GRACE IS IN THE SERVANTS’ HALL WITH HER BEST summer frock on. The boot boy is trying not to look at her but Susan and Sarah, they’re peeping all right, just pretending not to. They’ve all been waiting to see Joseph come for her this evening before he takes the train back. He called round more than a week ago and Grace wasn’t in. Wasn’t in, out just for an hour or so on an errand for Miss Beatrice. Fancy the luck of that. He couldn’t wait, his note said, he knew he’d said it would be today in his letter but he had to go straight up to see his ma on the next train. Didn’t know how long he’d be caught there, what there’d be to do. Harvest, he said, needs bringing in. He is sorry for letting her down.
Cheeky, thinks Grace. Let her down? He isn’t the only thing she has to worry about. But that’s not true, is it, Grace Campbell? Joseph and his big warm blondness are what’s given her hope in the past year. It’s strange, being so free to choose her own life now. She can go where she likes – but there’s a nothingness to that, as though wherever she puts her feet, the ground beneath might slide away.
Not that she’s seen him, it’s all been in words, speaking out plain about the adventures he’s been having but how all he’s looking forward to, he writes, is his Grace, and her laugh and pretty face again. When she reads his letters, they make her feel that there’s somebody who wants to look after her and she doesn’t have to worry him about going off to marry somebody else. Joseph will hold her in his arms and tell her how much he likes her. It also makes her think that, even what with all that’s happened, there is good somewhere, and her wickedness might not stop it coming to her.
Even though the world and his wife have now been in and out of the library and there’s been not a flicker of notice about the book that is missing, Grace can’t help but sometimes lay her head on the pillow and think she can still feel it under the mattress. At least she’s as good as stopped the lying, for there’s nobody left to lie to. And after Michael went to France she wrote to him to say that she’s now working as a maid for her employer. Though she said that it’s only because the business has shut, for there’s not much trade overseas you can do with those U-boats skulking around. She told him that she’d rather be working in a nice house than a munitions factory, and it keeps her in place to go back to her old job as secretary when the war is over.
The war’s changed now. It’s not being all proud of our boys any more, it’s worrying sick, and it makes Grace’s insides tremble whenever her thoughts go there. This week the news has been so frightful: sixty thousand wounded in just one day, and a third of those dead. She can’t not think of all those dead boys, and wondering whether it’ll be Michael, Joseph, James even, next.
There are more in the newspaper every day. At least sweeping and cleaning you have to keep your eyes open and find the dirt; it’s the jobs you don’t need to think about that let your mind wander. So she’s careful, Grace, when she’s polishing silver and falling into a rhythm, for it’s then that the pictures grow in her head. Young men, as far as she can see, lying there with bits blown off them, covered in other people’s parts, too. That’s Michael’s job now, fetching the ones that aren’t quite dead, and that’s not a thought to have. Not just what it’s like out there, turning them over to see what still moves, it’s the guns, too. ‘Conchie’ they call him, Conscientious Objector it says on the forms. Won’t fire a gun but will run in to pick up the dead and not an idea if it’s safe. She hadn’t wanted him to go, he had just told her he was leaving, now that the rest of the family was gone.
She can remember the last time they were together, before he left. More than a year ago, it was; they were sitting in Kensington Gardens, the sun warm on their faces and neither of them saying a word. Michael wasn’t even tapping his feet on the ground, and Grace, well, she was far from sure she believed in God any more. Not after. No, not after …
Even though they were all to come by breakfast time that May morning, Aunt Ethel had done teacakes for Peggy and Jenny and Alice – a treat for Ma and Da too, for eggs, now, they weren’t easy to find. When her lodger came back with the evening paper, she’d seen it, that three trains had come together on the line from Carlisle. The two of them looked at the teacakes and all the dinner gone cold, and she knew. She wrote to Michael in London. He hadn’t had her letter until he was back from work on the Wednesday, then he’d written on to Grace. He was running, he wrote, to catch the evening train north, he’d find them, he promised. Then he’d send word, no, he’d come around to tell her it was all right. Even with everything, the thought of Michael turning up at the house and finding out how long she’d been in an apron and cap had given her a fright.
