IT’S EVEN RAINING INSIDE, THINKS BEA. THE restaurant’s windows have steamed up, and small droplets are beginning to run down the panes, streaking the view of Piccadilly. She looks back across the table at Bill Fitzroy, all pale brown hair and reasonable, well, quite attractive, blue eyes fixed on her intently. A little too intently. She should perhaps not have kissed him ten days ago.
Last week, last week she was liable to kissing. The day after Mother’s funeral, she drove the Calcott to Pimlico, her stomach turning with embarrassment and excitement and a heave of memories, not all of which she wished she had. The house looked as grey on the outside as she’d remembered it being inside. The door was answered by a short, wide-shouldered woman with dyed black hair piled up into a bun on the top of her head. Below, the skin on her face sagged from wartime rations. The woman looked her up and down. Mr Campbell, she said, dear, you’re not his sister, are you? He only left word for her, didn’t mention anybody else. He’s one of the ones that hasn’t been back for over a year, dear. Bea’s head whirred, of all the things she’d been steeling herself for, this had not been one, the dread of him no longer wanting her drowning out that possibility.
She took the tea offered. Don’t be silly, she told herself, of course he isn’t dead. To her, though, he was perhaps as good as, for he had not even thought that she might have wanted to find him.
A couple of days later, her head still spinning, and fired up by half a bottle of champagne, she had, extremely willingly, kissed Bill Fitzroy.
Since then there have been two bunches of flowers and three calls. The first two calls, mercifully, she was out. On the third, she’d been running downstairs, practically buttoning her coat as late as ever. This time for the family solicitor, for Bea has been left to supervise the sinking of the ship. Clemmie has retreated to Gowden and the half-baked Tom, Edie’s little Archie scooped up under her arm. I wanted another, she said, and I don’t think I’ll be getting one out of Tom. Thus Bea has been left to pack away the world they grew up in.
What then? VAD nursing will trickle on for a while, for the wounded don’t recover the moment the bells ring. However, it will end soon and Lauderdale Mansions has been empty since the war began. Now there’s the vote at thirty, Emmeline has retreated. The Women’s Party in the election last year was such a damp squib that she, Mrs Pankhurst that is, is going to lecture abroad. This Celeste despises. ‘Damn fickle woman, should have spotted it a mile off. Come on, Beatrice, are you really going to wait another five years for the ballot? You might even miss the next General Election.’ Bea’s not sure how much she cares any more. It’s a detail, a fingernail compared to everything else that has happened since the war began. She’s almost back to where she was beforehand, floating along between social engagements with Celeste trying to stir her up to something.
Bea leans back, taking her elbows off the restaurant table and mistakenly letting her bad hand fall on to the tablecloth in front of her. Before she can withdraw it, Bill’s one remaining hand is on hers. His other wrist hovers below the table top. He has managed quite well to keep it out of sight, which has only made her the more curious. She has grown used to trying not to gaze at the injuries that pass on the street. Some, the legs, or rather lack of legs, she can hardly bear to see. It’s the powerlessness, she thinks, on a body that is otherwise so strong.
‘Beatrice,’ begins Bill, and Bea feels a prod of panic. It is clearly a ‘begins’ and she somewhat dreads where he is going next. He can’t be going to, is he soft in the head, a touch of what Tom has? She thought it was just Bill’s hand that he’d not come back with. She wants to say Good God, is that the time, but they’ve not even been there an hour and are somewhere between the main course and pudding – which they went for instead of a starter. Won’t lunch, thinks Bea, become inconveniently long when rationing ends and they can stuff themselves on three courses in the middle of the day again?
She interrupts, stop him, Beatrice, dead in his tracks. ‘Bill?’
‘Yes.’ His eyes light up. Hell.
‘Will you excuse me?’ She picks up her purse and winds her way through the tables towards a glass door leading into the hallway. As she enters the hallway, she steps around the ladder of the man recruited to de-fog the windows and thinks that, were she with someone she wanted to be with, she would have rather liked the fogged glass to cut her off from the world outside. But everything familiar to Bea seems to be falling apart in a way it wasn’t during the war. Is that another reason why she kissed Bill? To take herself back to the old days? He was a face from that past, and she might have kissed him then.
