing. I always try it on and it’s always too big. Must be for you too. Lord, we must have been fat sows in those days, and we thought we were such sirens. Why don’t you give it to Aunt Jo for her nuns? They would make it into nightdresses for fallen women or something. I always loved it on you, though. You wore it at Oxford the year before the war. I wore that red-and-yellow topless number, and that dreadful spotty friend of Carl’s said I looked like a tulip. It seems centuries ago. My God.’ She sat down on the bed with the white dress crumpled on her lap. ‘What’s happened to us, Chris? I feel dreadfully old.’

‘We did have fun,’ said Christine, remembering. ‘We were silly, but I wish it had lasted longer.’

‘Was it us, was it us,’ mourned Rhona, ‘you and I, who drove up to Oxford in that dear little red car of mine, cutting such a dash, with a gramophone in the back playing “Goody Goody”? Now that you can have radios in cars it isn’t fun any more. Was it us who danced all night and didn’t go to bed for days on end and drifted about on the river and cruised from party to party and thought those awful callow young men were so exciting? Have you still got that picture taken after breakfast at the Magdalen dance? No, don’t bring it out. I don’t think I could bear to look at it. You keep it because of Jerry, I suppose. There you are. That was really romantic. You and Jerry. Things like that don’t happen when you get older.’

‘I sometimes wonder,’ Christine said slowly, standing with her back to the dressing-table and looking at her friend, whose bright face had become harder and bolder through the years of marriage to an unsubtle, successful man, ‘whether we were really so happy then as we think we were, looking back on it now. I don’t think I’d like to go back to being eighteen. I was awfully shy, and I used to care too much what people thought. It’s probably better being thirty-four. I don’t mind about parties now. If I don’t like them, I go home; but in those days, if you didn’t like a party, you thought there was something wrong with you, not the party.’

‘Well, I wasn’t shy,’ said Rhona, smiling. ‘Better if I had been, perhaps. I’d never have ended up at Bow Street with that awful Italian. Remember how we worked to keep it from Father? I’d love to go back to being eighteen again, though, mind you, I’d handle things a bit differently.’

She lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. ‘And I sometimes wonder where it’s all gone to, all the things I thought life was going to be for me. Of course it’s different for you.’ She turned her head to look critically at Christine. ‘You didn’t get married. I wish you would, though,’ she said illogically, and then switching back, closing her eyes: ‘Oh, you know, Chris, I do really envy you, having a room to yourself. You can read all night if you want to, without someone keeping waking up and looking at his watch and cursing. Dan’s so big to have around. I don’t know. And he won’t stick to his dressing-room, and you know what? I just hate the smell of men’s shoes.’

‘I’m sure you’d hate far worse being a spinster,’ Christine said lightly. ‘Come on, try on that awful hat if you want to, and let’s go down and feed the dogs.’

‘Yes, I suppose I would hate it,’ said Rhona with a sigh, swinging her legs off the bed and feeling for her shoes. ‘Poor Chris. It must be dreadful for you really. I wish you’d get married and have lots of children and I’d be their godmother. Isn’t there anyone you could possibly …?’

They reviewed the list of Christine’s men friends, which was not extensive and not very satisfactory.

‘You know,’ said Rhona, ‘I often wish you’d married that Maurice. He wouldn’t have given you any trouble. Except that it would have been sort of uncomfortable if he went about being so embarrassed all the time. Haven’t you got anyone new on the tapis?’ she asked, making a disgruntled face at her reflection under the benighted black hat which Christine had bought hastily for a funeral and never worn since. ‘What about that American Aunt Jo was talking about?’

Aunt Josephine was always talking about Vinson Gaegler. He had made a great hit with her. Whenever she put any of the food he had brought on the table, she would say: ‘By courtesy of the U.S. Navy’, and Mr Cope would say: ‘I don’t know that I like being treated like a distressed person’, and attack the ham or the American bacon with gusto.

‘Well, what about him?’ repeated Rhona, throwing down the hat and stopping to rifle Christine’s sweater drawer. ‘Does he give you nylons? How did you meet him? Can I have this yellow cardigan? What’s he like? Tell me all.’

Christine told her. It was often easier to tell things to Rhona than to less frivolous people. ‘He was quite nice really,’ she ended. ‘His mother lives in Kaloomis, Kansas. But he was evidently only ships that pass in the night. I ‘ve written him off.’

‘Oh, but you mustn’t!’ cried Rhona, who never wrote off the possibilities of a man until he was dead. ‘Look here, I’ve got two tickets I don’t want for the Royal Command film show. Ask him to that.’

‘He’s probably gone back to America.’

‘Well,’ said Rhona patiently.’ Ring up the hotel and find out.’

‘But I don’t think I could ask him, Ro. He’d think I was chasing him, and I’m not. He’s not so fascinating.’

‘He’s an American, and that’s something different from the stuffy old Empire builders you and I plug on with,’ said Rhona, speaking as if she were still as unattached as Christine.’ Let’s be thankful for that.’

‘Well, but I couldn’t –’

‘Of course you could. Most natural thing in the world. You’ll be just kindly offering to show him the sights of London. He’s bound to come if he thinks he’s going to get a look at royalty. You know what Americans are. I’ll send you the tickets, and don’t you dare take Aunt Jo. Don’t tell her, or she’ll want to go, because it’s a Stewart Granger film.’

When her aunt and father were safely in the drawing-room, Christine went to the telephone, which had been first installed in the draughty hall years ago and had never been moved to a more convenient place.

Nervously she half hoped to hear the hotel operator tell her that Commander Gaegler had left, but while she was waiting for her to say that, Vinson came on the line, using his clipped telephone voice.

When she told him who she was, he sounded friendly. ‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Good to hear your voice after all this time’, although it was his fault that he had not heard it before. He accepted the invitation with pleasure, noted the time and place to meet her, and rang off without further conversation.

As the film show was too early for Christine to have time to go home and change, she took her paisley silk dress to the shop and changed into it and did her face in the cloakroom after work. Some of the other girls were also getting ready to go out, changing into clean blouses, or adding scarves or jewellery to brighten up their black work dresses.

Alice, with her tongue in the corner of her mouth, was sitting in her petticoat, tacking a large square of lace collar on to her dress, which a woman’s magazine had told her was ‘a cute trick for busy girls to turn day into night with that little black dress’.

‘Going on the loose, Miss Cope?’ she asked. ‘That’s ever such a pretty dress; though, of course, I always say prints are trying. Excuse me, dear.’ She leaned forward. ‘You’ve got a blotch of powder on one side of your nose.’

Christine took out her puff again and fluffed it off. The light in the cloakroom mirror was too dim to do your face properly, and she did not think she looked very nice this evening. She had washed her hair last night and changed the side of the parting, in the innocent hope that this might make Vinson find her more attractive than before, and it kept trying to flop back to the other side.

She told him to meet her in the bar of a hotel near the shop, and he was there waiting for her with two martinis and more potato crisps and salted nuts than anyone else on the little round table before him.

He jumped up and fussed over settling her coat on the back of the chair. As they sat down, Christine wondered why she had worried about not hearing from him for more than two weeks. He had not enough substance for a man, and his face, in spite of heavy black eyebrows, was inconsequent, with its short, incurious nose and small chin. His eyes were unusual, however: dark when he looked away, but seeming light when he looked at you, staring, as he often did.

He stared at her now as they drank their cocktails, and made a flattering comment on her dress. Christine thought that was just his polite American habit, and brushed it aside.

‘Why don’t English women know how to take compliments?’ he said. ‘If you tell an American girl you like her dress, she’ll say: “Thank you”, and look pleased, but an English woman just mumbles: “Oh, this old rag? It isn’t really.”’ His attempt at an English accent was so funny that Christine laughed, and he laughed too and spoke some more English, and they began to have a good time together.

They waited in the crowded foyer of the cinema to see the royal family arrive. Christine was excited to see a few English film-stars, the women making the most of small bosoms in strapless dresses, and the men smaller than heroes should be, with bad complexions. She pointed them out to the American, but he had not heard of them. He was intent on trying to stay near the door, so that he could get a good view of royalty.

Several other people were intent on the same thing; and when the uniformed ushers and the thin officious men in tail-coats began to push them back to clear a lane through the centre, the scented, well-dressed crowd jostled and battled almost as violently as the street crowd outside battled behind the arms of the amiable policemen.

A cheer began to murmur down the street, swelled to a growing roar, and became a clamour of distinguishable shouts and cries as the royal car slid up to the end of the red carpet. Peering over the furred shoulders of the woman in front of them, who smelled of exotic boudoirs, Christine and Vinson saw the Queen cross the pavement and step into the foyer in a lilac-coloured crinoline, with a pleased smile for the photographers.

After her, into the sucked-in murmur of: ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ stepped Princess Margaret in white with a white fur, looking as if she felt as attractive as she looked.

‘The Princess!’ breathed Vinson Gaegler, visibly moved. ‘My, she’s a honey. I wish I had my camera.’

Christine was glad he had not, although flash-bulbs were popping all round.

‘Is that the King?’ he asked, as a tall man with a white carnation in his tail-coat followed the Princess and her mother into the cinema.

‘Of course not, silly.’ Christine shushed him, because he had spoken loudly, and people looked at him. ‘That’s just someone who’s with them, same as that other girl in black. She’s a lady-in-waiting.’

‘Well, who are they?’ he persisted, wanting to miss nothing of the show. He was surprised that she did not know the names of all the British aristocracy in the royal entourage. The Queen and Princess stayed a few minutes, shaking hands with the line of film personages who were waiting to be introduced, and he stood on tiptoe and stared intently, with his throat working.

‘Gosh,’ he said, sinking back on his heels with a sigh as the royal party disappeared. ‘That’s a thing I shan’t forget. Those two lovely women, and all the dignity and homage. It’s the finest thing your country has to show a foreigner.’

‘I’m glad you like the royal family,’ Christine said, as they moved slowly with the crowd to find their seats. ‘Some people pretend they think it’s silly to make such a fuss of them, although they probably read everything about them avidly in secret.’

‘I like it fine,’ he said. ‘For your country, of course. It wouldn’t do for ours.’

When they were in their seats, waiting for the lights to dim, Christine said: ‘Why wouldn’t a monarchy do for the States? Americans always get so excited about the King and Queen. Why wouldn’t they like to have a pair of their own?’

‘Americans,’ he said seriously, ‘swear allegiance to the flag, not to any one person. We admire your royal family as emblems of the old world, but they would have no part in ours. When people talk about a closer tie between the two countries – absorbing Britain right into the United States – they forget that there’s one major reason why it could never work. We wouldn’t accept your monarchy, and you wouldn’t relinquish it.’

Christine could think of several other reasons why England could not be absorbed into the United States, but a roll of drums brought everyone to their feet as the orchestra laid down the first challenging notes, and the Queen came smiling to the front of the royal box to accept the swelling anthem of God Save the King.

When the film was over and the royal party had left, they had to wait in the foyer while the police settled a minor riot outside, in which a male film-star lost his tie and coat buttons to the shrieking crowd. There would be pictures of it in the papers tomorrow, and Christine would be able to talk about it at work and say she had been there.

At last they managed to push their way out on to the disorderly pavement, where a host of women who should have had something better to do were still milling about in and out of the gutter, exchanging badinage with the policemen.

Coming out of the cinema, Christine hoped they would think she was somebody, but all the film-stars had gone now, and the crowd was not interested in the people coming out. They were just interested in being a crowd, which would not be moved on before it felt like it.

Vinson took Christine to dinner in an underground restaurant with a dance floor. He had not booked a table, and they were stowed away at a tiny table in a corner, where they did not get good service, but Vinson thought the waiters were just being English, and did not seem to mind.

He danced well, holding her lightly, and his steps were easy to follow. It was the year of scarcity of good new tunes, and the band, like bands at Broadcasting House and all over the country, were playing old tunes from the thirties. When they played ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’ he sang it softly in her ear as if he meant it, but when the music stopped and they stood apart, he looked round the room at the other dancers and seemed to have forgotten her.