At morning break on the Friday, Michael’s letter in her pocket, Grace had asked for the newspaper. Susan whispered to her in a way that is pretending to be on your side because it is a whisper, but puts you down. ‘Mr Bellows has it. You’ll wait your turn.’ And, for the first time since Grace arrived, and, my word, it was something that she hadn’t let them out before, tears were rolling down her face. She sniffed them up, kept breathing so as she could answer their questioning, but all that came out was: Michael, the letter being from him, even that he was in the law, and Gretna, and that all of them, the family, had been on one of those trains. Her voice ran out.
All of a sudden there was a fuss, and she thinks Mr Bellows said he’d look for her, and Summers was going through the old newspapers they used for lighting fires. ‘It was Monday,’ said Susan, ‘that’s when we first saw it, not that it’d happened then, Saturday it was. Thank the Lord none of us are Scots, I said.’ Well Thursday’s and Wednesday’s had been burnt, and Tuesday’s too, but Monday’s Times was still there. Then Mrs Wainwright said, ‘Let me,’ and, ‘For heaven’s sake, someone give the girl a cup of tea.’
Mrs Wainwright opened the newspaper on the table and picked her spectacles up from the chain around her neck. She folded through the pages and then stopped, smoothing down the creases as though it were a dress. Grace could see her scanning the lines and she thought of Miss Sand and learning to read the Lesson out aloud. Read it through first, Miss Sand had said, so as you don’t stumble on your words. Mrs Wainwright went on reading, more than just the first few lines. Then she looked up, took her glasses off and said, ‘My dear, I can’t read this out to you. I don’t think you should read it, either.’
Grace’s head was spinning with not wanting ever to see and wanting to read it right away. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind, I’d like to look now.’ They couldn’t stop her, could they? The teacups were cleared and space made and the newspaper moved and folded out and pressed down in front of her and they all sat round her, as though ready to catch her if she fell.
She couldn’t take it all in, just fragments like worst ever, and more than a hundred dead. And to think they’d been talking about it all week, Grace too. It had made her come over a little queer even then, before she knew. What with it being so close to Carlisle, the fire might creep all the way along the track to home.
‘They’ll be all right,’ Mrs Wainwright was speaking dead soft, ‘there are survivors, plenty of them, it’ll just take a while for them to find their way home. Your brother’s up there now and he’ll find them in a trice. And some jumped clear.’ Grace wasn’t sure how far a nine-, ten- and twelve-year-old could jump.
Troop Train Disaster, five trains were in it, including the local one her family was on, she knows now. Her head was stew, words leapt out at her as she tried to read it. Heavy death toll. Stated last night to be 158. The King has sent a telegram, she read. Well, that’s all right then, a telegram from the King must make things all right, but what’s she thinking? It’s the words that came after that which made her choke. More words. Burnt alive. Scorched and charred. Little bundles of blackened bones and flesh. And she turned to the side, right where Susan was beside her, and felt the contents of her stomach rising.
Grace was put to bed for the rest of that day, and told to stay there for the next. Yet when she woke up proper on that same afternoon, she dressed ever so carefully and went downstairs. She found Mrs Wainwright, who started to give her a telling-off for being up, not resting, but Grace begged to be given something to do. ‘It’ll keep those thoughts, Mrs Wainwright, from running all over my mind.’ ‘You’re dressed for the morning, Grace,’ Mrs Wainwright replied. ‘Go and change before anyone sees you, and then you can sit down at the table and polish knives and forks.’ Grace looked down at her skirt, blue print she’d put on, not black.
The following week the newspaper stopped mentioning it. Instead there were just lists of names of Mr Asquith’s new Coalition Government, and the servants’ hall changed to chatter about the politicians who came to the house. The Prime Minister of course. Mr Lloyd George too, with Mr Lansbury, even though he went to jail for women to vote. Lord Kitchener, that moustache, well, you couldn’t miss him, not when he’s on all those posters up and down the land, telling men to join up. Mr Bellows says she has them from all sides, Lady Masters. Grace took in not even half of it all. She couldn’t think about Lady Masters’ guests.
Still, they wouldn’t let her alone on Sunday. ‘You can’t be worrying,’ said Mrs Wainwright, ‘I’ll take you with me.’ And they’d gone to church where Grace prayed so hard that she forgot to breathe, and had to steady herself on the pew in front, though she wasn’t thinking of them as angels, wouldn’t let herself do that. Afterwards, she walked around the park with Sarah. When they came back, Grace pulled out the case from under her bed to go on with her sewing, a dress for Peggy, the eldest of her younger sisters, because if she goes on with the sewing for her then she must still be alive. Grace is making herself feel sure that they are, that Michael will find them, for Michael can do anything.