There’s also that glaring word being muttered around all the dregs of drawing rooms in town. Shortage. Good God, it’s so tasteless, like the harvest was poor while the other harvest, over there, was so damn rich. Take what you can, says Clemmie, who is all for accepting a spontaneous proposal. And in the absence of Mother, Bea finds that she is behaving in just the manner that, out of pure stubbornness, she refused to do when Mother was around. She is contemplating marriage for the hell of it because Mother may just have been right when she said life is easier with a husband; however little you are in love with them, at least then nobody thinks you are looking, especially if you are twenty-five.
Bea glances through the now cleared window and stops stockstill. Looking back in and straight at her is a face she recognises. It stares at her hard for a second or two, then turns and walks away quickly.
Her ribcage is squeezing into itself and she’s catching her breath. It’s like that image of Edward she caught in the yellow drawing room. It can’t really be Mr Campbell, can it? Not walking down Piccadilly at half past one in the afternoon. And what are the chances he’d be back so soon? Unless, like the others, he’s on a brief leave before going back to clear up the mess. Mind you, stretcher-bearers, all they have to do now is help those who can still travel return home. Mr Campbell, no, Michael. Her anger at herself makes her feel sick. But would she not just do the same thing again? No, she could still slip away from the shining bars of marriage and country-house life that she is but half a dozen words from right now, and do something quite different, couldn’t she? But it was a ghost, wasn’t it, a figment of her imagination appearing at the final hour, just in time to make her realise she might have a choice.
She rushes to the door and out into the street. That bowler hat and trench coat, thick young neck between, is ahead of her but moving away fast. It is damp and chilly and she hasn’t a coat, and she’s left poor one-handed Fitzroy to wonder whether she’s quite well, but she’s trotting to keep up. She needs to trot faster, all he’ll have to do is vanish into the crowd at Piccadilly Circus and she’ll have lost him. Ahead there’s a small crowd blocking his way and he stalls to step aside. It’s long enough, and her hand reaches his sleeve, as she gasps for lack of breath.
‘Michael!’
He stops, turns and looks straight at her as though she’s a bridge away.
‘Miss Masters,’ he says.
Lead pie in her stomach. Miss Masters? Where’s the ‘Beatrice’ that he asked to call her last time they met? Does he hate her that much? His eyes are pitch-dark enough to make her run. Stand your ground, Beatrice. If he goes now, then he’s gone.
She’s been through this moment in her head more times than anyone can count. Next time, next time, this is what I’ll say, she told herself, but now there are no words there for her.
He’s talking, though. How funny, it always used to be her who spoke more.
‘Not like a lady to run down the street.’
Bea finds herself shaking her head. No, she says. Not like a lady.
‘Shouldn’t you be returning to your lunch companion?’
Damn you, Michael Campbell, she wants to say. You’re so damn ungentlemanly – but the Bills of this world dull in comparison. Does he realise that the angrier he is, the more determined it makes her to stay?
Same place, he challenged her to. The tea room. What if the Zeppelins had it, she replied. Then it’s since breakfast this morning, he said. But, she began, and then she stopped. How could she say, But you’re not back in your old lodgings. Or at least you weren’t last week.
She is in her bedroom, still debating whether to change her outfit again. There’s not been much new since the war began, just a lot of taking-in, and only half of her clothes fit into the cupboards in Celeste’s surprisingly feminine spare room, which, though barely a quarter of the size of her room on Park Lane, feels four times as airy. The other half of her clothes are on the unused nursery floor upstairs and for the past hour Bea has been pattering between the two, hunting down skirts and dresses and blouses that flap at the edge of her memory. She wants to look different to the woman who ran away from him after they’d made love.
The front doorbell clangs and Bea starts. Celeste’s visitors rarely put in an appearance at such a civilised time of day. Bea can’t help but walk to the door of her room and open it just to listen. Whoever has arrived is planting weighted footsteps across the marble floor of the hall. Now he has stopped and is speaking measuredly, as if considering each word before it is delivered in a voice strange to this house, but very familiar to Bea.
She doesn’t run downstairs. She can’t move, can barely breathe, and she is waiting for the room to spin. Somewhere outside her head she can hear steps padding up the stairs to the drawing room on the first floor. Bea sits down at her dressing table and leans on her elbows. A pot of powder falls over and she watches the grains spread on to the carpet, light as dust. That’s how I feel, she thinks.
The knock at her door still startles her. One of Celeste’s maids stands in the doorway, all crisp in her black and white, her face soft with concern. Christ, does she know, too? She’s been with Celeste long enough. Before the woman has had the chance to speak, Bea nods. As she starts to stand up from the dressing table, the maid moves towards her as if to help her, but Bea shakes her head, pulls herself upright, wrestling her feet back into her shoes, and then heads for the door.
