I

COMING OUT OF the hospital, Alan turned sharp left and began walking quickly, sticking to the kerb side of the crowded pavement. His sight was blurred, but he knew where he was going, there was no need for him to be able to see clearly in order to recognise signs. It was a stifling hot day, though there was no sun. London in August, an uncomfortable place to be, but soon he would be on the train and speeding – he hoped speeding, and not dragging – towards Cornwall. Once there, once home, he would feel better. Everything would settle down. A humdrum life, that was what he wanted now. A quiet, uncomplicated existence.

He loathed hospitals. He had been surprised to discover how many men found them safe, comforting places. He’d seen faces light up when the decision came – ‘Hospital for him.’ But he had no trust in doctors, not much respect for most nurses. It seemed to him that some of the medical staff in the hospitals where he had been didn’t know what they were doing. Suspicion and scorn probably showed on his face, because he was not a popular patient. He asked too many questions, analysed closely too many answers. Before the war he’d been a civil servant, desk job, Trade & Industry, which had taught him to be meticulous. He liked to get things right, and couldn’t stand bluster.

The city was packed. He saw lots of men like himself, obviously wounded in the war. A few were even in uniform though it was two years since the Armistice. He didn’t like looking at them, and tried instead to concentrate on the traffic, a mixture of automobiles and horse-drawn vehicles which still struck him as strange. He thought he would like a car one day, if he could ever afford one. Moving less carefully among the rushing pedestrians, though his sight was clearing, he noticed a woman who looked a bit like Stella getting onto a bus. Odd. He hardly ever saw another woman who looked like her, whereas there were quite a few who reminded him of Charlotte. It was a question of colouring, obviously. Stella’s bright red hair and disturbingly green eyes were not a common combination whereas Charlotte was a brunette, a tall, fairly ordinary-looking brunette. You had to look closely (as he had done) to see the sweetness in her face.

Tiring, and still nowhere near the underground station, he decided to stop at a café and have a drink. The café he turned into was more of a teashop, but his bad leg ached and he had to sit down. He ordered tea, and a scone. There were only two other people in the place, women, both with shingled hair, a style he hadn’t yet got used to, deep in conversation. They paid not the slightest attention to him, which relieved him. His burns invited attention, and he hated being stared at. There were those who tried not to look but their furtive glimpses proved harder to bear even than stares. There was a paper lying on the table he’d chosen, The Times. He shoved it aside, not wanting to know any news. He’d finished with news. Politics, foreign affairs, share prices – they no longer had relevance to his life. He felt he didn’t really belong to the world any more. ‘Cutting yourself off, hiding away, won’t help,’ Charlotte had said. But she was wrong. It did.

He’d been with her for only six months, just before the war began. The future had been so bright, so full of every kind of promise. In 1916, remembering himself in the summer two years before produced a kind of tearful emotion in him harder to cope with than the misery he had had to endure ever since he was injured. All his images of his pre-war self were of a man overwhelmingly energetic, a man who had found it difficult to sit at a desk, though his job demanded that he should. He’d liked games – mainly cricket, and tennis – and had been good at them. His school reports had referred to his ‘exuberance’ and Charlotte had once said this was what had first attracted her to him. She liked exuberant men, men who glowed with vitality and physical well-being. She didn’t play games herself but she was a great walker, and had taken up the new fad for cycling with enthusiasm. That was how he’d met her. She’d been coming too fast down East Heath Road and her skirt had caught in the wheel, sending her flying into his arms as he came off the heath after his swim in the pond. He’d been almost at the road when he saw her hurtling down and he’d sprinted into her path, seeing what was about to happen – and caught her as she crashed to a halt.

Neither of them was hurt. It could have been embarrassing, being thrown onto his back as she catapulted on top of him, but they both laughed, not at all shy. He’d helped her disentangle the offending skirt, and a slight scratch on her ankle, where something had cut through her stocking, gave him the opportunity to produce his handkerchief (luckily clean and unused) and tie it round. He pushed the bike back up the hill for her to the rather alarmingly grand house where she turned out to live. On the way, they chatted about cycling and bicycles. He told her that he loved to cycle, belonged to a cycling club, and went off most weekends on long rides, taking the train to various places outside London. She said she wished she could do the same. Then he offered to fit a guard to her back wheel so that her skirt could not catch in it again and, to his surprise, she accepted his offer. That was the beginning. They had never, of course, become lovers, though he had thought of himself as in love and he was sure Charlotte had felt the same. Who knew what might have happened, had it not been for the war starting just as they were really becoming close? But if it had not been for the war, he would not have met Stella.

It distressed him that Stella had never known him as he used to be. He’d been so dreadfully afraid at first that what attracted her to him in that wretched hospital was his helplessness, and that it was pity which drew her to him. She denied this, but it had taken him a long time to believe she could see anything at all to love about him. ‘You’re brave,’ she said, and ‘You try all the time,’ and then, later, they discovered a shared taste for the same kind of music and the same sort of books, and she said no one she’d ever known could talk so intelligently about things. It didn’t seem a lot, to him, to inspire love, especially when so much of why he loved her was to do with her looks. She was beautiful, as Charlotte had not been.