Next day Grace went to find Michael, to catch him before he came to her. There he was, eyes black like he’d not seen a wink of sleep. It was the train back down, he said, all night, and he’d given up his corner seat, the only one where you have a chance of sleeping, head leaning against the window. For a lady, he told Grace. Though, don’t she dare call him a gentleman, he said, just because they do things like that. His chambers gave him an hour to see Grace; after three days off, he’d catching up to do.
Michael told her he had started in the hospitals in Carlisle, that’s where they’d all been taken. He’d searched the beds for a woman, or a man without scraps of uniform, or a figure small enough. When he asked about those people he was told to go up the railway to Quintinshill; there was a farm building there and a village hall up the road at Gretna. Grace asked him whether they’d put together hospitals there like those field hospitals out in France. And Michael had looked away, the edge of his lip that she could still see curled in. When he turned back his eyes were like he’d caught flecks of dust, and he told her that everyone had been taken away by then. All the soldiers, they went to Edinburgh. There had been a woman and child, just one child, but a man had come to claim them. ‘And they went with him?’ Grace asked. Michael shook his head. They weren’t going anywhere of their own accord any more.
The fire burnt for two days. The cries stopped, Michael’s been told, not so long after the crash. Michael had been to the house, had to settle it, he said, before the month was up and the next rent was due. He asked the neighbours, just in case they’d all gone somewhere else. It was the early train, they all said, so as they’d be back by tea. The early train, and wasn’t it a shame. Shame, too, that you need a body for a funeral.
Michael brought back for Grace Ma’s silver-backed hairbrush that she’d been given as a wedding present and her glass bead necklaces, and the photographs for the two of them. The silver spoon too. He hadn’t seen the point of anything else, no place to put the furniture. Besides, it was all he could carry on the train. She walked back to chambers with him and waited while he went in and came out again. Then Grace took the bus back to Park Lane, with all she had left of her ma and da and three baby sisters in a small brown paper bag.
And Grace’s mind is again in the park with Michael the next Sunday after that.
They couldn’t talk about anything that’s not Them. But they couldn’t talk about Them either, not without her eyes swimming. Her mind was off, drifting, wishing they had something practical to do, plans to make, a funeral, possessions not yet sorted. But it’s all done, or will never be. She reached out her hand to find her brother’s and rested it on his. It clenched into a fist below hers.
‘I’ll … I’ll write,’ she heard him say.
‘Yes,’ said Grace. Then she swallowed. She hadn’t heard Michael stumble on his words since he came to London. But it wasn’t that which was making her search for air, it was the realisation that she hadn’t heard something he’d said. ‘Best if I send what I can to you,’ he continued. ‘Leave you in charge, Office Girl.’
His fist still clenched, he turned to her stiffly and kissed a part of her cheek not shielded by her hat. Grace couldn’t speak as it settled in her mind what he was doing. People kept passing; Michael didn’t speak either. Then at last she found the breath to try. It felt as if she were reaching out to grab him and pull him back.
‘What about all those things you’ve said, Michael? About the war?’
But her fingers caught only air.
He shook his head. ‘I have to do something, after—’
‘It wasn’t the Germans that did it.’
‘As good as. Anyways, what’s the point in staying here now?’
Grace looked down. So what did she count for to Michael?
A year ago, it was, that Michael went, and now Joseph is coming to visit. Joseph who writes at least a dozen times as much as Michael, even though Grace sends so many letters to her brother.
Joseph’s train goes in the morning, and he’ll come by early this evening. Susan, bless her now only half-hard heart, told Mrs Wainwright that he’d been in such a hurry when he came last week that he hadn’t had time to wait for Grace to return. So Mrs Wainwright has given Grace this evening off.
Let’s hope he’s not in a hurry for everything, Grace, Mrs Wainwright tells her. And Grace is a little taken aback. But it’s with the best will that Mrs Wainwright’s mothering her. Anyways, she’s the only mother Grace has now.
Yes, Mrs Wainwright.