‘Miss Beatrice?’
Bea stops. She really doesn’t want to stop, in case her legs don’t work when she starts moving again. But there is concern in the woman’s voice, and Bea pauses. What is she going to say? That he’s missing an eye, an arm, a leg?
‘You’ve a couple of hooks still open, Miss Beatrice.’
‘Oh.’ And Bea lets her do them for her and, without asking, smooth down one side of Bea’s hair and add a pin. Then Bea goes out on to the landing and down the two flights to the drawing room.
He is in uniform, and five years have aged him ten. His eyes are calmer, almost dulled, as he looks at her, but he is still John, all slim and high-cheek-boned and somehow boyish. She turns away so he can’t see whatever look it is she has on her face, which feels flushed and freezing and watery, all at once. Her insides are knotting themselves. You can’t, thinks Bea, just shut off everything you have once felt, blow it away in a puff as if it were never there at all. The world must be filled with people whose hearts do not fully belong to one person. Blast it. How damn annoying, how annoying of him to be here, now, waking the kraken she had long put to sleep. It’s not true, is it, that if you let wounds heal well enough, the scars can never be pulled open.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘For what exactly, Mr Vinnicks?’ and she feels a little stab of pleasure as he starts at the froideur of being called by his surname. Thank her? She’s angry now – it has taken her five years to be angry. She tells herself it’s with him, for being pulled along by the hand for all those months and then so suddenly let go. But it’s not: she’s angry with herself for the fool she was for believing him, and the fool she might still be.
‘For seeing me.’
‘I could hardly pass you on the stairs as I left.’
‘Beatrice, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s too late, John.’ This was at least true until five minutes ago.
‘Bea, I made a mistake.’
‘A lot of mistakes have been made over the past few years. You shouldn’t marry people you meet on a boat.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Oh, you knew her beforehand?’ Take the anger out of your voice, Beatrice. You’re giving yourself away.
‘No, we didn’t marry.’
Bea flinches, she can’t help it, and she knows he’s seen. She should be sympathetic now but she can’t do it. She can’t lie like that, it would be too damn obvious what she really thought. So she says exactly that, what she really thinks.
‘Don’t expect my commiserations.’
He pauses, swallows, looks at the carpet and then back up again.
‘Will you—’
This time she’s not going to stand and wait for the words not to be the ones she wants to hear. Five years, a war, a quarter of the men she used to dance with dead, and holes left in the rest patched up with her own hands, and she’s still not up to being disappointed by John again. And the thought that he hurt her that much gives her a rush of desire to hurt him back.
‘Good God,’ she interrupts him, ‘you’re not going to propose now, are you?’
He doesn’t reply to this. He just looks straight at her. ‘I’ve two tickets for Carmen,’ he says. ‘For the day after tomorrow …’
Bea nods.
She feels sick in the taxi to Pimlico. She’s late. Of course she’s late. Not that John stayed long, not even beyond simply arranging to meet, but afterwards she’d had to go and sit down upstairs, wait for the flush to subside, and wonder what she was going to say to Mr Campbell.
What is she doing with him, with John, with Bill, with any of them? That she’s such a far cry now from war-wounded Bea who felt she barely merited a second glance should make her feel pleased, but she is simply uncertain as to how she should behave. There are no rules for all this sort of thing now, it’s not how it was.
It’s guilt that she’s bringing with her: she’s barely seen Mr Campbell, and she’s going to let him down again. Of course she couldn’t have stood him up after last time. She’d certainly never see him again then. And she doesn’t want that, even though John is back.
There’s nothing between Mr Campbell and me, she tells herself. Not after no letter for a year and just five minutes on the street. When she’d returned to the table Bill had still been sitting there, looking nowhere. An old friend, Bea said. We lost contact during the war. Yes, Bill said. Bea glanced down and saw that he had already settled up. Let’s go, he said. And they went. She sent a short note to thank him for lunch. He has not replied.
*
Pimlico is sadder than ever. The tea room more so, and Bea hesitates outside. The paint has all but vanished from the sign and there’s a board across one of the front windows. She pulls her coat tighter around her as she walks in.
He’s not there. Good God, she can’t be so late that he has come and gone already. She looks at her watch. Half past, hell. It’s started to rain, her taxi’s gone and the street is empty. She sits down at a far table and considers how angry he must still be with her to have left.