When they were dancing after dinner he laid the side of his head against her cheek, and the short hair above his ears felt bristly, and his skin smelled nice, but it did not mean anything. It was just his way of dancing.

When it was time to go and he had paid the bill, with a large enough tip, Christine was glad to see, because foreigners sometimes did not work it out right in a strange currency, he put both hands on the table and said, staring at her: ‘Did you like the flowers I sent?’

‘Flowers? You sent -? Did you? I’m afraid–’

‘Roses,’ he said, ‘to go with your cheeks. And a plant for your aunt.’ The rhyme sounded funny, like ants in your pants.

‘My goodness,’ said Christine, ‘were those from you? We thought they were from Geoffrey.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, why not?’

‘There was no card with them.’

‘No,’ he said, getting up. ‘I thought perhaps you’d guess.’

He was silent on the drive home, and Christine thought that she had hurt him, but it was his own fault. How could she guess? And suppose she had thought they were from him … How awful if she had thanked him, and they were not.

When he stopped the car outside her gate he switched off the engine, got out and opened the door for her. He took her hand, and they stood for a moment by the car, looking at each other without speaking.

‘Christine,’ he said, ‘I’m going to pay you a compliment. I’m not going to kiss you. I like you too much, and respect you for what you are.’

This was not as flattering as he meant it to be. Christine said: ‘Oh’, and turned towards the gate, and he squeezed her fingers and said: ‘Good night, Christ’, accenting the last syllable of her name in the way he did.

After that he took her out quite often. They went to the theatre, and he took her to dinner at the Air Force club again, and one Saturday she took him out to Luton Hoo, where he insisted on looking at nearly every one of the hundreds of treasures, which exhausted her.

He had boundless energy. He was never tired, and when they were out together he was always looking at his watch to see if they could fit in one more thing than they had planned. When they went sightseeing in London it was not enough for him to see just the Tower and Westminster Abbey, which to Christine was a day’s work, but he insisted on stopping off at St Paul’s, and then dragging her up the hundreds of steps of the Monument in Billingsgate. He went up in front of her, swinging his neat little bottom up the spiral stone steps and flattening himself politely against the grubby walls, where despairing climbers had scrawled their names, when he met anyone coming down. When Christine reached the top he was already studying the map on the parapet and trying to identify every church spire.

She leaned against the parapet, looking out over the sooty view with a singing head and watery legs.

‘Come and look at the map,’ he said, staring out into space like a captain on the bridge, his clipped hair unruffled by the wind. ‘It makes it much more interesting.’

‘I can’t. I’m out of breath. I’m too fat for such a climb.’

‘You’re not fat,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘I like your shape. And when you climb up all those steps it makes your cheeks glow. Your complexion is beautiful. I like that too.’

‘Do you?’ She looked at him, wishing he would look at her.

‘Oh sure. It’s odd, there’s a domed church over there I can’t seem to identify.’ He dismissed the subject he had started, as he often did if you took him up on a personal note.

Although he would seldom talk intimately, she was seeing him often enough to learn quite a lot about him. He talked to her about his early life in Kaloomis, Kansas, and about how fine it had been at Annapolis, where he was a Star Man, and he told her about his career in the Navy, of which he was proud. He was always saying: ‘Look, I’m a professional naval officer’, to qualify an opinion about the American Navy, or the war, or the navy of any other country.

He knew that the American Navy was the finest in the world. Christine knew that the British Navy was the finest in the world, but she did not argue about it. She was learning to avoid Anglo-American arguments, which were frustrating and got you nowhere. He was American. She was English. Nothing could alter that, and so, if you wanted to be friends, you had to accept the differences of opinion caused by an accident of birth.

With this growing realization that they must always be different in so many ways, she did not worry so much about who was right and who was wrong. He used his knife and fork in one way, she in another. He pronounced certain words differently, and said things like ‘hospitalization’, but who was she to criticize? He might just as well have criticized her for saying ‘going to hospital’. As she began to like him increasingly and to feel a friendliness in his company, she began to be just slightly shaken in her ingrained belief that because whatever you did or said was English it must be right.

He came to lunch at ‘Roselawn’ one Sunday, bringing another parcel of food and chocolate, and got into an argument with Roger about Marshall Aid, which made the meal boring for everyone else. They were both opinionated, but Roger, being a Cope, took the argument in his stride, while Vinson took it seriously and wanted to go on with it after Roger had tired of the subject and everyone was talking about something else.

Roger had said: ‘You Yanks think you’re the only people who know how to live, but really you’re the only country in the world which hasn’t begun to know what life’s about.’ Christine knew that Vinson was hurt by this, but she could not rouse herself to his defence. The Copes always banded together against outsiders, and it took more than her courage to champion the wrong side, because the family would have said to themselves: ‘Here, here, what’s all this? She is interested in this chap.’

None of the family except Aunt Josephine seemed to like Vinson very much, but Christine went on asking him home, because she knew he liked it. He was envious of her family life. He wanted to be part of it. He liked her best when she was at home, moving about with trays, or sitting quietly with some sewing in the drawing-room, while the men talked. Although he came from the New World, he was old-fashioned in many ways, and he liked to think that she was old-fashioned too.

He gave courteous attention to her father, whom he admired as a literary figure. There were so many overpublicized new authors in the States that every American at this time was thinking he would like to write a book; and to get something published, even if it was only a translation of someone else’s work, was to Vinson a marvellous thing. He tried very hard with Christine’s father, but even when he talked to him about his work, Mr Cope was still suspicious of him as a foreigner and would not react properly.

Vinson also tried very hard with the dogs and cats, which were such a centre of interest and conversation in the house. Christine’s dog would go to anyone, but the cats were wary of him and would not go to him to be petted. This was the only thing that caused any doubt to Aunt Josephine. She set great store by the opinions of her cats.

Christine continued to see Vinson Gaegler quite often, and it was not long before the family were referring to him as ‘Christine’s boy friend’, and making insinuating remarks which they thought were funny. If she had told them that he had never kissed her they would not have believed it.

There came quite suddenly a very warm day, when spring was summer before its time. All day, moving about the book department, Christine had seen the sun flooding the pavement beyond the glass doors, and had looked with jealousy at the women who came in from outside, caught unawares by the sudden heat, wearing last summer’s dresses.

Mr Parker, shut in his stuffy little office, did not know whether it was Christmas or Easter, but all his assistants were restless, and longed to get out for their lunch-hour.

Christine had told Vinson that on the next sunny day she would walk up to Grosvenor Square and sit with him on the bench where they had first met. She was in the cloakroom getting ready to go out when Margaret Drew came down and found her by the grubby washbasins.

‘I changed my lunch-time,’ Margaret said. ‘Old Burman wanted me to go with her to that awful teashop that smells of fish, and I just couldn’t bear it. Let’s buy sandwiches and go and sit in the Park. I never see anything of you these days. You never come to supper any more. You’re always out with that little American with the funny name.’

Margaret knew about Vinson Gaegler by now. Everyone in the book department knew about him, because he sometimes came to fetch Christine at the shop, where he was known as ‘Miss Cope’s American’, as established as he was at home as ‘Christine’s boy friend’.

Because Margaret had said: ‘You’re always going out with that little American with the funny name’, Christine could not tell her that she was planning to meet Vinson now, so she put him out of her mind and went up the stone steps into the sunshine with Margaret.

They bought twice as many sandwiches as they needed, because ever since the war, sandwiches had one side that was just plain bread, so you had to throw away the dry bread side and put two spread sides together to make them edible. They walked down Piccadilly to Green Park and found two empty chairs among the crowd of lunch-time workers who had come to open out like crocuses to the sun.

Margaret ate her sandwiches quickly and wished they had brought more.

‘It must be wonderful to be able to eat as much as you want without worrying about getting fat, because you know you’re going to get fat soon, anyway,’ Christine said. ‘What’s it feel like, having a baby?’

‘Queer,’ Margaret said. ‘You get breathless if you talk too much. And it’s not so much fun being able to eat a lot, because there are so many things you can’t face. Laurie always wants to have salami and liver sausage, and I can hardly sit at the table with it.’

‘Why don’t you tell him? He wouldn’t eat it. He’s always so sweet and considerate.’

‘I don’t want to make any more fuss than I have to. It’s bad enough for him as it is.’

‘Bad? I should think it was marvellous for him having a baby after all this time.’

‘That’s the trouble. By this time we’ve got organized into being able to manage fairly comfortably, just the three of us, and keep Bobby at the school the Drews have always gone to, and not have to give up that silly old big house, which Laurie adores. But now there’ll be all this expense with the baby. Laurie insists on me having a private room. He says no wife of his is going into a public ward, though it’s silly when I’ve been paying five shillings a week all this time to let the Government have my baby for me.’

‘I’d like a public ward,’ said Christine, ‘except for the communal bed-pans. I’d like to lie on my side and discuss symptoms with the woman in the next bed.’

‘So would I, but you know what Laurie is. And then there’ll be all the clothes to get. I gave away all Bobby’s things years ago. And after this one is born I shan’t be able to work, because of looking after it, and I just don’t see how we’re going to manage. I tell you what it is, Chris. We just can’t afford to have a baby.’

‘Oh, Maggie, don’t. No one says that.’

‘Well, I don’t, but Laurie does. He sat looking at me the other night, at the spot where I can’t do up the button on that yellow housecoat any more, and he said, with a face as long as a boot: “We can’t really afford to have this baby.”’

‘He said that to you? Oh, poor Maggie –’

‘Well, why shouldn’t he?’ Margaret shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s true.’

‘But one just doesn’t say those things to a wife.’

‘My dear Chris, when you’ve been married fourteen years you say the truth to each other. After all that time you’re like one person, so if it doesn’t hurt you, you don’t think it will hurt the other.’

Christine was shocked, not only at Laurie’s remark, but by Margaret’s cool acceptance of the dreadful thing he had said. How little one knew about one’s married friends – the happily married ones who did not quarrel in public and seemed to have made a natural circumstance of the fusing of two lives. One knew nothing really about their marriage, because it was only significant when they were alone together. That was when the important things happened.

Walking back to the shop, Christine thought about the mythical, romantic marriage that she sometimes imagined for herself, and tried to picture it reaching the stage when you were so used to each other that one could say a hurtful thing without the other minding. But, like the magazine stories, her imagined marriage never got much farther than the wedding day and the picture of herself in a frilly apron waiting for his key in the lock in her bright little kitchen. It did not embrace the realities of familiarity. The dream would lose its charm if it did.

At a quarter past five Vinson came into the shop with his cap set perfectly straight on his head and his eyes narrowed to a gleam under his black brows.

Christine was busy with a customer. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him waiting impatiently, pretending to look at books. When she was free he came quickly up to her and caught her arm above the elbow, pinching a nerve against the bone.

‘Why didn’t you come to Grosvenor Square at noon?’ he asked, his voice strangely uneven and rough.

‘I’m sorry,’ Christine said. ‘I went out with Margaret. I hope you didn’t wait too long.’

‘I waited an hour for you, that’s all, and didn’t get any lunch,’ he said, sticking out his lower lip.

‘That’s a shame.’ He was cross, so she spoke lightly, trying to make him not cross by pretending not to notice it. ‘But we hadn’t exactly made a definite date, had we?’

‘You said you would meet me there if it was sunny,’ he said. ‘Well, it was sunny today, and you didn’t come.’

Christine apologized again, but he would not be appeased, and because he continued to be cross she ceased to feel sorry. She drew him behind the bay of the classics section, where no one could see them.

‘Look here,’ she said, ‘you’re being silly to make such a fuss. If I couldn’t come, I couldn’t, that’s all. Don’t behave as if you owned me.’

‘When I make a date with a girl I expect her to keep it. You said you’d be there and you weren’t, and that’s no way to act.’

‘Don’t lecture me.’

‘I will, goddamn it, if you need it.’

They had quite a quarrel there behind the rows of collected editions. They had never had a real quarrel before, and Christine did not like it. Vinson was petty and petulant, and Christine thought that if he was going to be like this it was not worth while having anything to do with him.

‘You just didn’t take time out to think whether I’d be waiting for you,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mean a thing to you. You wouldn’t care if I went back to America tomorrow.’