Thank heavens for Number Thirty-Five, for it’s Grace’s family now, even if the house is part dead, most of it dust-sheeted over. Miss Beatrice has been gone three months and Master Edward out there, too. Lady Masters comes up less and less, as though she doesn’t want to see the house empty as it is. When she does, though, there’s a dinner Of Great Importance, they are told, and the guests’ names are only whispered around the servants’ hall. It’s us women, says Susan, she’s trying to have more of us in the war, so that afterwards they can’t say we didn’t fight too.
As for the refugees, they’ve nearly all left; it was too far from the munitions’, though Mussyur Durot, he’s still here with his family, and well brought up they are. He was the one who could speak English and now the others have gone he doesn’t look half so pale as he did when every word had to be turned by him. He was a businessman, he said, breweries, and more than one. You could tell that if you watched Madame Durot when she arrived, don’t think she’d lifted a duster before. Now she’s brandishing a broom in her fraying fine lady’s clothes. Confusing the visitors, said Susan when she started. Makes it look like we can’t do it ourselves. Her lady-ship’ll start moving us down to the country, and having us clean out the hospital as that strange house is now, and it’s overflowing.
It’s the telegrams that do the telling. Grace shouldn’t have a kind thought towards Susan, not after all that business when she first arrived. But that’s two years ago, more even, and though Susan still has the tongue of a snake, she has her own suffering now. The telegram didn’t come to Susan; her sweetheart’s mother was sent that. Then his sister came around to see Susan and she took to her bed for days, Grace sitting her up, making her eat, persuading her that it’ll do her no good hiding away when there’s all that life to distract her downstairs, Grace knows that. Though it’s not as if Grace is much better. Sometimes she wakes up to sheets as though a river’s run through her bed.
Then there’s Summers; the boot boy found him out the back, curled over the piece of paper with James’s name on it, which had come straight to him and it was only then that they realised James was his son. Explains why Summers was so mindful of him. Susan claimed that surely they all knew; it was obvious, just not worth mentioning. Grace doesn’t believe that Susan didn’t think it worth mentioning, not with James’s mother not being married. Why Susan would’ve had it out in an instant, Grace tells Sarah. But perhaps, Sarah replied, Susan’s sweet on him, don’t you think? Was sweet, corrects Grace. No, says Sarah, sweet on Summers, I mean. Grace thinks about that, about an older man. Maybe they’ll all be sweet on older men. There might not be any young ones left any more.
Whenever the doorbell goes and it’s not the butcher’s or the grocer’s usual time, Grace stops and holds her breath. If it was about Joseph she knows she won’t hear it straight. It’s Mr Bellows, even Lady Masters, who’ll get the news from his parents. It’ll be a new hand on an envelope, thinks Grace. The post can make your stomach turn now.
*
Even Mrs Wainwright is to worry about at times. With Susan’s sweetheart and James, Mrs W.’s face was so still, you’d’ve thought the news was for her. After James went she called Grace in, sat her down, and told her that Joseph was a good man, and gentle too. ‘Not someone to turn your nose up at, Grace.’ Grace puffed a bit at this. Turning her nose up? It was as though she should be grateful for anyone who showed a bit of interest. Mrs Wainwright watched her for a moment, then looked across the room at her sideboard and the picture-frame on it. ‘I didn’t,’ she said, ‘marry a man I should have once. And then it was too late.’
Whenever Grace is up in her room, she looks at the postcard Joseph sent her: the one of his troop ready to go. There he is, third row up, two in from the left, behind the ones sitting down.
Grace smooths down her dress. She’s ironed it sheet-flat then shaken it into folds so as he won’t be able to see the hand stitches she’s had to put in up the side – for there’s only so long you can have less worth eating without shrinking. He’s seen the dress before, of course, but how’s he to remember with all he sees? In his letters he says it’s a fine thing to be playing a part, doing something for King and Country. And that’s the doorbell – it’s him and Grace feels a flutter of panic. She would have heard if he’d been wounded, but she still has a fear. She knows all about how different a man can look when he comes back to England, although she tells herself she’s not one of those girls that might mind.
Susan and Sarah pull her up by the arms. Careful now, my dress, she says to them. They’re not listening, they’re bundling her into the hall and there he is. She looks up and sees that there’s not a mark on him, thank the Lord, but there’s something different about him all the same, and she’s got a clenching in her chest.