Bea is still sitting there five minutes later when a figure in the doorway catches her eye. It is Mr Campbell, mackintosh undone, the hem swinging around his knees. She gets a half-smile across the room, but no apology. I know, he says, when he reaches her table, that you have hardly been waiting. The waitress approaches, half the age and size of the one who was here before. As she puts a card on the table Bea notices, they both notice, the indentation of a wedding ring. That’s not been gone long, he says when she walks away. No, replies Bea.
He’s different to how he was in Piccadilly. The dislike has gone and in its place is a distraction; he’s tapped that cigarette on the table over a dozen times. He’s looking at her, though, with what, Bea thinks, is a look of regret – and this gives her hope. He is moving the cigarette towards his mouth when he glances at Bea and hesitates.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I do.’
He passes it to her and she puts it in her mouth, holding it high and to the side. He takes out a box of matches, strikes one and leans over the table towards her and she can feel the size of him swallowing her up. Hold fast, Beatrice, she tells herself, and break this silence.
‘No lighter?’ she teases.
‘No holder?’
‘There weren’t so many in France,’ she replies.
‘Bloody mess. The whole thing, a bloody mess.’
‘Isn’t slaughter always bloody, Michael,’ she says, using his Christian name pointedly, as if to pull him to her.
‘Sadly, it is not,’ he replies, ‘always pointless.’
‘So, where has it not been pointless?’
‘When it makes men free.’
‘Still the idealist. Where will your ideals take you after all this?’ They’re sparring now, she must surely be winning him back.
‘Only as far as my circumstances allow me.’
He brings it straight up, the chasm of class between them, that his circumstances are less than Bea’s. He is saying he has neither her money nor her connections, and has to pound away at the law, while Bea can do what she likes.
Does he think, she wonders, that is why she turned him down? She wants to tell him he is wrong.
‘That is the sort of pragmatism that suffocates ideals,’ she hits back.
‘A man must do the right thing. For four years, I, and every man around me, have been searching for the right thing to do amidst a morass of wrong. It is habit-forming.’
But not happy-making, thinks Bea, for she can feel a heaviness in him as he speaks.
‘How do you know what the right thing to do is?’
‘It makes itself very clear.’
‘You sound obliged.’
‘Obligation, Miss Masters, comes in many forms.’
Thoughts of possible obligations start to race around Bea’s mind, taking various female shapes. Pale-faced women, sickly women, seductresses. She almost asks him whether he has someone in the f.w., but stops herself. Would he even know that meant the family way and, in any case, she can’t bring herself to ask. Then she wonders whether that was all his proposal to her was, an obligation to a woman to whom he had just made love? She can feel him slipping away from her. Dammit, Bea, you can’t let him go now, and, instinctively, almost unconsciously, because it is her bad hand that leads the rest of her, it reaches forward and places itself upon his clenched fist before she can think to draw it back.
Even through her gloves his fingers are warm. Mr Campbell’s fist collapses beneath her hand. A second later, his fingers are locked through hers, and he leads her back to his old digs.
Afterwards, they lie smoking in bed as well as they can, for there isn’t the width for them side by side, and they laugh as they pull each other back up as they start to fall. In the end they cling on to each other, his thick arm around her back, turning them into a single, balancing mass.
There was no tentativeness this time on his part. There is no resemblance, she thinks, thank God, between now and last time. She blocks out of her head what may have happened in between. Not that Bea’s been, well, there’s been nobody she liked that much, not worth the bore of worrying about whether she were pregnant. However, there’ve been a few inconclusive long evenings with the Bills of this world, who would not have been, she imagines, as openly hungry.
Bea never did this with John. They didn’t even spend a long evening together; that part of their relationship was left entirely to a combination of idealised hopes and ignorance. It wasn’t supposed to be done then, certainly not before you were engaged. But few bother with ‘supposed-tos’ now.
Bea thinks about how John’s slender frame would fit beside her easily in this bed, and how she can’t imagine him holding up the pair of them with one arm, and she’s not sure she would want him to. All she wants now is for John to ask her what he failed to before – so she can turn him down. For she will, won’t she? You can’t marry two people at once.