‘Probably not,’ she retorted. ‘Why? Would you?’ Her voice was rising with his, and then he suddenly spoke softly and pulled them both down to normal, as a telegraph pole seems to pull down the rising wires as you pass them in a train.

‘Yes, I would,’ he said very sweetly, and he smiled at her and her own easy smile spread quickly, because he had made it all right.

‘I really am sorry, Vin,’ she said, touching his arm. ‘Margaret gets a bit low these days. You know, she’s going to have a baby, and so I thought–’

‘Don’t start on explanations,’ he said. “Forget it. You should never try to hold post-mortems after a quarrel’s been stopped. Don’t you know that? Let it drop, and forget the excuses.’

She liked him when he told her how to behave. She liked to think that he was wise and knew more about life than she did, so she readily became complaisant, and when he said: ‘I’ve only got an hour, because we’ve got a late conference coming up, so go and ask if you can get away now,’ she went obediently to seek Mr Parker’s permission, and hurried out to meet Vinson at the Jermyn Street door.

They drove up to Regent’s Park and walked a little way over the grass. A bushy hedge made an angle of retreat from the open space where people were walking home across the Park, and he took her hand and made her sit down there, and then he kissed her.

When he had been kissing her for a little while, and putting his hands on her body, Christine realized that she had been wanting him to kiss her for a long time.

‘Why didn’t you do this before?’ she asked, pulling away from him and lying back on the grass, which was fresh and new and not yet soured by the treadings of a hundred picnics.

He turned, resting on the flat of his hand, and looked at her. He had lipstick on his mouth, but it looked all right. ‘Did you want me to, Christine?’

‘No,’ she lied, ‘I never thought about it.’

‘Well, I did. But I didn’t think you’d care for it too much. I didn’t know – I don’t know – whether anyone else had more right than I to kiss you.’

‘No.’

‘I thought maybe your cousin – you’d been going to parties with him, and there was that day you wouldn’t come out with me because of him, and you thought he’d sent the flowers.’

‘Geoffrey?’ Christine laughed and sat up. ‘Oh, Vin, if you could see him! Fancy thinking that. Men are funny.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They are funny like this. They like to do this.’

He was extremely nice to kiss, and, oddly, it felt familiar and right, as if he had been making love to her for months. Time stopped, and there were only two of them in the world. It seemed like that to her, but he suddenly raised his head and looked at his watch and stood up, brushing grass off his uniform. A naval officer is never late for a conference. Even love comes second to the United States Navy.

‘Stick around in town,’ he said,’ and meet me later and we’ll drive out to the country and find somewhere nice to eat.’

‘I will,’ she said, sitting on the grass and dreamily tidying her hair, ‘if you’ll kiss me again afterwards.’

‘Why, Christine, I thought you were so proper,’ he said, looking pleased.

‘I am really. You’d be surprised.’

‘We shall see.’ He pulled her to her feet, and Christine thought: I could stop this now, or let it go on; but she did not have any will to decide, and it did not seem to matter.

She put her arms round him. ‘Don’t go for a moment,’ she said, but he did not move close to her. Looking back on this, long afterwards, she saw that this was the first of all the many times she had said to him: ‘Don’t go’, and he had put the Navy first, until soon she began to hate it.

Things were changed after that. Christine went out with Vinson nearly every night. He let her have the car, and she would drive herself home after she had been with him, come to work in the car in the mornings and then fetch him at the naval headquarters after she came out of the shop.

She thought that when he had gone back to America she would never again drive down North Audley Street, past the red-brick corner building where the transient American sailors, loosely hung together, waited with white seabags, and the neat naval wives came out of the commissary store with huge brown-paper bags, without remembering Vinson. Whether she would remember him with or without regret, she did not know. She could not tell how this affair would end, and she was content to live in its present, without troubling about its future.

One night, when they were out dancing and had had quite a lot to drink, Vinson said: ‘I love you.’ Christine did not let herself say: ‘I love you too’, having learned long ago the folly of letting alcohol say that for you when you were not sure you meant it; but when he breathed deeply and said: ‘Come back to the hotel with me’, she hung her head and said that she would.

The night porter looked at her shrewdly, but she did not mind. He did not know her. Vinson lived at the hotel, and the censure, if any, would be on him.

When they were in the room together he kissed her violently -he was stronger than he looked – and then he sat her on the bed and sat down quietly beside her and took her hand.

‘Christine,’ he said, ‘forgive me. I’m a little plastered right now, but I know what I’m doing. I shouldn’t have asked you to come here. My wife doesn’t go to hotel bedrooms with me.’

Christine stood up, with a chill on her heart. ‘I didn’t know you were married,’ she said, with her back to him, trying to sound casual.

‘I’m not. I’m asking you to marry me.’

She did not know what to say. She hesitated, still with her back to him, and before she could answer he got up and went over to the wash-basin, where he began to mix drinks for them.

In the silence, Christine looked at herself in the mirror on the wall and wondered why anyone should want to marry her. There came into her mind all the proposals she had imagined from a dream husband, but none of them had been like this. In her dreams she had always known what to say, and had said it well, because the man gave her the right cues; but what could you say to a man who was bending over the basin trying to make the water run cold enough to mix with whisky, and who, when he turned round, wore an impersonal face, as if he had already regretted or forgotten that he had asked you to marry him?

‘Drink this,’ he said, handing her the glass she did not want. ‘You’ll feel better.’

‘I feel fine, thank you,’ she said, and then she saw his eyes, and they were not impersonal at all, but staring at her with a naked appeal not to be hurt.

‘Oh, Vin,’ she said. ‘I -’ And because it seemed so unkind not to say yes at once, she hedged with the excuse of: ‘I don’t know that I could live in America. I’ve never been there, and I–’

‘Christine,’ he said. ‘Look at me. I’m not asking you to marry America. I’m asking you to marry me.’

Christine was silent. It was better to say nothing than to say the wrong thing, and her thoughts would not collect themselves. She was excited. If he had put his glass down then and taken her in his arms and kissed her, she would probably have said yes, but he did not move towards her. He took a long swallow of his drink, walked to the window, turned and said judicially: ‘I’m not asking you to give me an answer right now. I can understand you may want to give the matter some thought.’

Why, oh why, she thought, standing in the middle of the green carpet with the untasted whisky in her hand, why be so sensible and level-headed about this? This is an emotional matter, and it should be settled emotionally. This is all wrong.

‘I think I’d better go, Vin,’ she said unhappily.

If he had protested she would have stayed, but he said: ‘All right, my dear. If you want to go away and think about it, I’ll be happy for you to do that.’

Christine did not want to think. She wanted to be swayed irretrievably one way or the other. She wanted to accept him with joy and passion, or reject him with sorrow and a few tears, but he was already picking up her coat. When she had put it on, she said, wanting some contact with the man who had asked her to marry him and then withdrawn into himself: ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?’

‘No,’ he said, looking noble. ‘I don’t want to influence you in any way. I want you to be free to make the right decision. This is real, Christine. You haven’t got to make a mistake.’

But it isn’t real, she thought. It doesn’t seem to be happening at all. In the little lobby of the suite, he held open the door for her, and when she looked seriously into his eyes he smiled.

Oh, you fool, you fool, she thought. How can you ask me to marry you when you don’t know how to treat me? If you would only take me back into the room and kiss me, and make me love you, of course I would say yes. You fool. She hated him suddenly, because he had spoiled it for both of them.

‘Good night, darling,’ he said gently. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

Well, wait on, she thought furiously, as she went down the endless hotel corridor, her whole body aching for the embraces he had not given her.

Driving home in the lovely American car, which answered your touch like a thoroughbred horse, she thought, as she outstripped two other cars at the traffic lights: If I told Rhona that Vinson had asked me to marry him, she would probably say: ‘My dear, of course you must, if it means driving about for the rest of your life in cars like this.’

Christine laughed aloud, with the moving air through the open window lifting her hair, and felt suddenly happier. Perhaps life was not such a grim business after all. Perhaps Rhona’s way of picking a husband was the right one. She had professed to marry her husband for no better reason than that he kept a motor-launch on the Thames.

Christine parked the car, closed all the windows and locked all the doors and went into the house, savouring experimentally the important feeling of being engaged. It would be fun telling all the people who had been saying for so long that she ought to get married. It would be exciting to take Vinson round and introduce him as My Fiancé. He was not the best-looking man she had ever seen, but there was nothing wrong with his appearance. It would be exciting to go to American parties with him and be introduced as his fiancée. It would be something new to give up work and buy a lot of clothes and have a wedding day, with herself as the central figure.

But when she was in her room she did what she had been afraid she would do ever since Vinson had said: ‘I’m asking you to marry me.’ She knelt to the bottom drawer of her desk and took out the photograph taken after the Magdalen College dance, and allowed herself to think of Jerry.

Jerry had been drunk the first time she saw him, drunk on beer at a party in someone’s rooms at Oxford. Christine was twenty, too plump, and unsure of herself, overshadowed, as she was by most of her girl friends, by the casual Jennifer, with whom she was staying at the manor house a few miles out of Oxford.

Oxford was Jennifer’s happy hunting ground. From the age of seventeen she had been running through a succession of undergraduates at every college, and scarcely a party was given without her. She was Rhona’s friend first, and then Christine, who was Rhona’s inseparable, began to be asked for weekends too, and to be taken to parties at Oxford and left to sink or swim.

Rhona and Jennifer swam with the crowd of sloppily dressed young men and precocious girls, but Christine sometimes sank, because she could not keep up with the slick conversation. She was sinking at this party where she first set eyes on Jerry. She could not drink a lot of beer. Her throat rebelled against swallowing it, but no one else’s did, and girls were sitting on laps, and someone was playing the piano in the middle of a roaring crowd who thought they were singing.

A thickset boy with brown hair falling into his eyes sang a descant in a pure tenor, waved his mug of beer and sat down in a heap on the floor.

‘Who is that?’ Christine asked the man sitting next to her on the sagging sofa. She had been trying to think of something to say to him for some time.

‘Oh, that,’ he said, ‘That’s one of the Canadians. He’s in the ice-hockey team. That’s about all they’re good for. Toughs all of them.’ He was an intellectual young man, with earnest glasses and a mobile Adam’s apple. He got up and left her and Christine sat alone, wondering where Rhona was. Jennifer was among the group round the piano, but Rhona had disappeared with a long young man with a head like a snake.

Christine could not remember how that party had ended. Dinner somewhere, she supposed, and then driving home too fast, with Rhona and Jennifer busily disparaging the young men who had kissed them.

The next night they went to another party. Almost as soon as they arrived, the drunken Canadian, quite sober now, with his hair slicked back and a slightly tidier suit, came up to her and said: ‘You were at Porgy’s party last night. You were sitting on the sofa. You had a yellow dress. I noticed you.’

‘You were drunk,’ Christine said, her tongue loosened by the happiness of someone having noticed her and remembered.

‘Sure,’ he smiled, ‘but not too drunk to think you looked pretty swell. Come on, I’ll get you a drink and let’s talk.’

That was the beginning of it. That was the beginning of Oxford with Jerry, and being in love, and writing to each other every day, and going to all his ice-hockey matches in London and sitting at the edge of the rink, wishing she could tell the people sitting by her that the burly, padded figure who was always being turned off the ice for fouling was hers, and would take her out alone somewhere afterwards, while the rest of the team went on to beat up the town.

Jennifer was all for love, although she did not believe in it for herself, and Christine was asked to stay more often. Jerry had a dreadful little car with flapping celluloid windows, and he would come out and spend whole Sundays at Jennifer’s house, and unless they were wanted for tennis or billiards, no one minded what they did.

That was when they used to go into the hay barn, and Jerry said: ‘Forgive me, darling.’ It was not until long after that, after the Commemoration Ball, where Christine had worn the white organdie dress and people had thrown bread at them at supper, that Jerry came down to Cornwall, where she was staying with Roger and Sylvia; and in the little inn bedroom with the Old Testament pictures and the uneven floor, he did not say: ‘Forgive me, darling’, because they both knew there was nothing to forgive.

