4

At the sink Harry ran the taps. Water gushed out. The old dog pricked up his ears, then settled back into his basket with a sigh. ‘Has he been out?’ said Julia, coming into the kitchen.

‘Had a little snuffle round the garden.’

‘Any joy?’

Harry shook her head. ‘I’ve got the mop handy.’ The spaniel had been having accidents lately.

Julia sat down at the scrubbed deal table where her son was eating his breakfast. For the past two days she had been conscious of a feeling of uncertainty or restlessness, as if someone had been sandpapering her nerve endings. It would be the coming war, she thought. She wouldn’t give in to it. ‘Lovely morning again,’ she said.

‘Windy,’ said Harry, turning off the taps. ‘Where’s your games shirt, Sunny Jim?’ she said to Peter. ‘I can’t find it. It needs to go in the wash before you go back to school.’

No answer.

‘Peter?’ said Julia.

‘What?’

‘Don’t say “what?”, darling. It isn’t polite. Harry asked you a question.’

‘Sorry, Madre,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t hear.’

‘Where’s your Aertex? Harry needs to wash it.’

‘It’s in my trunk.’

‘No, it’s not,’ said Harry. ‘And it’s not under your bed either.’

‘Perhaps it’s in my tuck box.’

‘What’s your Aertex doing in your tuck box?’ Julia glanced up, caught Harry’s eye and shrugged.

Peter didn’t know what his Aertex was doing in his tuck box. He didn’t know whether his Aertex was in his tuck box. Like many schoolboys, those possessions that weren’t actually in his pockets at any given moment tended to come and go of their own accord. ‘May I get down?’

‘Finish your toast first,’ said Julia. ‘Crusts as well.’

Peter chewed his crusts. ‘Are you going to Bury today?’

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full. You know that I am.’ She was going to Bury to equip him for the new term.

‘You can always buy me another one there.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Julia. ‘You should look after your belongings.’

Harry plonked down the teapot. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

Julia consulted her list. Blazer, socks, two school shirts. Aertex?

‘Finished,’ said Peter, indicating his plate.

‘All right,’ said Julia.

He headed for the back door.

‘Where are you off to?’

He scuffed his toe on the floor, then looked up. ‘Nowhere in particular.’

‘Don’t slam the door,’ said Harry to the slamming door.

Julia was under no illusion where Peter was going. Off to the harbour to watch what he could of the filming.

She knew, because Dougie had mentioned it at lunch, that they were filming this morning beyond the mole. He’d offered Sam Binns three pounds to take them out in Mon Amy and she’d told him with a laugh that, firstly, he’d offered too much and, secondly, he’d offered it to the worst skipper in town. To which he’d replied it was a pity she couldn’t take over the budgeting because he was useless at it and always overspent. With that memory came an involuntary image of his hands.

In normal times, Bury St Edmunds, with its cathedral, guildhall and Abbey Gardens, and its two rivers, the Lark and the Linnet, was a typical East Anglian market town, part medieval, part Georgian, the fringes Victorian and none of it lively. Lately that had changed. War was here, or close by, in a way it wasn’t at home. Many windows were criss-crossed with tape. Outside the Salvation Army headquarters a terrier lifted his leg on a pile of sandbags.

When Julia made her way from the bus to Buttermarket the narrow streets were clogged with raw recruits from the training camp outside of town, along with one or two flight officers from the airbase at Mildenhall. One lad, moving off the pavement to allow her to pass, was wearing a uniform so large it seemed to move independently of him. They could have weighed him for it, her father would have said.

Whittle and Son, the outfitter for Peter’s school, was busy with mothers, all of a certain class, all wearing a certain sort of hat, the same sort of calculation in their minds: leave it as late as possible after the summer growth spurt. You couldn’t call the atmosphere festive, yet it was in its way seasonal. Tickets were issued in strict rotation. Clearly there was a system, which wasn’t to say your needs would be served, merely that every appearance would be given that they might be.

‘St Barnabas?’ said an assistant.

‘Crossfields,’ said Julia, handing over her list.

The assistant – a man in his early fifties with lines of grey hair combed over his scalp – ran his finger down it.