Bea looks to her side and can’t quite say it, so she turns to blow smoke rings at the wall opposite the bed. It’s the same room, same floorboards, same greyness, even a couple of socks hanging on a rail in the corner. But apart from these, barely a personal possession in view, just a small battered suitcase, firmly closed and, on the table in the corner, a hairbrush half hidden by the cheap paper of a couple of open letters. At last she finds the ability to speak.
‘Michael?’ Will he answer to ‘Michael’ again now.
‘Yes.’
They couldn’t stay in England, they’d have to take her remaining money and his accent somewhere it wouldn’t matter any more. They would vanish, like Edie, into a new and exciting place. America, she thinks; now John is back in London, they could go. It would be an adventure, and there they could make what they wanted of their lives – surely he would like that. And it comes,
‘Michael, I will marry you, you know.’
His arm slackens, and she begins to fall. He catches her and it feels as if he is holding her from necessity, his face is pointing away as he speaks. My God, he can’t bring himself to look at her. They’re coming again, aren’t they, those words that are the opposite of what she is expecting to hear.
‘Beatrice,’ he says, ‘I can’t marry you now.’
And Bea feels a darkness clouding her head. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, trying to push it out. Then a couple of fat teardrops fall on to the outside of her eyelids. She wipes them away with a clumsy fist of a hand, and opens her eyes.
He is leaning over her, his eyes damp with more tears. ‘I can’t,’ he says again. ‘Not now.’
Then he curves himself right over her and kisses her, so slowly and deeply that he could be taking her very soul with him.
She’s run away, gone down to Clemmie at Gowden. She doesn’t understand what can have changed so – apart from her hand. And it couldn’t be – she’s sure it isn’t that. The war, or rather the end of it, has changed him. At least, that is what Bea is forcing herself to think, that now ‘It’ is all is over, his urgency for life has faded and class is dividing them again. So much for being brought up to avoid fortune-hunters. Michael needs what money she has more than most; it’s more than enough to put him in Parliament, but he would rather go without it than have her.
His kiss had suddenly stopped. He had drawn back and stayed looking at her with sadness in his eyes. ‘I have to go,’ he’d said. Bea had nodded, realising that he meant quite the opposite, that she should go. So she’d pushed herself up with an ‘I’m late’, as though she had an appointment. Yet she was late, a year late in coming to her decision. The moment had passed and she’d missed her chance.
She and Clemmie are packing up the war. Most of the hospital beds are still full but they are putting what they can into the back wing until someone comes to take it away. Though who, says Clemmie, would want a hundred bedpans? Moreover the cupboards, even entire back rooms, are already full of family possessions emptied from the house when it was turned into a hospital. Shall we take all this out first, asks Bea? Some day, Clemmie replies, I’m not sure I can stare at all those dead animals again.
So they pile blankets and pillows around leopards’ and lions’ heads, slowly drowning the creatures in wool and feathers. Let’s move the moose. Don’t be ridiculous, Bea, it needs a dozen men to move one of those heads. With at least two legs each. Then do you think, asks Bea, we can hang some of these bedpans off the antlers?
Clem falls silent, and the two sisters go on folding. Then it comes. At least Tom isn’t alone, she says, though it’s a different type of hospital he needs. Bea almost drops the corners of the sheet she is holding.
‘Clemmie, how can you say that about your husband?’
Clemmie isn’t looking at her; she’s still folding her end of the sheet.
‘It’s been a terrible problem,’ she says, ‘with the nurses. At times he doesn’t know where he is. Or what he’s wearing. I’ve started to lock him in at night.’
‘Don’t tell me it’ll get better with time, Bea. Good God, look at the colour of these sheets. Shall we burn them?’
After lunch, they walk over to the woods at a slow pace, the children running between them and around them, almost tripping them up. Among the trees it’s all silver bark and a palette of oranges of autumn leaves. She and Clemmie catch up with the children, who are tracing their fingers over lines scratched into the bark. It’s the soldiers, says Clemmie, their initials, and the dates they were here. They’ve decorated almost all the wood. I like the hearts best, though some of those stories must have turned out terribly sad. Some of them, though, some of them, I like to think, may have ended up together. In any case these hearts will keep on growing with the trees. That’s something, isn’t it? In fifty years’ time, children will be fitting their fingers right into the grooves.
‘Clem?’
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t nagged me about finding a husband. It’s not like you.’