That was the end of August. When war broke out Jerry went back to Canada to enlist, and Christine’s loss was lightened by the thought that when the war was over she could go out to Canada and marry him. He wrote to her often from the training camp, and at first he talked about how they would marry, but after a while he did not mention it, and then gradually he wrote less and less, until he did not write at all, and Christine did not know whether he had gone abroad or whether he was alive or dead.

After a while Christine’s hurt grew less. She went into a London hospital as a probationer nurse, and soon had neither the time nor the energy to remember too often that she had a broken heart. When the other nurses wrote letters to army post offices, and showed pictures of what they called their fellows, Christine would show them the photograph of Jerry taken in a canoe on the Cherwell, which got lost when the bomb blew in all the windows of the nurses’ home one night, and they were not allowed to go back to their rooms until the debris had been cleared.

His letter came when she was having her day off. She had come home the night before, dog tired, because she was on the Theatre, and it had been Mr Trellick’s tonsil day, and she had gone to bed intending to sleep late. But the habit of the six-o’clock alarm was not to be broken by one night’s freedom from it a week. She woke at exactly six o’clock, turned over to look at Nurse Jones sleeping beside her in the black iron bed, discovered that she was alone in her own room at home, and felt wide awake, as she never did at this hour in hospital. She lay for a while enjoying the thought o ‘the others crawling out of bed and fixing caps and aprons with sleep-numbed fingers, and then she went downstairs in her nightdress and bare feet to find something to eat.

As she stepped down into the hall she heard the scrunch of feet on the gravel path, and then the letter-box flapped inwards and three letters fell on to the doormat. One was for her, from Jerry. He would be on leave in London in two weeks’ time, and he insisted, without thought that she might be working, that she should keep the four days free for him.

She had not seen him for three years, and it was two years since he had written to her, but as she stood in the hall reading the letter over and over, with her bare feet turning to ice in the draught under the front door, all her pushed-away emotions came flooding back, and she was in love with Jerry as radiantly as she had been in the far-away summer at Oxford.

She had only had one week’s holiday this year. She had another week due to her. At nine o’clock the next morning she put on a clean apron, checked her stockings for ladders, and waited with the line of criminals and petitioners outside the door of Matron’s office.

‘What do you want to see the old girl for?’ asked Nurse Broderick, who stood next to her.

‘Holiday. My boy friend’s coming home on leave,’ said Christine, wanting to tell all the world.

‘Lucky cow. I’m going in to get slayed for being late in again last night. That lousy new night porter saw me climbing in the eye clinic window and reported me. Damn conchie. Look, you’d better go in before me, because the old girl will be in no mood to give anyone a holiday after she’s dealt with me.’

She changed places with Christine, but the Matron was already in a bad temper when Christine went meekly in and stood before the desk with her hands behind her back and her toes pointing straight forward.

‘Ah, Nurse Cope,’ said the Matron, louring at her from under her pinnacle of cap. ‘Thermometers again, I suppose.’

‘No, Matron, I haven’t broken one for weeks. I just wanted to ask you -I have a week’s holiday due. Could I possibly have it the week after next?’ She did not say why. If the gossip about Matron’s sex-frustrations was true, that would be fatal.

‘It’s odd you should ask that, Nurse,’ said the Matron, brightening up, ‘because the answer is no.’

Odder still, thought Christine, if the answer had been yes.

‘You’re going on night duty next week, on the gynaecological ward, so, you see, your holiday will have to wait a bit.’

She smiled. She only smiled when she had said something nasty to you. The gynae ward, of all places! On most of the other wards you got a little peace while the patients slept, but women who had had female operations kept you running about all night.

After a week of night duty among the gynae women, Christine was almost too tired to worry about Jerry. She was crawling into bed one morning after a night when she had an emergency Caesarean, a disastrous haemorrhage and five women to prepare for operations, when the maid pounded on her door and shouted: ‘Telephone, Nurse Cope!’

Hell, thought Christine, flapping down the night nurses’ corridor in her dressing-gown and slippers; but it was Jerry. He was in London. His voice sounded just the same, and her heart went out in love to him.

She could not bring herself to tell him yet that she had not been able to get her holiday. She explained that night nurses were not allowed to go out before five, but she would meet him then at a hotel near the hospital. He began to grumble about her being a nurse, but she rang off hastily and went along the corridor to Nurse Fletcher’s room. Nurse Fletcher was in bed, reading yesterday’s papers.

‘Fletcher,’ said Christine, ‘you’ve got three nights off tomorrow, haven’t you?’

‘Praise the Lord,’ said Nurse Fletcher, without looking up.

‘Be a love and let me have them. Night Sister won’t mind, and you can have my nights off at the end of the month. It’s terribly important to me. Please do.’

‘Why should I?’ asked Nurse Fletcher with narrowed eyes. She was a mean character.

‘If you do, I’ll give you my electric fire. Give, not lend. The one you can boil a kettle on as well.’ Electric fires were treasures in the chill cells of the nurses’ home. They were not allowed, but you could hide them in a suitcase under the bed when you were out of the room. Christine had burned the bottom out of a suitcase when she had to put the fire in it red hot one evening when the Assistant Matron made a surprise raid.

Nurse Fletcher was tempted. ‘You can have the kettle as well,’ Christine said, and, grudgingly, she fell.

Jerry was waiting in the lounge, looking handsomer than anyone who had ever come to that stuffy Victorian hotel. His uniform was not smart – none of his clothes ever had been – but his eyes were bluer than Christine remembered, and his face was brown and firm. He looked ten years older instead of three.

He tried to sulk when Christine told him that she had to go back to the hospital in an hour, but when she said that after tonight she would be free for three days he looked at her with love and said that he would take a room at the most expensive hotel he could find, and they would have a honeymoon.

She did not ask him why he had not written to her for two years, and she made up her mind that she would not mention it unless he did, so as not to spoil any of their time together. She could not have a drink with him, because the gynaecological women might smell her breath. They ordered tea, but they hardly touched it. They sat in the lounge among the old ladies and provincial business men, and held hands until it was time for Christine to go back to the hospital.

He was waiting for her outside the nurses’ home at ten o’clock the next morning. Christine had ploughed through another gruelling night, and was so tired that, as she forced her weary limbs to go through the motions of dressing and packing her case, she had almost hoped that he would not come, so that she could just roll into her bed and sleep.

But he was there, and he was very bright and gay, and although he knew she had been up all night, he expected her to be bright and gay too. The sun was shining and he wanted to walk, so she tagged along with him, stumbling over kerbstones, but trying to match her spirits to his, in case he thought she was not happy about their honeymoon.

They went to the hotel to leave her bag, and when Jerry left her to go down to the hall for cigarettes Christine stopped in the middle of unpacking her case, lay down on the bed and went to sleep.

When she woke it was dusk outside the hotel windows. She was alone, and she was quite sure that Jerry had gone away in disgust, and she would never see him again. She cried for a while, and then decided that she would sleep a little longer and then get up and pack her things and go out of the hotel, inquiring at the desk: ‘Has my husband paid the bill?’

She could not go to sleep again, because she was still crying. She was crying when Jerry came into the room and lay down on the bed beside her, but then everything was all right, and everything about their time together was as wonderful as it had ever been at Oxford, or in the fishing inn in Cornwall.

It was soon after that that the bomb fell near the nurses’ home and Christine’s photograph of Jerry in the canoe was lost, so she never had any picture of him except the tousled one of him standing behind her with his hands on her bare shoulders after the Magdalen ball.

Much later, after she had written to his mother in Canada, and his mother had written back to say that Jerry had been killed, she wrote again to ask for a picture of him, but Jerry’s mother had never sent her one.

Christine rolled up the photograph again and put it back in the drawer. It was no use looking at it, and asking Jerry whether he would mind if she married Vinson. The dead did not mind if you committed sacrilege on their memory by pretending to love someone else. They just shrugged their shoulders and left it to you to decide. The dead would not help you. All they would do was make it more difficult for you by not letting you forget them.

At three o’clock in the morning, when she was sure she would not sleep, Christine went into Aunt Josephine’s room. The night-light was by the bed, because Aunt Josephine, who was afraid of no man, had been afraid of the dark all her life. The night-light flickered in a pool of wax, and by its wayward light Christine could see her aunt’s head tied up in a net, the mouth open and the nose pointing vastly to the ceiling.

At the foot of the bed the old fox-terrier slept like a heap of corrupted flesh, his brown-and-white patches bleached into his off-white senility, his fat haunch twitching to dreams of a Nimrod youth. When he twitched, one of Aunt Josephine’s legs twitched too, as if she were dreaming with him.

The opening and closing of the door had not woken her. Christine stood by the bed with her hands clasped, and said desperately: ‘Aunt Jo. Please wake up, Aunt Jo.’

Aunt Josephine’s thick eyelids quivered, her mouth closed, champing on the empty gums, and then suddenly she sat up gaping, her eyes wild. ‘What – what? What’s the matter? Is it a fire?’

‘It’s all right.’ Christine put her hand quickly on the big rough hand that trembled on the bedclothes. ‘It’s all right, Aunt Jo. It’s only me. I’m terribly sorry to wake you, but I just had to.’

Fully awake, Aunt Josephine became her solid self. She switched on the bedside light and sat up, blinking and yawning hugely. ‘What’s the matter, child? You look like the wrath of God.’

‘I feel like it. Aunt Jo, I’m awfully sorry. I know you hate to be woken up, but I just had to talk to you.’

‘Well, just let me get my grinders in,’ said Aunt Josephine, never averse to a chat at any hour of the day or night. ‘I can’t talk properly without them.’ She fumbled at the toothglass, where her large yellow teeth nestled in cloudy water, thrust them in, worked her jaws for a moment, and sat upright, staring at Christine with bright eyes.

Christine sat down on the bed and passed a hand over the bloated side of the fox-terrier, which growled in its sleep. ‘I’m in a terrible worry, Aunt Jo,’ she said. ‘I can’t sleep, and I can’t get things straight, and I felt I should go mad before morning if I didn’t discuss it with you.’

‘Fire away,’ said Aunt Josephine, hitching the eiderdown up to the neck of her woollen nightdress. ‘What’s your worry? I may not know the answer, but I’ll force advice on you just the same.’

‘I want you to. I want someone to tell me what to do, instead of having to decide for myself. He wouldn’t help me decide –’

‘He? That young Gaegler, I suppose.’

‘He’s not so young. He’s thirty-eight.’

‘That’s all right for you. I suppose he’s asked you to marry him?’

Christine nodded, fiddling with the bedclothes and not looking at her.

‘I knew he would. He asked me what I thought about it some time ago, and I said: “Go ahead and ask her. It’s no affair of mine.”’

Christine was disappointed that Vinson had spoken to Aunt Josephine before he risked asking her. It seemed Victorian, and rather cowardly.

‘What did you think I’d say?’

‘I hoped you’d say yes. Chrissie, he’s nice. There are a lot worse men than him in the world, and a lot worse people than Americans.’

‘Yes; but, Aunt Jo, you don’t marry someone because they’re nice.’ Suddenly, she was bored with the whole thing. It was too much bother. She wished she had not come into Aunt Josephine’s room and made Vinson’s proposal important by talking about it. She wished she were just the estimable Miss Cope again, calmly asleep until seven-thirty, when she would get up to go to the shop with nothing on her mind except the day’s work.

‘I don’t love him,’ she said irritably.

‘Oh – love,’ said her aunt. ‘When you’re as old as I am and have seen as many people passionately in love one year, and suing for divorce the next, you’ll learn to get cynical about that word.’

‘Don’t,’ said Christine. ‘I did love Jerry. I still can’t think of him without loving him.’

‘Jerry is dead,’ said Aunt Josephine harshly. ‘You’re morbid. I never should have read Great Expectations to you at an impressionable age.’

Christine felt that she was going to cry. No one could understand about her and Jerry, no one had ever had anything like that since the world began.