‘Two sizes up, I thought, for the blazer.’

‘Two sizes, madam?’

‘He’s grown.’

The assistant inclined his head. ‘Might I suggest three?’

‘Three?’ said Julia, thinking of the recruit she’d passed in the street. Peter would never forgive her if she bought him a blazer to drown in. ‘He doesn’t grow that fast.’

The assistant said, ‘In view of the present emergency, we are recommending parents take a longer view.’

‘Are you,’ said Julia.

‘We anticipate that the demand for cloth by the services,’ said the assistant, ‘will perforce cause a shortage for schools.’

‘Oh.’

‘I am also afraid to inform you,’ said the assistant, ‘that the Plantagenet games bags are currently out of stock. Shall we send one on to Master Compton care of the school when they come in?’

‘Yes,’ said Julia. ‘That will be fine.’ Throughout this entire exchange she realized, with a jolt, she had been simultaneously thinking of Dougie, as if he had set up residence in a parallel groove in her mind.

Abbey Gardens was crowded. She came through the gate clutching the parcel of Peter’s uniform and saw the fine weather had filled the benches and green spaces: mothers, babies, shop girls on their lunchbreak, old men, a smattering of khaki, small boys peering into freshly dug trenches.

When it was warm, you never remembered what it was like to be cold. You remembered shivering, putting more coal on the fire, getting out of bed in the morning and finding the floor icy under your feet. But these were descriptions of cold, not the reality of it. Similarly, she imagined, they would look back on these last days of peace and be unable to recall what they felt like.

It was two hours until the next bus back. The sun was shining. She had her book, and a ham roll she’d bought in the bakery, the necessary ingredients for killing time, yet she found herself too restless to sit and carried on walking down the avenue of limes.

The bells of the Norman tower began to ring and the air filled with tumultuous changes, structures of sound. At intervals on the smooth turf stood the ruins of the old abbey, lone piers of mortared stone shaped by time into giant human forms, the blurred suggestion of heads on top of bulbous weathered trunks. A man raised his hat to her. A child cycled past.

By and by, she came to the river. The Lark, a tributary of the Great Ouse, was sluggish and shrunk by the summer, overhung by drooping willows and red-stemmed dogwood. Small insects hovered.

On the bank was a couple, kissing, oblivious of her approach. Both were young, barely twenty, and unremarkable enough. The girl had rather thick ankles; the boy had brilliantined hair and rosy ears that stuck out. Yet the urgent sweetness with which they clung to each other pierced her. She stopped and stood watching them, unable to tear her eyes away.

It could only have been seconds before they sensed her presence, broke off their embrace and turned their flushed heavy-lidded faces in her direction. No one spoke. Then abruptly she went back the way she had come, past the ruins, up the avenue of limes, past the chatting mothers, the babies, the small boys, the old men soaking up the sun, the shop girls folding their sandwich wrappings. She had never understood temptation before – how it carried on mocking you after you thought you’d sent it packing, how it left behind loss.

You little fool, she told herself. You have a husband and a son. You have a home. You aren’t lovesick and twenty. She came out of the park.

Harry was making toad in the hole for supper and Julia wondered whether she had managed to buy any flour – they were running low and, like sugar, it was one of the things that was flying off the shelves as war approached. Perhaps she should try to track some down herself, just in case.

And that was when she saw him, standing on the other side of Abbeygate Street by the insurance building.

Him.

The coincidence seemed extravagant, fictitious, laughable.

She stepped off the pavement. A squeal of tyres, a blaring horn and the parcel of Peter’s uniform flew out of her hands. The car, which had missed her by inches, screeched to a halt a little way down.

‘Are you blind?’ said the driver, leaning out of the window. His hat fell off. He got out of the car to fetch it and shook it at her. ‘Next time, look where you’re bloomin’ well going.’

Julia put her hand on her heart, which was racing. ‘Sorry, my fault.’

The car drove off. Rooted to the spot – she had no choice, as her legs had stopped taking instructions – she watched him head towards her. Midway across the road, he retrieved her parcel.

‘Are you always so careless of your personal safety?’ said Dougie.

She stared at him. ‘What are you doing in Bury?’