‘Well, now there are so few … it must be a sore point, Bea, mustn’t it, and I didn’t want to … How are you, you look like you’ve been ridden over. It’s Mother, isn’t it? We all feel—’
‘No, it’s not. Well, perhaps a little.’ Of course it is. Though, Mother, mothers generally, never really go, their voice is always in your ear. More so when they’re dead – at least being corporeal limits where they can be. ‘It’s just that I am beginning to think I rather should get married.’
‘Good God, that sounds jolly vague. To anyone in particular?’
‘I thought you approved of vague. A sort of choose-from-the-list-of suitable candidates.’
‘Well, that’s what most of us do.’
‘Clem! I thought you and Tom …’
‘Oh yes, of course. You can’t help being in love when you’re getting married. There’s all the fuss, and the clothes, and the pantomime. Really for six weeks you’re in such a whirl it’s a miracle that not everyone falls over with exhaustion at the altar. But it’s not necessarily in love with the person you’re marrying. Besides, what a bar it was to live up to in Tom’s case. His parents’ perfect marriage, he said, dying in each other’s arms as the ship went down. So who’s in sight? Anyone I know?’
‘No.’
‘I thought Bill Fitzroy was sniffing around.’
‘Yes, he is, or was. I’m not sure any more.’
‘Well, don’t let him slip through your fingers.’
‘It’s back to the old Clem …’
‘Well, I’m sorry.’
‘John came back.’
Clemmie stops still. She turns to face Bea, immediately angry.
‘What did he want?’
‘He wanted to take me to a show.’
‘And?’
‘I agreed, then chucked and came here instead.’
‘You’ve done the right thing.’
‘Because I was so fixed on him?’
‘Because John Vinnicks is a cad.’ Clemmie pauses. ‘Now he’s back, Bea … you can go to America.’
Yes, thinks Bea, I could. I have nothing to stay here for now.
They are on the club fender in the small sitting room, watching flames the same colour as the leaves outside. Bea’s face is burning in the heat from the fire and she’s sure her stockings are about to singe. The two of them have picked at a supper of not-quite-the-worst of Mrs Cleaver’s offerings.
‘Don’t tell me to replace her, Bea. There are no replacements left. Honestly, even housemaids are as sought after as doctors. Women either only know how to pack shells, or want to work in an office. Half of them ran off in the war. Didn’t you have a couple who left Park Lane?’
‘Well, in the war, Grace. I rather liked her.’
‘There you are. She couldn’t give two hoots for you, vanishing in a flash when you were so short-staffed.’
‘I don’t think it was like that.’
‘What do you mean? Trouble? We had one here. Obviously one of the patients wasn’t quite so wounded. Anyhow, it can stay with her mother, and I’m tempted to have her back, but the other servants here would throw a fit, they mind so much about these things. You still haven’t told me whom you are thinking of marrying.’
‘No, well. I thought he wanted to marry me, but now he says he doesn’t.’
‘What rot. Gosh, you must know by now that men can never make up their own minds, we have to make them up for them. And once they have been made up, they don’t change. They can say terrible things, but they always come back round to where they were in the first place, otherwise they would have to admit they were wrong. Is he …? No, d’you know, after everything, I don’t think it matters. Is he as boring as Bill Fitzroy?’
‘No.’
‘As caddish as John?’
‘No.’
‘Then for God’s sake what are you waiting for? I’m packing you off on the first train in the morning.’
‘No, Clemmie, I really think it’s too late.’
‘Until he’s down the aisle with somebody else, it is never too late.’
‘Clem, I need some air. It’s too damn hot here. Let’s go for a walk.’
‘Can’t see much in the garden at night.’
‘Let’s walk down to the King’s Arms.’
It has stopped raining. The sky is moon-bright, and so clear that it feels as if a frost is coming down. In the silence, their heels ring on the road.
‘Are you not going to tell me anything about your mysterious beau? Is he a fox or a dog? Is he tall? A dwarf? If you don’t tell me anything, I shall have to assume that he is a dwarf.’
‘He is physically perfect.’
‘Even after the war?’
‘A few scars.’
‘That’s rather detailed knowledge. I hope you’re not being foolish. Does he have any prospects?’
‘Yes, Clem. I think he does.’
They have reached the King’s Arms, a picture-book glow coming from its windows.
‘Let’s go in, Clem.’
‘It will be full of officers.’
‘They’re your patients, and it will be good for you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Let them make you feel good.’
‘Is that what you want for me, my wicked little sis?’
‘For both of us. We need it. All women do.’
‘It feels as though it might rain again.’
‘So let’s call it shelter, Clem.’