‘I dare say you think you’ll never love anyone like you loved poor Jerry,’ said Aunt Josephine. She reached for a packet of Lucky Strikes, shook out a cigarette and lit it, coughing alarmingly. Since Vinson had kept her supplied with American cigarettes she had taken to smoking in a big and choking way. ‘And you’re right. You never will. He’d never have married you, though.’ She knew the whole story of Jerry, and had formed her own opinion. ‘But most people marry without being in love like that. Look at your mother. She seemed quite happy, poor thing.’

Christine could not think of marriage as applied to her mother, that unreal figure of fading memory, who was so often ill, and seldom much more to her children than the smell of washed wool bedjackets, and injunctions from nurses and maids not to make so much noise on the landing. She had never questioned whether her mother and father loved each other. It was impossible to think of her father in a relationship with any woman, and one just did not think about what one’s parents must have done before one could be born.

‘If you’d never known Jerry,’ Aunt Josephine went on, ‘you’d be able to think you loved that Gaegler enough to marry him.’

‘I don’t know whether I love him at all.’

‘You must, or you wouldn’t even contemplate marrying him. You’d come to me and say: “Ha, ha! That Gaegler asked me to marry him. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call him That Gaegler.’

‘You wouldn’t mind if you didn’t like him.’

‘We do get on pretty well,’ Christine said doubtfully. ‘But I don’t know. It would mean living in America, and I –’

‘My dear baby, the man comes first, not the place. That just goes with the man.’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Then he’s a man with more sense than I credited him with. Oh, I know you think you couldn’t leave dear old England -wave the flag, and all these jolly red buses and everything – but you’d get on all right in America. They tell me it isn’t all like the films.’

‘Would you mind if I went?’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Aunt Josephine shortly. ‘I should mind like hell, if you want to know. So would your Pa, I suppose, though he might not be able to say so in so many words.’

‘Well, then, how could I –’

‘Look here, Chrissie,’ said her aunt sternly. ‘You’re thirtyfour. You don’t want to be a spinster all your life, do you? It’s all right now, because people want you, but think about when you’re fifty. Who wants a single woman then? She’s just a nuisance, who everybody tries unsuccessfully to find a widower for. You love children. Well, it’s all right now being Aunt Christine, who’s more fun than Mummy, but later on other people’s children won’t want you. Clement and Jeanette will have to be told: “You must go and see Aunt Christine”, or “You really must write to the old girl. She doesn’t have much to live for.”’

‘But, Aunt Jo,’ said Christine in distress, ‘you shouldn’t say that. Everybody wants you.’

‘Like hell they do,’ said her aunt cheerfully, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the first one. ‘I’m useful, because I run your Pa’s house, but I’m a bit of a nuisance, you must admit, and people say: “There’s that crazy old woman with all her dogs and cats.”’

‘They don’t!’ said Christine, remembering the times when she had heard people like Geoffrey say something like that.

‘Don’t worry. I like them to. I like to be that crazy old Aunt Josephine. If I can’t be desirable I can at least be renowned as an Old Character. I have my niche.’

Yes, she had her niche. She had her letters to the family abroad, and her cats and dogs, and her charities, and her pilgrimages to cemeteries. Christine gave a little shiver, seeing herself in thirty years’ time as that crazy old Aunt Christine.

‘You’re cold,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘Marry that Gaegler and have a nice warm double bed. It’ll do you a power of good.’

‘But then, about Daddy,’ Christine said, imagining what Vinson would look like in pyjamas. ‘I’ve been at home so long, and Roger isn’t really any use to him except to carve the joint on Sundays. Ought I to leave him and go so far away?’

‘Don’t you worry about him. I’ll look after him, same as I always have. He won’t mind too much. I know he doesn’t like that Gaegler much, but then he won’t have to see him often if you’re in America.’

‘That’s another thing,’ Christine said. ‘Everyone is so stuffy and insular. Just because Vin doesn’t like beer and went to a school that they’ve never heard of, no one likes him except you and me. What will Roger and Sylvia say if I tell them I’m going to marry him? They’ll be crabby.’

‘I’ll tell them,’ said Aunt Josephine, ‘I’ll settle them. Don’t worry.’

‘Aunt Jo,’ said Christine, bending to kiss her, ‘you’re marvellous. Do you know, I believe I really might get married.’

‘Of course you will,’ said Aunt Josephine briskly. ‘And now go down and get us something to eat for the Lord’s sake. I’ll never go to sleep again, and I’m starving. Let’s have the wedding here, shall we? What excitements. I shall wear a feathered toque and a blue satin dress with a dipping hem and a bow on the hip. I see it all.’

Much later, when Christine came out of Aunt Josephine’s room with the empty plates and cups, they had made so many plans that she felt as if she had been engaged for months and was almost as good as married.

It was exciting. It was important. She was someone with a definite status, someone at last to whom something really noteworthy had happened. Then it occurred to her, with some surprise, that it had not happened yet. She knew that she was going to marry Vinson, but he did not. He had probably lain awake all night in a torment, chewing his nails, She knew that he bit his nails, because she had seen them.

It would be unkind to keep him a moment longer in suspense. It was only six-thirty, but Christine went down to the hall and dialled the number of his hotel. They had to buzz his room for a long time before there was a click and a grunting ‘Hello.’ He always said Hello, instead of Hullo, as English people did.

‘Vin,’ said Christine eagerly. ‘It’s me.’

‘Oh, hi there,’ he said without enthusiasm. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter. Everything’s all right. I will marry you, Vin.’ There was no answer. ‘I mean – if you still want me to?’

‘What’s that? If I want you to? Oh, sure, sure. Don’t be ridiculous, Christine. I’m a bit dopey, that’s all. Haven’t had my eight hours yet. You’re calling pretty early.’

‘Well,’ said Christine drearily. ‘I thought you’d be anxious to know.’

‘Oh, sure, honey. It’s marvellous. Look, you go back to bed now, and I’ll call you later, hm?’

She had a feeling that he was asleep again almost before he put down the receiver. He was more interested in getting his sleep than in knowing whether Christine would marry him. She almost rang him back to say: ‘I’ve changed my mind’, but if she woke him again he might not listen properly, and her anger would fall flat.

At breakfast she disappointed Aunt Josephine by refusing to carry on with the plans they had started the night before. She would not talk about Vinson. Her pride would not let her tell how he had hurt her.

When Aunt Josephine, putting her coffee on the table with a joyful gesture that spilled some of it into the saucer, said: ‘Well now, baby, here’s a happy day for you! Aren’t you glad your crazy old aunt persuaded you to do the right thing? You see, I do have some sense after all’, Christine stirred the coffee and muttered: ‘Perhaps not as much as you think you have.’ And she bit her aunt’s head off when she asked if she might tell her brother about his daughter’s engagement before Christine got home.

‘Don’t interfere, Aunt Jo,’ Christine said, as she went to the car. ‘You’re always interfering.’

Doubting and worrying, she tried to give her mind to work that morning. She snubbed Alice and snapped at Helen, and avoided Miss Burman, who followed her about trying to tell her about her mother’s birthday party, with eight big candles and two little ones. With a rush of business that came in the middle of the day, Christine was glad to have to take her mind off Vinson and occupy herself with the customers.

She had to go up to the accounting department about a mail order, and when she came back Margaret said: ‘Your boy friend rang up, but I told him not to hang on, because I knew you’d be hours with those muddlers upstairs. He wants you to ring him back as soon as you can.’

Well, I won’t, thought Christine angrily. Let him just see, that’s all. Let him just see.

But let him see what, she was not quite sure. She did not know whether she would marry him or not. Aunt Josephine had made her think she would, but it ought to have been Vinson, not Aunt Josephine, who had persuaded her. She did not know what she could say to him.

Mr Parker called her into his office to hear a publisher’s representative talk about an epoch-making new book. She glanced through the book and did not think much of it. All this firm’s books were epoch-making. The representative was a bouncing young man, who was always saying: ‘In confidence, I’ll stake my reputation on this one’, and was quite unabashed when Goldwyn’s did not do well with it.

The telephone rang and Christine answered it, holding it well away from her ear, because the receiver was dusty. It was nobody’s job to dust Mr Parker’s office, and since Mr Parker did not want it done, because he was afraid that things would be moved and he would not be able to find them, no one was going to make it their job.

It was Vinson. Christine could not say: ‘I’ve changed my mind. I can’t marry you’, with Mr Parker and the bouncing young man listening. She was non-committal, and so was Vinson, because he was not alone in his office either. She thought that the least he could do would be to go out and make the call from a telephone box when talking to the girl who a few hours earlier had said she would marry him. They had a sterile conversation. Vinson wanted to see her, but she said that she must go home first, and he could ring her up there and they would make plans for the evening. She wanted to talk to Aunt Josephine and get assurance before she saw him.

When she rang off Mr Parker, who had been waiting, tapping a pencil, said mildly: ‘I don’t know that you ought to make your private calls here, Miss Cope’, and the publisher’s representative said archly: ‘Ah well, we all know Miss Cope is a young lady much in demand. I’m sure there are many people, Mr Parker, who would like to get her away from you.’

If he imagined he was going to increase Goldwyn’s order by that, Christine thought, he had another think coming. When he had gone she persuaded Mr Parker to reduce the order for the epoch-making book from a hundred copies to seventy-five.

Five-thirty came slowly. When at last it was time to go, Christine hurried out of the shop, and fretted and fumed at the traffic which kept the Buick crawling nearly all the way to Barnes Common. She wanted to talk to Aunt Josephine. Aunt Josephine would make her feel that whatever she decided to do was right. Aunt Josephine would help her, as she had helped her, erratically but lovingly, ever since she had taken over the job of mother, and been more to Christine than her own mother had ever been.

She stopped outside her home, thinking that if she gave up Vinson she would have to give the car up too and go to work by bus and underground again, and hurried up the path and through the front door, calling: ‘Aunt Jo! Aunt Jo! where are you?’

Aunt Josephine usually came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dirty tea-towel when Christine came home and called her. Today, no one came out of the kitchen, but Mr Cope came out of the drawing-room with bent knees, a newspaper dangling from his hand.

‘Chrissie,’ he said, ‘thank goodness you’ve come home.’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ she began, but she stopped, seeing his face. The smudges under his eyes were darker than usual, and his mouth was slack.

‘It’s your aunt,’ he said in a dead voice. ‘She’s had a stroke,’ he added abruptly, concerned less with breaking the news gently than with unloading his own troubled thoughts as quickly as possible.

Aunt Josephine, robust Aunt Josephine, who everyone thought was as strong as a horse and could do her work day after day and never be spared, had fallen down while she was carrying a tray of books to the back door to pack up for hospital. She had clutched at the dresser and broken some plates as she fell. The pieces of china and the books she was carrying still lay scattered on the kitchen floor, where the cats were mewing for their dinner.

Mr Cope did not want to go to the hospital with Christine. He did not like hospitals. Aunt Josephine was still unconscious, and he had seen her unconscious on the kitchen floor, had watched her there for a long time until the ambulance came. He did not want to see that any more. But Christine made him go with her. Aunt Josephine might come round, and she would want them. As they went out of the house the telephone rang. It was probably Vinson, but she did not go back to answer it. He was like a dream that did not matter any more.

Driving to the hospital in the Buick, which he did not like, because the seats sloped farther back than in his own car and made him feel uncomfortable, Mr Cope kept saying: ‘I heard the crash, you see. I was working, but I came out at once, and there she was, lying on the floor with her mouth open. I was working, but I came out at once,’ he kept saying, as if to justify himself that, whatever had happened, it was not his fault.

Christine hardly heard him. She drove automatically, knowing the way well, for she had often driven Aunt Josephine down these roads with books and bundles of clothing for the hospital. All she could think of was that she had been unkind to Aunt Josephine this morning. When Aunt Jo was so eager about the engagement, Christine had said: ‘Don’t interfere. You’re always interfering’, and Aunt Josephine’s big face had looked like a gun dog disappointed of a walk.

She could not forget that long-chopped, fallen face. If Aunt Jo died, was that how she was doomed always to remember her?

‘I was working,’ Mr Cope said, ‘but when I heard the crash in the kitchen I came out at once. I did what I could,’ and Christine kept seeing Aunt Josephine’s hurt, triangular eyes, and remembering that she had banged out of the house without saying good-bye to her.