‘Right now, I’m buying you a drink and making sure you drink it. You know,’ he said, ‘compared to London, this town has no traffic to speak of. I shouldn’t think a car comes past here more than once an hour. It takes some talent to get yourself under it.’

‘I didn’t get myself under it.’

‘Fortunately.’

They began walking back towards Buttermarket. He had a grip of her elbow. But this didn’t exactly steady her up. She stole a glance at his face, then looked away. What was it about the arrangement of these particular features that had such an effect on her? Why did his mouth, his voice, drive every thought from her head? He wasn’t handsome, like her husband, yet he made her husband’s handsomeness seem pointless.

‘I thought you were filming,’ she managed to say.

‘Too windy.’

‘It’s not that windy, surely?’

‘It is when you’ve got a camera that weighs two hundred pounds in a boat with a shallow draught and an operator who’s capable of being seasick on a duck pond.’ They passed the outfitters. ‘You were right about the skipper, by the way. We didn’t even leave the harbour. No point wasting stock. We’ve little enough of it.’

‘Wasn’t there anything else you could film?’

‘You sound like my crew.’

‘Sorry.’

‘To tell the truth, a lot of filming is waiting.’ He glanced at her. ‘You’re shaking.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Try not to apologize quite so much.’

She allowed herself to be steered into a pub, sat at a table and bought a brandy. He watched over her as she sipped it.

‘Better?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

The pub, whatever it was called – the George, the Prince Arthur, the Duke of York – something royal in any case, was one of those frowsty places with brown ceilings, brown mirrors and dull brass. She was the only woman drinking in it.

‘Last orders,’ said the barmaid. ‘Last orders, ladies and gentlemen, please.’

‘What are you doing here?’

He set down his pint. ‘Looking for you, among other things.’

Looking for her. Could that be true? It seemed less believable than coincidence. ‘How did you know where I was?’

‘Your son told me.’

‘You asked him?’

‘He volunteered the information. You’ve had to buy him a new Aertex, I gather.’

‘Time, please,’ said the barmaid, ringing a bell.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Julia. ‘You can’t have thought you would just fetch up here and find me.’

‘Dearest,’ he said, ‘I did. Admittedly, I nearly killed you in the process.’

‘Time, please,’ said the barmaid.

‘What now?’ said Julia, ‘dearest’ pounding in her ears.

‘Now I’m going to drive you home.’

It wasn’t his car, he was at pains to explain; it was on loan from the Unit. Outside: battered. Inside: rather a tip. Decayed apple core in the footwell. Papers, maps, books on the seats.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Throw the jacket in the back.’

Dougie drove erratically, speeding up and slowing down when you least expected it. He shot blind corners and lingered by clear level crossings; he overtook when he shouldn’t have done yet dawdled in the wake of a cart so as not to spook the horse that was pulling it. Soon enough they neared the coast, evident in the bright reflected uplight over the high hedgerows, the sense of an imminent expanse just out of sight. When they turned on to the road that ran straight through the marshes down to the town and the silvery blue sea lay in view, he pulled the car over on to the verge and stopped.

He had barely spoken since they left the pub. Now he turned to her. ‘What happens next is up to you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I understand why you ran off the other day.’

She nodded.

‘And I won’t press you. But you must know one thing.’

She stared ahead.

‘I should very much like to take you to bed.’

If he had told her he loved her, couldn’t live without her, said what they said in films, in books, she would have got out of the car and marched home across the marshes. The truth, spoken plainly, was what stunned her.

The windscreen was speckled, smeared, with dead insects. She looked through it and at it, shifting her focus from the far to the near. Somehow from the first moment she had seen him she had known it would come to this. She had known it as she knew her own name. ‘Where are you lodging?’

The town didn’t boast many guest houses; it had few visitors. There was a down-at-heel hotel, the White Sands (doubly a misnomer, for there were no sands, white or otherwise) and rooms to let here and there, chiefly above the pubs. Most of the crew were accommodated in these, which was handy enough for what they liked doing best after work. Dougie shared digs with the camera operator in an old fisherman’s cottage on the front near the lighthouse.