He’s as still as one of those statues down near Buckingham Palace, and looking at her as though tears are pushing to come out of his eyes with sadness so’s you’d drown in it. No, thinks Grace. No, I can’t have that. So she steps over to him, and touches his cheek. The skin is rough, and she flinches. He takes her hand in his.
‘Yes.’
‘Am I really so different?’
There’s a darkness behind his eyes, as though underneath that blue, the pupils just spread and spread.
‘No,’ she lies.
Then it’s into the servants’ hall for a cup of tea and news, and all the exclamations that go with it. After half an hour or so, the two of them are bundled out of the house with winks and nods. When they’re standing on the street he says there’s a tea room, near Victoria Station. And they walk along Park Lane, but with their eyes down, searching for the kerb. With no lights, says Grace, in case of the Zeppelins, you can’t see whether you’re in the road, and the motors can’t see you in it. Not that there are many motors, streets are death quiet at night. As they walk Joseph keeps beside her and a foot away, like he’s shy of touching her, and Grace wonders whether he won’t put his arm around her, give her a squeeze that makes her feel a woman, and he should do that, especially as it’s the first time he’s seen her since Mrs Wainwright wrote to him about Grace’s family. He wrote back to Grace time after time, saying as how the thought of it for her was near bringing him to tears, what with the sort of family they looked in their photograph, and how Grace spoke about them. Maybe it was all just words, thinks Grace, and she sinks a little. It can’t be, though, she tells herself, it must be what’s happened to him. Something’s happened to him, for there’s a silence between them makes the gap grow until, when they are by Buckingham Palace garden wall, Grace speaks into it. She wants to make a joke, but it’s not there, so she asks a question, one that can cause no offence.
‘Do you think it bothers him?’
‘What bothering who?’
‘Him. The war. The King.’ Grace almost feels she should bob with the word, as they are so close to the palace.
‘Yes,’ replies Joseph. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it, we’re fighting for King and Country. Can’t be any other reason to it.’
There’s something harder, flatter, about the way he is speaking. Grace doesn’t know what to reply.
He takes her to Pimlico. Just a place I’ve been once or twice before, he says, in the old days. He stops outside the tea room, and Grace’s heart sinks a little for the paint is peeling off the sign hanging at the front, and there’s a crack in the corner of a front pane. But she’s with Joseph, she tells herself, what does it matter where they are? Only he isn’t quite Joseph. Where Joseph’s all soft, all boy, this man’s like leather flapping in the wind. Grace isn’t sure what she feels about this strange person beside her.
When he opens the door for her there’s a rush of a smell that makes her hesitate. She’s too used to Mussyur Fouray’s cooking, even with all the potato flour he has to mix in with the wheat these days. They sit in a corner at the far end of the window. At least she and Joseph are facing each other now, and Grace stretches her feet out under the table so that they rest against his. Joseph doesn’t move away. Then he talks to her about her family, that it’s too terrible, but she’s not to worry, she’s a good future ahead of her, he’ll make sure of that. Still this isn’t quite what she’d hoped for, there’s something that’s missing from him, but when she turns a bit teary Joseph thinks it is for her family. Anyway, he starts to hold her hand, then he tells her that his elder brother has died, so the farm is his for going back to, and he hadn’t written because he hadn’t known how to tell her this terrible thing in the same letter as he told her about how different things would be. And he wasn’t sure what she’d make of it, farming not being service and all that.
Grace sits there and thinks how sad Joseph must be, how she would be if it were news of Michael, but her mind can’t go that far. At the same time she is thinking of sheep and cows and milk still warm without having to put it on the stove. That’s all her hope in front of her now, and she tells him she is proud of him, which is true. A half-smile comes back to his face, then vanishes.
‘Not much to be proud of.’
‘One compliment, Joseph Salter, and you’re asking for more.’
‘There are a lot of’ – he pauses – ‘things I am not proud of at all.’
‘Well, it’s a fool can see his own virtues. You’ll just have to take my word.’
‘Your word, Grace?’ He perks up.
‘And what’s wrong with my word, then?’
‘Nothing, Grace. Nothing at all.’
