SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS were the busiest days for picking. Whole families went: mothers with toddlers perched in wickerwork child seats behind the saddles of their bikes, men with boys on their crossbars and lunch bags over their shoulders. Clem and Goz stood up on their pedals, overtaking at high speed.

The picking had moved to an adjacent, much larger, field. There were two weighing stations. Mortimer’s men were stretching a tarpaulin over a three-sided shelter made of hay bales. Even at this early hour, the day was very hot, and the filled punnets of strawberries would need shade. The two boys pushed their bikes over the baking ground to the far side of the field, where a line of ash trees separated it from a shimmering expanse of ripening wheat.

“There,” Goz said, gesturing with his head.

One ash had lost its grip on the earth and slumped against its neighbor. In their conjoined shadows, a few of last season’s bales had been overlooked. The boys parked their bikes there and stuffed their rucksacks into the spilled hay.

At dinnertime they returned to this den, away from the noisy mob, shuffling themselves into the narrowing shade. They unwrapped their sandwiches with reddened fingers.

“Wanna swap one?”

“Dunno,” Goz said. “Wotcher got?”

“Cheese and piccalilli.”

“Cawd, no. Dunno how you eat that stuff. It’s like yellow sick.”

“Thank you very much, Gosling. I’ll enjoy them all the more for that.”

“My pleasure.”

They drank over-sweet orange squash from a flip-top Corona bottle. It was as warm as blood, despite their precautions. Goz had a packet of ten Bristol cigarettes. They smoked, sighing pleasure. A segment of time passed.

A voice that was neither of their own said, “Give us a drag on that.”

They squinted up. She was wearing the same knotted shirt and short blue jeans as before, stained now, and a misshapen, big-brimmed straw hat that webbed her face with shadow.

Goz reacted first. He held up his ciggie, and she reached down and took it from his fingers. She took a theatrical pull on it, then stepped forward, pushed the boys’ legs apart with one of her own, and flopped onto the ground between them, her back against the broken bale. She took another drag, with her eyes closed.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “Daddy doesn’t know I smoke.”

Clem and Goz leaned forward and goggled at each other (Daddy?) and then, as one, took a peek down her shirt.

Goz found his voice. “Your dad? That’d be the Lord High Mortimer, would it?”

She laughed, snortling smoke. “God, is that really what they call him?”

She opened her eyes and looked at them in turn. There was a little slick of perspiration in the hollow where her throat met her chest. She smelled of sweat and strawberries and something like vanilla ice cream.

“Some do,” Goz said. “We don’t. We’re Communists. We’re making plans for the revolution.”

“Are you? Are you really? Is that why you’re down here away from all the other workers?”

“Yeah. People talk. You can’t trust anybody. There are informers everywhere. Walls have ears.”

“So do corn,” Clem said, and instantly regretted it.

“That was feeble, Ackroyd,” Goz said.

She turned to Clem.

God, her eyes.

“Ackroyd? Any relation to George Ackroyd?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “He’s my old man.”

She studied him. He trembled with the effort of holding her gaze.

“Yes,” she said. “You look like him, come to think of it. I like George. He’s nice. Daddy thinks the world of him.”

“Yeah, well,” Clem said, thinking, She knows my dad? He knew she existed?

“So what’s your first name, son of George?”

“Clem. My ugly mate is Goz.”

The girl stubbed the cigarette out, carefully, on a patch of bare soil and pushed herself forward onto her knees. She looked around the field, then stood up.

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for the smoke. I’ll see you later, alligator.”

“Hang on,” Clem said. “What’s your name, then?”

“Frankie.”

“Frankie?”

“Short for Françoise.” She pronounced it ironically, with an exaggerated Norfolk accent: Fraarnswaars.

“Cawd strewth,” Clem murmured, watching her walk away.

“Dear, oh, bleddy dear,” Goz said sorrowfully.

At three o’clock, Clem straightened up and faked a groan.

“ ’S no good. I gotta find somewhere for a leak.”

Goz didn’t lift his head. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”

Clem hurried for the hedge, stepping over rows, then glanced back, turned right, and walked casually up the field.

She was not among the throng at either of the weighing stations. A tractor was pulling a laden trailer out of the field. Was that her riding on the back of it? No, just a boy in a blue shirt. Clem stood, indecisive and achingly disappointed. She’d gone. Like a drunk surfacing from a stupor, he realized that he was being looked at and that he knew most of the faces around him. Half the Millfields estate was here today. God, what was he thinking of?

“Orright, young Clem? Lost someone, hev yer?”

That nosy cow Mrs. Parsons from Chaucer.

“No, I . . . No. I was just . . .”

He retreated hastily.

Halfway back, he looked over to where their camp was and saw — could it be? — a soft flash of blue. Just beyond the trees. Two brushstrokes of blue and one of black where the leaf shadow edged into the green-gold haze of wheat. Yes. His breath failed briefly. He made his legs move, made himself take care where he set his feet, crossing the rows. When he next looked up, the vision had gone. Dismay made him gasp and swear. And hurry. He stumbled up and through the gap between two of the ash trees. Their dense shade was like a moment of night, and his eyes were baffled for an instant. But then, there she was, sitting cross-legged but leaning back on her hands, on the narrow berm of dandelion-freckled and daisy-splashed grass beyond the tree line. The straw hat was on the ground beside her left knee. Her head was lifted away from him, and her eyes were closed. She was smiling. She seemed to be listening to the frantic debate being conducted by a parliament of greenfinches in the branches overhead.

He would remember all these things long after they’d been blown away. Scraps of talk, sound, would drift back like flakes of burned paper on a spiraling wind:

“You took your time.”

“I thought you’d gone. . . .”

The chirrupy hissing of grasshoppers.

“Yeah. A levels. Art, English, history. . . .”

Her comical grimace. “Brainy with it, then?”

A noisy exodus of skirling birds.

“. . . I dunno. Art school, probably.”

“Dirty devil. So you can look at girls sitting there in the nude? I don’t know how they can do it. . . .”

A whisper through the grain.

“No, not that. I want . . .”

“Are you any good at kissing?”

An intense silence, everything stilled, at the moment she took hold of his collar and pulled his face down.

The panicky thrill throughout his body with her mouth on his. Not knowing what to do with his hands, so keeping them pressed into the grass. Something, an ant perhaps, crawling on the stretched skin between his thumb and forefinger. Awkward twisting of his shoulders. Tongue? Hers doing it. Slithering into his mouth. Hot breath tasting of cigarette and strawberry juice and something else. Coarse distant laughter, like a pheasant’s call, coming from somewhere. Squirming to keep the hard thing in his jeans from touching her leg. Wanting the aching moment to go on and on and on, because he had no idea what she might expect him to do next.

And then a snappy rasp from behind them: Goz, with his back against a tree, lighting a ciggie.

“Funny sort of a widdle, comrade,” he said.

Clem pulled away from her, gasping, lost.