Aunt Josephine had had a stroke. They were driving to her bedside, but Mr Cope and Christine were thinking less of her than of themselves; he trying to justify his own part in the affair, she struggling with the bogy of regret. She thought with shame of the fickleness of human sympathy. You could only be really sorry for someone if what had happened to them did not make you sorrier still for yourself.

When they went round the screens in the ward where Aunt Josephine lay, Christine forgot everything except the log-like figure, whose toes reached to the end of the high iron bed. They had taken the pillows away, and Aunt Josephine was lying flat on the mattress with one side of her face slipped backwards, and drunken snores coming from the twisted cavern of her mouth.

Mr Cope looked at her dutifully and then looked away, pretending to examine the dish with the tongue forceps and spatula that stood by the bed. Christine gazed and gazed, trying to see beyond this strange and horrifying façade and find Aunt Josephine. She must be there, her spirit unchanged by the blow that had befallen her body, needing help, asking for help perhaps, from the limbo where she was confined; needing help and not getting it.

Christine had nursed many unconscious people. Like the other nurses, she had learned to look on them as no more than bodies, needing routine care and watchfulness, making a lot of work, almost perverse, it sometimes seemed, when their beds needed changing just when you were most busy. Relations had come and gone, had wept, or looked in silence, and stroked the stubbornly still head that did not know or care if it was touched by a mother’s hand or a nurse’s.

There was a boy who had been unconscious for three weeks before he died. The doctors had said he would never regain consciousness, but his mother had come every day and held his hand and talked to him, and Christine had marvelled that she could without effort see beyond the wall of coma to her son, and treat him as if he knew she were there, and could respond.

‘He does know me,’ she told Christine, smiling quite cheerfully. ‘I know he knows I’m here.’ But when Christine had asked the Ward Sister: ‘Could he?’ Sister had said: ‘Of course not. Use your sense, Nurse – and you must tell his mother she’ll have to go now, before the surgeons’ rounds.’

Standing by Aunt Josephine’s bed, Christine knew that the Ward Sister had been wrong, and that she herself had been wrong when she treated unconscious patients as impersonally as if they were already dead. Aunt Josephine gave no sign, but Christine felt that she knew she was not alone.

Her father muttered: ‘We’d better go. You heard what the nurse said. They don’t think she’ll come round. We can’t do anything here. We’d better go.’

‘No, I don’t want to,’ Christine said. ‘I want to stay with her.’ But the Staff Nurse came round the screens, drawing a turnip watch from under the starched bosom of her apron, and said: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go now. I have to close the ward.’

They took the screens away from Aunt Josephine, so that the Night Nurse could see her when she sat at the desk in the middle of the ward. The patients in the other beds peered over at Aunt Josephine, and peered at Christine and her father as they went away down the polished length of floor, their heels making too much noise.

Alone together, each needing comfort from the other and not getting it, Christine and her father were almost like strangers. Their intimacy of thirty-four years was not deep enough to absorb this crisis. Before, when anything had happened it was always Aunt Josephine to whom they turned. She was the apex of the triangle, they the two points at its base, now left looking at each other across the space that divided them.

There was a lot to do. Christine prepared supper for her father and tried to eat with him, and then she cleared up the books and broken china in the kitchen and fed the dogs and cats, who wandered about uneasily all evening and would not settle anywhere.

She rang up her brother. Roger was out, and Sylvia dealt with the news with studied calm, thinking that she was being of great practical help. ‘Now, you’re not to worry,’ she said. ‘You should take a Veganin and try and get a good night’s sleep. I don’t want you to worry.’

‘Sylvia says we’re not to worry,’ Christine told her father caustically. Aunt Josephine would have laughed at that, but Mr Cope nodded and said vaguely: ‘Kind girl. She’s a good, kind girl. When Christine said: ‘They’re coming up tomorrow, I’m afraid. I couldn’t stop them’, he said: ‘That’s right. The family should be together at a time like this.’

Christine did not want them to come. They had never been particularly nice to Aunt Josephine. Roger had tormented her and disobeyed her consistently when he was a boy, and since he married he and his wife had looked on her chiefly as a useful solution to the problem of his father, who might otherwise have had to live with them.

When Vinson rang up and Christine told him what had happened, he said he would come down to her at once, but she did not want him either. People always wanted to rally round you, even though they could do nothing except talk round and round what had happened, and you did not want the bother of them. Certainly she did not want Vinson. He was outside her trouble, and she still could not think what she was going to say to him. Only Aunt Josephine could help her with that.

She promised him that she would ring him up in the morning, but in the morning she went off to the hospital and forgot about him. She had telephoned to inquire for Aunt Josephine three times during the night, and a busy Night Sister had told her briskly that there was no change and likely to be none, and no need to inquire. She would be informed of any change, the Night Sister said; but when she and her father reached the hospital, Aunt Josephine had been dead for two hours, and no one had told them.

It did not seem worth making a fuss about that. There was nothing to do but collect Aunt Josephine’s clothes from a harassed probationer and go home.

As they went down the corridor, Sylvia and Roger came out of the lift and walked towards them. ‘How is she?’ they asked, making their faces concerned. ‘We came as soon as we could.’

When they heard that Aunt Josephine was dead Roger pressed his father’s arm in a manly way, and Sylvia’s ever-fluid sinuses began to overflow at the eyes and nose. Seeing her sob and sniffle and flush loosened the stricture in Christine’s throat and she no longer had to fight to keep herself from crying. If Sylvia, who had not loved Aunt Josephine, was going to weep for her, Christine did not feel like crying.

They all went into the waiting-room and sat down on the wicker furniture. Mr Cope told over again the story of how he had been working and had heard the crash in the kitchen and had come out at once to find Aunt Josephine lying on the floor.

‘What I can’t understand,’ Roger said, ‘is how she could have been taken like that without ever having any symptoms. She always seemed so strong. I don’t see how she could have had a stroke,’ he grumbled, as if aggrieved that Aunt Josephine had pulled a fast one on him. ‘I don’t see how she could have had a stroke.’

‘Well, she did,’ said Christine. ‘It’s no good keeping saying that.’

‘Take a hold on yourself, Chris,’ said Roger, narrowing his eyes at her. ‘It’s no good getting cross with me. It wasn’t my fault.’

Why was everyone so concerned with proving that it was not their fault? It was not anybody’s fault; and if it had been, fixing the blame somewhere would not bring Aunt Josephine to life.

Nor would talking about it, but they talked on and on in the overheated waiting-room, and Sylvia snivelled and Roger wore his heavy, serious face, and Christine listened to the ticking of the radiators and tried to make herself understand that Aunt Josephine had not just taken the leading part in a dramatic episode, but had gone away for ever and would take no more part in anything.

It was a scene in which Aunt Josephine should have participated. She had always been there at family conferences. She had always been the loudest voice, and given at the same time the sanest and the most startling opinions. She should have been there. She would have pulled them together and given the scene some point. Christine kept thinking that she should be there, and having to make herself realize that if Aunt Josephine were there the scene would not be happening at all.

A woman came in with a composed little boy, who carried a fibre suitcase and had evidently come for admission to one of the wards. They sat by the window and whispered, and presently a nurse came in and said: ‘Is this the Tonsils for Mr Bishop?’ and asked the Copes if they were waiting to see someone.

‘No, thank you, we’re just going,’ they said, and they all stood up, as if she had dismissed them. Roger and Sylvia wanted to get back to the country. Arrangements had been made about the funeral, and there was nothing more to be done or said.

‘Thank heaven for you, Chris,’ Roger said, as they went out. ‘We needn’t worry about the aged P. with you there to look after him.’

‘Do you think you’ll be able to manage, Christine?’ Sylvia asked. Manage was one of her favourite words. It applied to everything from a child’s tantrums to a dinner-party without enough matching plates. There were two kinds of people in the world: those who managed, and those who did not, and it was only possible to be one of those who did.

‘I could ask my Mrs Hatchett to come up for a few days if you like, to help you get straight. I’ll manage without her,’ Sylvia said. ‘You may find it rather difficult at first to manage both house and your job. Until you find a Woman, that is. You’ll have to get somebody in. I’ll give you the address of that agency I always go to.’

In the slow lift, which was long and narrow to accommodate stretchers – or mortuary trolleys – she went on about Daily Women and Mother’s Helps and two-and-six an hour. Christine let her talk; and when the gates slid back and they stepped out, she said: ‘I’ll be all right, thank you. I’m sure I’ll manage perfectly well.’

‘My little girl’s going to look after me now, aren’t you?’ said her father, drawing her arm through his in an unwonted gesture of affection, and Roger said: ‘Good old estimable Miss Cope. I don’t know what we’d do without you.’

No, thought Christine bleakly, but without bitterness, as they walked across the gravel space outside the hospital to their cars. I don’t know what you would do without me. Aunt Jo solved the problem of Daddy before. Now I do.

They took it for granted that her lot in life was now to stay at home and keep house for her father. Unknowingly, they had decided for her what she should do about Vinson. Perhaps, in that far-away time which was only yesterday when Aunt Josephine was still alive, she might have married him. Now she could not, and the idea of it was already a senseless dream.

Roger was more cheerful now that he was outside the hospital. ‘Still got that pansy car, I see,’ he said, as Christine went towards the Buick. ‘That Yank must be pretty far gone to hand that smashing job over to a ham hand like my sister.’ He wanted to make jokes now, to resume his position as funster of the family, and shake them out of their trouble.

‘I’ll be giving it back,’ Christine said. ‘He’s going away soon.’

‘Oh well,’ said Roger, ‘they come and they go. I don’t suppose he’ll be much loss to you, apart from the car. I must say, for one awful moment, we were afraid you might be going to marry him, weren’t we, Syl?’

‘Hush, dear,’ she said. ‘You’re making too much noise.’ She did not add: ‘with Aunt Josephine only a few hours dead’, but that was what she meant.

Roger became grave again and helped his father dutifully into the Buick. Mr Cope had not spoken much since the nurse had met them at the entrance to the ward and they had seen through the glass doors the bare springs of the bed from which the mattress had gone to be fumigated, and the lost, empty look had come down on his face and settled there.

He was not irritable any more. He was not sarcastic or fidgety or self-centred. He was not even sad. He was just nothing. He muddled through the days, doing whatever Christine suggested, but she suspected that when she sent him into his study to work he spent most of the time staring out of the window.

Their tragedy did not bring them closer. They were two people together in the overlarge house, but alone, with nothing to say to each other. Christine had not yet been able to find anybody to come and help her in the house, and she was busy all the time she was at home. She and her father rarely sat together, except at meals, which he did not enjoy, because she could not cook as well as Aunt Josephine.

Mr Parker had offered to give her a week’s leave, but she refused. She did not want to stop working. It was all she had left of her old life, and there were people to talk to at the shop. She could not bear the thought of being at home all day, and so she struggled on, with the house growing dirtier and more untidy, the animals getting out of hand, Aunt Josephine’s possessions still unsorted, and herself getting more and more tired and discouraged at the idea of the future, which promised to go on like this for ever.

Sooner or later she would have to see Vinson. She put him off with one excuse after another, but a few days after Aunt Josephine’s funeral he arrived at ‘Roselawn’ one evening when Christine was sitting in an overall in the kitchen, trying to sort out the tradesmen’s bills.

Vinson came in by the open back door, as he had learned to do since he became a frequent visitor to the house. Christine got up, pushing back her hair and conscious of her bedraggled appearance as he put his arms round her and kissed her.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, when she did not respond.

‘You know what’s the matter.’ She turned away.

‘Sure. I’m terribly sorry about this. Christine, why wouldn’t you see me before? You know how sorry I am for you, but it doesn’t make any difference to you and me. I’m still there, honey. You can put your head on my shoulder and cry if you want to.’

The arrogance of him. The typical male arrogance, which thought that a loss could not matter to you as long as he was there. ‘I don’t want to cry,’ she said quite crossly. ‘I finished crying some time ago. I don’t need to howl all the time to show how much I mind about Aunt Jo. I wish you hadn’t come. Please take the car and go away. I don’t want to see you.’