It’s like he’s speaking a different language. But that’s the war; when it’s all over, the real Joseph’ll come back to her. She can’t hope for that baby face again, mind, there’s part of him looks as old as Noah, and it’s not just the moustache. But that’s not going to stop her liking him. What’s a little change to take away what she’s been believing in, and what his mind must be full of, with that long journey to France tomorrow. So she tells him she’s even proud of where he’s taken her with its little tables, all wood, salt and pepper even, and just the two of them. Michael brought her here once before but she doesn’t tell Joseph. Joseph knows about Michael, of course, but he’s not met him. The war has given her that excuse.
‘Can you afford this?’ she asks, looking at the creased card in front of them.
‘All three courses, Grace. There’s no point being a rich man in Heaven.’
She turns her eyes down to the table. Just in case they fill at the thought of Heaven, who’s in it, and who might be next. Joseph goes on talking.
‘Thank you for wearing that dress, Grace. That’s how I think of you when I’m out there. In that dress.’
After they scrape their plates, Joseph leans across the table and covers her hand in his again. It makes her feel safe. She’s got him back, the Joseph she knows.
‘Grace?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s go for a walk.’
‘Where would we go at this time of night?’
‘We’ll barely see our noses, let alone where we’re putting our feet.’
‘What a lark, then. Better not knock into a tree.’
Lord knows what she thinks, and what Joseph’s thinking. But it can’t be anything bad, for she knows Joseph, and she’s to cheer him up, that’s her bit now; that’s what they’re all supposed to do, make sure the men have a good time before they go back to fight for us. So if he wants a walk, then a walk it is, and she agrees it’s a lark. They walk back up past the Buckingham Palace garden and into Hyde Park. There’s enough of a moon to make it not totally dark.
He puts his arm around her waist. Nothing strange in that, he knows she likes him guiding her along by the waist, especially dressed as he is, all shiny belt and buttons. His arm is a little tighter than usual, though. Think nothing of it, Grace Campbell, she tells herself, but she starts to chatter as though she’s putting the nerves out of her. She tells him about the kitchen maid with a nose like a potato marrying a man who came back without an inch of sight in his eyes. Now she’s in Croydon, nursing him, though he can find his way round with a cane right enough. The two of them joined the servants for Christmas, her with a smile near broke her face.
But Joseph’s read this all before in her letters, and her voice fades as she remembers. He’s walking steadily and they’re alongside bushes now. Grace doesn’t look too close to the side, she doesn’t want to see the branches move and people come out like she’s heard they do. It’s less bad here, though, than it was with them all on the streets, where they were before the patrols came. Then Joseph suddenly swings her round until she’s facing him, and kisses her.
It’s not their first kiss, but as a footman he couldn’t have a moustache. The hair tickles her lips. Soft hair it is; some men look as though they’ve a scrubbing brush and their sweethearts must have faces raw as tomatoes. The kiss makes her feel warm and lightheaded and she lets her shoulders go. Then he stops.
‘Come on, Grace.’ And he takes her hand and rushes forward, pulling her along behind. ‘Let’s cut through here.’
They’re in a bush, and Grace isn’t sure about this. The Joseph she knows wouldn’t have taken her in here, it’s not where proper people go, and Grace finds proper reassuring for it’s set in its ways, so that you know where you are. He’s kissing her again but this time she’s not enjoying it for he’s squeezing her shoulders as though there should be only an inch in between, and he’s ramrod against her. Grace is feeling more of him than she should and his tongue is at the back of her throat. It’ll have hers out with it in a moment. He pulls his face off hers and Grace feels a wave of relief but his body’s still pushing, his head just over her shoulder, whispering in Grace’s ear. ‘Please, Grace, please. You can’t imagine what it’s like out there.’ As he speaks she feels as though it’s a stranger with her. This isn’t Joseph, it’s just some man come back from the war wanting what they all want, not wanting Grace in particular. Why she could be anybody, and Joseph, the Joseph that has kept her hoping isn’t here any more. He goes on whispering, ‘Please, please, Grace, for me, let me, just this once. Next time we’ll marry, promise you that.’
Grace doesn’t know that she wants to marry him, for the man in front of her isn’t the strong one she’d hoped to spend her life with; he’s a shell of a man who needs her more than she needs him. Now Grace is thinking of him as a poor soldier, and they’re told to comfort them, the women here at home. And that’s the only purpose Grace seems to have as she stands there, that’s all she can give this man, she realises, not her hand, not her life, just the instant that he is breaking for. And this could be his, their, only moment, she thinks, tears beginning to come out of her again as she reasons how, how can I refuse him this?