They were renting it from the postmistress, he said, as they pulled up in the cobbled lane and got out of the car.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘walkers and birdwatchers stay here sometimes. But mostly it’s empty.’

‘Frank’s a birdwatcher, funnily enough. He’s spending the afternoon down at the estuary doing just that.’ He opened the door for her and they went into the hall. Ahead were uncarpeted stairs.

Afterwards, she remembered the aching distance between them, how charged and alive it was, how much she wanted the feeling to last for ever and how much she didn’t. But who made the first move she could not say. They were apart one moment, the next they were together, dissolving whatever separated one person from another.

He took her face in his hands, kissed her hair, her ears, her neck. Then he found her mouth. The world fell away.

What sort of kissing fed hunger with hunger? There was no end to it. She drank in the way he tasted, drank in his smell. Her hands drew him to her, the nape of his neck, the small of his back.

‘Darling.’ He pulled back to look at her. ‘Darling.’ The expression on his face was naked and tender as he led her upstairs.

A small featureless room, bright afternoon sunlight, dusty floorboards, clothing, papers, books strewn about. They came through the door, and there was a shocked, plummeting moment when she realized what she was doing, then they were clutching at each other, unbuckling, unbuttoning, and she knew she had been waiting for this her whole life.

When they fell on the narrow bed his weight on her was a homecoming. The contours of his body met hers. His skin met her skin.

‘Open your eyes,’ he said.

She opened her eyes.

‘That’s better. Now I can see you properly.’

Then he entered her and she gasped at the wet welcome she had made for him.

A little later they were lying entangled in the bedclothes. He traced her profile, down the bridge of her nose, across her lips to her throat. ‘So beautiful.’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘A Modigliani, that’s what you are.’

Modigliani? But then he was kissing her again, running his hands over her body, his wonderful warm hands, and she lost all sense of where he started and stopped and where she did.

When Frank returned to the cottage a little after six, Dougie was sitting smoking in the tiny front room. Like the rest of the cottage, it was furnished, sparsely, with oddments. Some of the furniture was too big, some of it was too small; none of it would have been easy to shift at auction.

‘Stone curlews, a pair of marsh harriers and a bittern,’ said Frank. ‘Not bad.’ He slipped the strap of his field glasses over his head and set them down on a table with a bad leg. ‘Might we have a little illumination, do you think? Or is that not included in what we’re paying for this tip?’

Dougie chucked a box of matches at him. ‘Oh for London,’ said Frank, lighting the oil lamp perched on the narrow mantelpiece. ‘Oh for the Tottenham Court Road.’ He replaced the smoky glass sleeve over the flaring lit wick. ‘And how was your afternoon? Satisfactory?’

‘I went to Bury.’

‘Did you.’

‘And then I came back.’

Frank sat himself opposite in a frayed basket chair. He was a large man, and it was a tight fit. ‘Tiring, was it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You look completely fagged out.’

‘Thanks,’ said Dougie. ‘Any news?’

‘We’re not at war yet. Eddie almost exposed a can of footage. And the trawlerman you were talking to earlier said he’d take us out on Sunday, but he wants the same money as you promised the other bugger, the one with the useless boat. Plus a little bit more, seeing as it’s the Lord’s Day.’ A creak of wicker. ‘You’re not listening.’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Had any supper?’

‘Not hungry.’

‘Pub?’

‘You go. I’ll be along later.’

A brief flash as the lighthouse beam swept over the cottage and glared right into the corners of the room and under the furniture. After dusk, you could time yourself by it.

‘Oh, I get it,’ said Frank, tilting his big head on one side like a coquette. ‘Now it comes to me. It’s not tiredness, is it? It’s freshly fucked.’ Post coitum omnia tristia sunt, he thought.

Dougie put out his cigarette in a scallop shell overflowing with stubs.

‘You had her, didn’t you? The fishwife manqué. Quick work, I have to hand it to you.’

‘What a way you have with words.’

‘I’d say that was more your department.’ Frank got up from the chair, and for a moment it was touch and go whether the chair would get up with him. ‘Was it worth it?’

‘Stick to your birdwatching, Frank.’

‘Oh, I shall. Much less bother.’