As soon as she said this she was afraid. She had seen Vinson angry once or twice, and she did not like it. He became different and quite frightening, his slight body tense, and revealing the strength it did not normally seem to have.

She looked at him cautiously, but he was not angry. He was evidently going to humour her and treat her gently, and she despised him for it. She would have preferred his anger.

‘Now then,’ he said, putting his arms round her again. ‘Now then, darling. You’re all upset, I know, but you mustn’t be that way. It’s all right. Everything will be all right when we’re married.’

‘But we’re not going to be married!’ Christine pulled herself away and went to the stove, where she began to stir the dogs’ horsemeat furiously. ‘I can’t marry you, Vin. I know I can’t.’

‘Look here,’ he said calmly. ‘This isn’t good enough. You told me several days ago that you’d marry me. I believed you. I believed you meant it, and I’m holding you to your promise. I expect you to keep faith with me as I shall with you.’

‘Oh, don’t be pompous!’ she said, resisting a theatrical desire to stamp her foot. She went on stirring, and the steam from the boiling horsemeat made her eyes smart. She would not turn round in case he thought that she was crying.

‘I’m not pompous,’ he said. ‘I’m damned mad, if you want to know.’

She risked a look at him, and he was angry now, his brows down and his mouth set. He looked like a Sicilian with a knife in his palm.

‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ he asked roughly. ‘One day you’ll marry me, and the next you won’t. This is a hell of a way to treat a man, and you’ll have to learn you can’t play that game with me. Come away from that goddamn stove. Come here.’

‘I won’t,’ she said, hearing her voice rising. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I told you. I can change my mind, can’t I?’

He dropped his voice. ‘I suppose it’s because you think you can’t leave your father now,’ he said, and because he had guessed most of the truth Christine turned round and said furiously: ‘Can’t you understand – are you so conceited that you can’t understand that I just don’t want to marry you?’

‘I see.’ He picked up his uniform cap from the table and went out of the kitchen. Christine heard the Buick start, turn round and roar away, and she knelt on the floor and laid her face against the silky cheek of her dog, who always came to her when she was crying.

She cried several times during the next few days. She cried for Aunt Josephine, because she was tired and discouraged. Aunt Jo had always been the one to go to when you were tired, or could not cope with something you had to do. Aunt Jo would say comfortably: ‘Leave it. It’ll keep. Do it domani, like the Italians do.’ And she would put you to bed with a hot-water bottle and a bowl of soup, or take you out to see a silly film, either of which worked equally well.

Margaret was away from work again. She had been ill and nearly lost her baby, and it was doubtful whether she would ever be able to come back to the shop. Mr Parker, who hated new people in the department, clung to the idea that she would, and did not ask for anyone to replace her.

Helen was on holiday, and Christine was sometimes too busy even to take her lunch-hour. When she did she could not be bothered to go out. She trailed up to the canteen and ate what they called Vienna steak, and listened to the futile complaints of the people who were always saying that they were going to tell the management, and never did.

In what she already thought of as The Old Days, when she came home from the shop, Aunt Josephine had always wanted to hear about her day and about the funny or irritating things that had happened. But her father did not want to hear. He was not interested in Goldwyn’s, and if she said that she had had a hard day he would say: ‘Well, why don’t you give it up? You know I’ve never liked you being a shop girl’, although he could not possibly go on living in that absurdly big house on the little money his translations brought him, if Christine gave up Goldwyn’s.

Now when she came home tired from the shop, dreading the thought of having to cook supper and do a mountain of ironing and clean the silver or wash the kitchen floor, or tackle any one of the hundred jobs that were piling up on her with no hope of ever getting done, there was no Aunt Josephine to make her go to bed early and say: ‘Do it domani.’

She found a woman to come and clean in the mornings, but she made a noise banging her brush against the stairs when Mr Cope was working, and he fired her before Christine came home. She found another woman with a long wet nose and weak ankles, who brought with her a misshapen four-year-old daughter, who ate all the cakes and biscuits and broke a valuable vase. Christine forgave this, and the woman and child disappeared one day with the last of Vinson’s American hams, a bottle of sherry and the orphanage box full of pennies, and were never heard of again. Christine did not have the time or energy to look for anyone else. She struggled on alone.

She went to bed exhausted, and woke still tired. For the first time in her career she began to make mistakes at work. Alice, catching her out in a muddle over the cash register, said: ‘You must be in love, Miss Cope. That’s what it is.’

In love! If only she was … When she had been in love with Jerry she had been vague and unpractical, living only for the weekends when she could get up to Oxford, but it had not mattered. When you were in love the world conspired to help you, to take the boring practicalities of life off your hands so that you could get on with the charming business of being in love. Loving glorified you and gave you an unfair advantage over other people.

Rhona was in love again, with a Hungarian film director, with whom she was occupying herself while her husband was in Brazil. She came down to see Christine and was horrified by the mess and drudgery in which she found her. She took a duster and sat down at the kitchen table to help Christine with the silver, but she soon pushed her chair away from the table and forgot about the silver while she talked about the Hungarian.

She was fond of Christine and warmly sorry for her, but at the moment she was more interested in the Hungarian.

‘It’s really love this time,’ she mooned. ‘I know now that it was never the real thing before.’

‘Oh, you always say that, Ro. It’s always the one and only real thing – until the next time.’

‘Don’t be horrid. You wouldn’t say that if you knew Lajos. You must meet him.’ Rhona tipped her chair back against the dresser. ‘He’s wonderful. I tell you he’s made a different woman of me.’ All Rhona’s new men made a different woman of her.

‘He’s so brilliant. He’s much cleverer than me, which is such a relief. I’m sick of men who pretend to think I’m cleverer than them, and sit around waiting for me to say something witty. With Lajos, you know, I sort of – sort of feel almost like a peasant girl.’ She laughed, looking less like a peasant girl than it was possible to imagine.

‘He dominates me, you see, and it’s wonderful. It’s exciting. You know, Chris, I believe that’s how women really want to be treated.’

‘You might try it with Dan some day,’ Christine said, thinking of Rhona’s husband, who was a ball of fire in the business world, but a trained seal in his own home.

‘Oh, Dan!’ Rhona said. ‘That’s different. Don’t let’s talk about him, or I might start feeling guilty. Let’s talk about Lajos. Let’s have an evening together soon and you’ll see what I mean about him. You bring someone and we’ll go dancing.’

‘Oh, Ro, I don’t think I can go out. Daddy doesn’t really like being alone in the evening, and, anyway, I’ve got too much to do here.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Rhona, ‘you’re getting warped. We’ll have a party. Who’ll you bring? Why don’t you bring that American you took to the film? What about him, by the way? How’s that coming along?’

‘It isn’t,’ Christine said. ‘It didn’t work.’

‘Oh well, too bad,’ Rhona lost interest, because she had looked at her watch and seen that it was time to go and meet the Hungarian. ‘I’ll find you someone else, Chris darling. When I’m in love I always want everyone else to be in love too, and you can’t go on playing at being a Victorian daughter for ever. You look ten years older already.’

‘Thanks. That’s a big help.’ Christine kissed her at the door and Rhona drove away, taking her light and excitement with her.

Christine went back to the kitchen table and the pile of heavy old silver, which made her its slave instead of being a slave for her use. It was Saturday afternoon. Her father had announced at lunch that he had invited a friend for dinner, and presently Christine would have to go out with her shopping basket and find something for them to eat.

After dinner her father and Mr Wilson, who dropped cigarette ash on his waistcoat and constantly cleared his throat, would sit and talk about the Labour Government, and Christine would wash the dishes and darn her father’s socks. It would go on like this for years and years, and she would grow to look as drab as she felt now, and people would say what a good daughter she was, and call her That poor Miss Cope, who never married.

She wanted to cry, but what was the use of crying if you had no one to be upset that you were upset enough to cry? If Rhona cried she would have the Hungarian to comfort her. There would be some point for her in crying, because it would stimulate the Hungarian to emotion too, and they could have quite a scene together. But you could not make a scene all by yourself.

When Vinson came in at the back door she was still sitting with her hands among the silver, doing nothing.

‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘I look awful.’ Usually, you only said this to a man when you knew that you did not. Christine knew that she looked awful now in a sweater that had shrunk in the wash, with her hair straight because she had been too tired to set it last night; but Vinson was out of her life, and it did not matter.

‘That’s O.K.,’ he said, not denying it. He was in civilian clothes, with a striped tie that no Englishman would have worn unless it was his Old School colours, and he looked more at home in the kitchen than he did when he was in uniform. He sat down opposite her at the table, picked up a spoon and began to polish it carefully, as if that were his only interest in the world.

‘I told you not to come here again,’ Christine murmured, feeling that she ought to say that, although she was glad that he had come.

‘Oh, sure,’ he said, starting on another spoon. ‘I only came to see if you had the monkey-wrench from the car. I can’t find it.’

‘Oh yes. We used it when we were trying to unstop the waste-pipe in the bathroom. Aunt Jo must have put it in our toolbox. I’m sorry. I’ll get it.’ She got up. Nowadays, when she got up from a chair, she had to push herself up with her hands, and he noticed it.

‘Don’t bother now,’ he said. ‘It can wait. Let’s you and me have a drink together first, what do you say?’

‘A drink?’ She looked at the kitchen clock, made like a frying-pan, which she had bought for Aunt Josephine last Christmas. ‘It’s not five o’clock yet.’ ‘So what? You British never raise a thirst before six o’clock because the law says you mustn’t, but an American can raise a thirst any time. Can I go fix one for us?’

‘All right. You know where everything is. My father’s out walking his dog.’ They both knew that Mr Cope would disapprove of the cocktail cupboard being unlatched at this hour.

Vinson took out some ice, and when he had gone through to the drawing-room Christine hastily went to her bag and powdered her nose, put on lipstick and combed her hair. He caught her at the mirror when he came back with two strong whiskies on a tray. He always carried drinks and food as neatly as if he were a trained parlourmaid.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘You’re so pretty, Christine, you mustn’t let yourself go. You’ve got thinner,’ he said, as she came over to the table, where he had cleared aside the silver and put the glasses down.

‘Have I? That’s a good thing then. I was too fat before.’

He did not answer this. He did not seem inclined to talk much. He sat there sipping his drink and smoking, and left it to her to make the conversation. She did not know what she should say.

‘I can’t stay very long,’ she told him. ‘I’ve got to go out and get some food. Daddy has asked a friend for supper.’

‘You’ve got too much to do,’ Vinson said.

It was the first time anyone had said this to her since Aunt Josephine died. She had drunk half her glass of whisky, and it made her unable to resist saying: ‘Oh yes, Vin, I have. It’s awful. I can’t get anyone to help, and I just can’t cope, and Daddy doesn’t want to leave this house and get a flat, and I just don’t know how I’m ever going to get straight. I can’t see it ever getting any better.’

‘You’re pretty unhappy, aren’t you, Christine?’ he said, looking at his glass.

She paused, and then she said on a sigh: ‘Oh, Vin, I am.’ She knew she should not say this to him; but although he was there in the kitchen with her he was out of her life, and so perhaps she could admit it.

‘It’s awful. I miss Aunt Jo so much, and I’m so tired, and it’s so dreary because Daddy and I – well, he never wants to hear about the shop or anything. He doesn’t like it if I go out, and I don’t really want to, but I’ve got nobody to talk to. I’ve got nothing.’

She held herself from making the noises or the facial expressions of crying, but tears began to run down the side of her nose and into her mouth, and she kept her head down as she said: ‘Aunt Jo was always here, and she was my friend. But it’s all so different now. I’ve got nothing.’

‘You’ve got me,’ Vinson said quietly. It sounded like a line from a play, facile and just right, but when she looked up at him she saw that he meant it.

‘You’ve still got me,’ he said, and a warm flux of comfort began to flow through her as she let herself drift for a while on the tide of all the things he began to say to her in a quickened voice. He leaned across the table, twisting his empty glass round in his narrow hands, and told her that she was the sort of girl he had been looking for all his life and never found, and how his friends would be jealous of him, and how he would make her happy. He told her about America and the home they would have there together, and how wonderful it was, and how she would get to love it more than England… .

‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘I could never do that.’ But she was only speaking theoretically, because she knew she could not go to America with him.

She did not tell him that, because she did not want to abandon just yet the illusion of relief and escape which he was offering her. To be looked after … to have someone who cared about what you felt and did … She shook herself out of the dream and stood up.

‘Don’t go on, Vin,’ she said. ‘I must go out now and get some food before the shops close.’

‘To hell with the shops,’ he said, getting up and coming round the table to her.’ Forget it. I’ll take you out to dinner.’

‘I can’t. There’s Daddy and Mr Wilson –’

‘We’ll take them out too. Give them a bang-up meal. Take them to the club if you like, and buy them a steak. I’ve got to get in right with your father.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m going to marry you.’

She smiled. She thought that he would kiss her then, but he just patted her shoulder and turned to the table to pick up the glasses. ‘I’ll go get us another drink,’ he said.

Telling Roger and Sylvia was the hardest part. Her father had been quite easy. So that he could not make a fuss, Vinson had told him in front of Mr Wilson, who sat at the table in the Air Force club gorged with food, with his eyes popping out. Mr Cope was more concerned at the time with worrying about whether he was going to be able to digest the food he had eaten than with worrying about Christine going away to marry in America; but when he and Christine talked about it alone at home afterwards he realized that she meant it, and he began to say:

‘What will happen to me? And what is going to happen to me?’

‘You knew I might get married some time.’ Christine steeled herself against feeling too sorry for him. ‘You must have thought of that. It happens to nearly all fathers. It’s just because I’ve been at home so long that you … But you’ll be all right,’ she said briskly, determined not to be held back by pity. ‘You’ll be fine. You know that Roger and Sylvia will be glad to have you, and you’ll have a lovely home with them. You know you like Farnborough, and it will be wonderful for Bruce. There’ll be hundreds of places you can take him for walks.’

She was trying to persuade herself as much as him. She still had to persuade Roger and Sylvia.

When Mr Cope’s dog was mentioned they seized on that and made it a point of issue. They could not very well say that they did not want Mr Cope, but they could hint at it by quibbling about his dog. They held up the more important plans by objecting to details, and they were like that all through the talk which Christine had with them when she took a Saturday morning off and drove down to Farnborough to tell them that she was going to marry Vinson.

They did not like it. In common decency, they could not object to the larger aspects of the case. Christine had a right to get married, and her father had a right to expect that his son and daughter-in-law would give him a home. Whatever they were thinking, they could not deny that in so many words, and so they tried to unsettle Christine by cavilling at details.

It was a horrid interview. It ought to be so wonderful to go to your family and say: ‘I’m going to be married’, and to be kissed and wished happiness. Sylvia did kiss her, with her nose cold and wet against Christine’s cheek, but all she could wish her in the way of happiness was: ‘I hope you’re not making a mistake, Christine. No doubt you know what you want.’

It was made more difficult for her because Vinson had been recalled to Washington. If he were there Roger and Sylvia would not have been able to talk as they did, but Christine had seen him off from the airport two days ago, and now she was alone, and the confidence she felt with him was ebbing.

They had lunch, a dull, overcooked lunch served laboriously by a slow maid. When the maid had gone out of the room, Roger began again to try and undermine Christine’s assurance.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘We don’t know anything about this fellow. He’s obviously a first-class chap – don’t get me wrong -but aren’t you rather rushing into this without knowing anything about his background? We don’t know who his people are, and so on. I mean, you’ve only seen him over here as a naval officer, and you never can tell about Americans, anyway. They all sound the same to me.’

‘You mean you think he’s common.’ Christine stabbed at a brussels sprout with her fork. Sylvia was the sort of housekeeper who aggravated the horrors of having to have brussels sprouts in season by having them out of season as well, when there were other vegetables to choose from. ‘Don’t be a snob, Rodge. Vin isn’t common, though it wouldn’t matter if he was. Our family’s not such great shakes. What about Uncle Willie and the pawnshop? Anyway, nobody’s common in America. The word doesn’t exist.’ She had gathered that from Vinson’s mystification when she had used the word to him in describing someone.

‘Must be what’s wrong with that country then,’ said Roger complacently, slathering mustard on his meat. ‘But honestly, Chris, you’re going to find it awfully different over there. I wonder if you’ll like it? I know I wouldn’t.’

‘I’ll love it,’ said Christine. ‘You’re so beastly insular. I think it’s exciting to be starting out all over again in a new country that has the future of the world in its hands.’

She was quoting Vinson, and Roger said: ‘God help the world, if that’s the case.’

‘Of course you’ll be living in the land of plenty. It will be very different from what we have to manage with over here,’ said Sylvia gently but accusingly.

‘I’ll send you food parcels,’ said Christine, determined not to be confounded by them. ‘And chocolate for the children, and I’ll send you nylons.’

‘I’d have to pay duty on them.’ Sylvia quickly found fault. ‘But you mustn’t worry about us. You’ll have your own life to lead over there, and we’ll manage all right, no doubt, though I must say I wouldn’t have expected you to spring this on us just now, so soon after Aunt Jo –’

‘She liked him!’ cried Christine violently. ‘She liked Vinson, and she wanted me to marry him.’

‘Oh, so you discussed it with her?’ Sylvia raised her thin gingery eyebrows. ‘I must say I think it’s a little funny that we never heard anything about it.’ Funny was another of her favourite words.

‘Why should I tell you when I knew you’d be like this? Aunt Jo was the only one who cared whether I was happy or not. She wanted me to marry Vin. She said so, and I don’t care what you or anyone thinks -’ She paused blindly at the unappetising food on her plate, and Sylvia said in very English French: ’Pas devant la bonne’, as the maid trod heavily back into the room with a plate of blancmange.

The children had been lunching with a neighbour. When they came back Christine told them her news. She thought that they would be pleased and excited, as children were by any new turn of events, whatever its implications. Even death was something new to marvel at; but instead of being excited about Christine they looked at her in dismay and said: ‘What about us? You’re going away to America and we shan’t ever see you again. What will happen to us?’

Jeanette clung to Christine and began to cry, and they both put on a ridiculous act, crying:’ What shall we do without you; oh, whatever shall we do?’ as if they had a cruel mother and father, and she were their only hope in the world.

It was almost as if their parents had put them up to behaving like this. Everyone was conspiring to make Christine feel bad about following her perfectly natural desire to be married and have a life of her own.

When she left, Roger made his final shot. ‘Well, we shan’t be calling you the estimable Miss Cope much longer,’ he said amiably enough, as they went down the path between the neat box hedges, which were one of the reasons why Sylvia did not want to have Mr Cope’s dog,’ but I don’t see how you can face the thought of being called Mrs Gaegler. That’s no kind of a name. My sister, Mrs Gaegler.’ He shook his head and snickered. ‘I can’t see myself saying that with a straight face.’

It was not much better at the shop. Christine’s outside friends were pleased when she told them. Rhona was ecstatic, and began making plans to come to America and stay with her, and Margaret and Laurie were unselfishly delighted, although they would miss her. But in the busy book department, where the estimable Miss Cope was so much needed, the congratulations were shadowed by the unspoken reproach that she was letting them down by going away so suddenly before anyone could be trained to take her place.

‘Of course I’m glad for you, my dear,’ Mr Parker said, ‘but if only you could have stayed just a little while longer and helped me to organize the department under a new head saleswoman. I don’t know who they’ll send me. The personnel is so poor these days. Mrs Drew could have taken over, but I doubt she’ll come back now. She seems to have deserted us too.’

‘She’s going to have a baby. Surely she’s allowed to do that.’

‘I know, my dear, I know. I’m not complaining, but to lose the two of you … Miss Burman will never amount to much, poor old soul, Alice is being moved next month, and Helen -well, she’s a worthy enough girl, but she hasn’t your experience. Oh dear, Miss Cope, I just don’t see how I’m going to manage without you. You’ve been indispensable to me, but your young man must come first, I suppose.’

He managed a brave smile, which flickered out of his face almost at once. Christine agreed with him. She did not see how he was going to manage without her. She knew that she had held him together in his uncertain sway over the book department. Even if he got efficient new helpers, they would not cover up for him and look after him as she had done.

She worked like a beaver in her last few days at the shop, to try to make amends for her desertion. She brought the stock list up to date and checked the order book and rearranged untidy sections, but Mr Parker, in his distress at losing her, was already becoming more futile than he had ever been, and she dreaded to think what muddles he would get into when she was gone.

Now that she knew she was leaving the shop she wanted it to happen quickly, but at half past five on her last day she did not want to go. She remembered only the nice things about working at Goldwyn’s, and none of the things she had grumbled about.

Mr Parker, Miss Burman, Alice and Helen, and even the new assistant, who had a fluting voice and cut-away nostrils, had clubbed together to buy her a silver ashtray with her new initials on it: C.M.G. They gave it to her with some embarrassment after the shop closed. Christine wanted to cry. Miss Burman did cry, and Mr Parker shook her hand feebly and shuffled away in his black musician’s hat to the door which the commissionaire was holding for him. It was very distressing.

Just before she left England Margaret told Christine that she had had Miss Burman to tea, and Miss Burman had told her, with many indrawn breaths, that Mr Parker had resigned his post. ‘Though given the sack,’ Miss Burman said, ‘would be more my way of putting it.’

Then there were the animals. Mr Cope’s dog was going to Farnborough, under Roger’s half-joking threat that he would shoot it if it gave any trouble. Christine had wanted to take her dog Timmy to America with her, but Vinson said that they would be living in an apartment, and dogs were not allowed. Even if they moved away from Washington, he said, they would not want to be trammelled with a dog when they did not know where they might be sent.

When he wrote that to her, Christine almost wrote back to say she would not come to America. Vinson had pretended to like dogs when he first came to ‘Roselawn’, but now that he was safely engaged to her she saw that he did not. If only they could have talked it over, he might have reassured her, but three thousand miles was too far to make contact over things like this. Christine’s letters were warm and impulsive, the sort of letters she would like to get; but Vinson’s letters to her were carefully composed and a little stilted, and did not reveal his feelings. Even his love messages sounded as if they came out of a book. Christine thought that she would mind leaving Timmy more than anyone in England. Margaret was going to take him for her, and two days before her boat sailed she took him over to the Drews’ house. It would have been terrible if he had been sad and pleaded her with his eyes not to go, but it was even more terrible that he settled down quite happily, ate a large meal and was too busy with a bone in the garden to notice when she went away.

The goldfish were given to Sylvia’s children. She struck at having the love-birds, and they were given to a pet shop, whose owner would not pay anything for them, because he said they were too old.

The oldest cat had to be destroyed because Christine could not find anyone who would take it. Two of the others had run away after Aunt Josephine died, and the remaining cat was given as a parting present to Miss Burman, who might not have been so delighted with it if she had realized it was expecting kittens.

There remained only Aunt Josephine’s decrepit fox-terrier. Christine had been looking after it as well as she could, even letting it sleep on her bed, although it did not like her.

‘Have to be put down, of course,’ Roger said robustly. ‘Put it out of its misery as it should have been long ago.’

‘But Aunt Jo loved it,’ Christine said. ‘It seems so mean to her to let it die.’ But no one would have it, and there was nothing for Christine to do but to take it away to be destroyed. When the vet carried its soggy old body away, with one leg dangling down under his arm, it looked at Christine with eyes of deep distress.

When her father said good-bye to her at Waterloo she looked out of the window as the train pulled out, and saw in his eyes the same look that the fox-terrier had when it was carried away to die.

She had let everybody down by going away. No one was pleased that she was going to be married. No one was happy for her, and she could not feel happy for herself. A bride going to her lover should have gone with shining eyes and an eager heart, but Christine sat miserably in the train to Southampton and would not look out of the window. When people exclaimed about the buttercups, she would not look at the fields. She did not want to leave England.

‘Look,’ said the man next to her, leaning over. ‘There’s our bateau. Quite sizeable, isn’t she?’

Christine turned her head, and there was the black-and-white hull of the liner rising, it seemed, right out of the flat fields, as the train slid past it and into the customs shed.