He’d met Charlotte again, briefly, after peace was declared, to tell her about Stella and to finish things properly, and he’d been shocked at the change in her. She’d written to him throughout the war, sisterly letters, but never mentioned how thin and worn she had become, though she’d told him how ill she had been after the death of her father. But then she’d been equally shocked by his appearance. They sat in the buffet at Victoria Station, a meeting which lasted twenty minutes but felt like twenty hours. He was ashamed of his prepared speech but also relieved to have made it, to get it over.

The scone was delicious – light, fluffy, with a hint of cheese in it. He ordered another. Thank God, his taste buds were unaffected. Food was so important now, and drink, wine in particular. He’d gone off to war thinking of food as just a kind of fuel to keep his body running smoothly, not caring much what he ate as long as his hunger was satisfied. He’d used to drink beer, and occasionally a whisky. Since he returned, food was of much greater interest to him. Stella was a good cook, and he had picked up a lot from her. The kitchen had become as much his as hers. It was small but compact and there was a view of the estuary from the window, the best view in the cottage. It faced west, so that in the evening, when he was in the kitchen, wonderful sunsets illuminated the room. Going into the other rooms afterwards was a little depressing. It was a metaphor for his life, he thought, from brightness to dreariness, to gloom.

But that was a lie. His life had not been particularly bright before the war. It was just that he had been thoughtless, or rather he had never thought about anything deeply. He went to the office, he did his not-very-demanding job carefully enough, he went home, he played tennis, he went cycling, he went to cricket matches, and was quite content to enjoy himself. These days, he couldn’t stop thinking how breathtakingly unprepared he had been for war. And then four years of it, and months in hospital with not the slightest hope of regaining what he had once had, that unworried existence. Only four years, and everything about him and his circumstances was changed for ever. ‘But you survived,’ Charlotte had said to him. ‘You’re alive.’ She meant he ought to be grateful. Her own life, and the lives of thousands of others, had also been dramatically altered, sometimes far more than his had been.

There was sympathy in the eyes of the waitress when he paid for his tea, but he bore it stoically. He’d seen chaps in hospital smiling in spite of the most awful injuries just because someone was sitting holding their hand and being sympathetic. Sympathy hadn’t helped Alan at all when it came his way. It just made him bad-tempered and determined to manage without. ‘You are a surly fellow,’ Stella had reproached him. It was true, he was now. Pain had made him surly, fear made him surlier. Today, he’d set off for his hospital appointment, afraid that he was going to be told he was losing his sight and that nothing could be done. But, as it turned out, the condition was entirely treatable. He had the drops in his pocket. Nothing more could be done about the burns, nothing further could be done about his leg or his shoulder, which would always pain him, but his eyes were safe.

He wanted to buy a present for Stella, something to make amends for his vile temper the last few days. There were no decent shops on this route between hospital and underground station. In fact, there were hardly any shops at all, only a few small grocery stores, and a couple of newsagents. He hadn’t the energy to walk to Oxford Street before going on to Paddington. Flowers, he thought, he could buy her flowers, when he got to St Austell, but then he remembered how late he would arrive. There would be no flower stalls. It would have to be scent, but where the hell was he going to get that? Then, just ahead, he saw what looked like a market. It ran down a side street, both sides of the road, crammed with open stalls. The goods on sale were not new but second-hand, maybe with some genuine antiques hidden among the bric-a-brac. Slowly, he began searching, looking for jewellery. Stella liked cameos; perhaps he would find an old cameo which could be made into a brooch or have a velvet ribbon threaded through it. He noticed he was being closely observed by the stall-holder whose trays he was scrutinising. The man, who had been slouching against the wall at his back, was alert. ‘Looking for something special, sir?’ he asked. There was a slight emphasis on the ‘sir’. Shouldn’t it have been ‘guv’ or ‘mister’, Alan wondered. Did he look as though he had money and was worth a ‘sir’? Or was it the war wounds? Shaking his head, he moved on.

There were several book stalls, which he paused to browse over, almost selecting a very pretty copy of Gulliver’s Travels. Stella liked old books with decorative covers and this one looked Victorian, a deep turquoise colour with gold foil flowers embossed in it. There was a label pasted inside the cover, recording that the volume had been awarded to James W. Hayston for regular attendance at school, and proficiency in reading, in 1896. The man selling it wanted a shilling. But Alan decided he needed a more appropriate book, and passed on. The next stall was a mess. He almost didn’t stop at all – it looked heaped with junk. But a box caught his eye, and he asked the stall-holder if he could examine it. She handed it over, pointing out that it was in perfect condition, not a scratch on it. It was a biscuit box, made for Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, the queen looking immaculate in her robes. But it was large, and awkward to carry. Handing it back, he watched as the woman moved her stuff about to make a space for it. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at something that had caught his eye. She hauled out a small picture, and showed it to him. He stared, recognising something in it but he couldn’t think what. Had he seen this room? Been in one like it? Was it a little like Charlotte’s? Her rented room had been her secret from her family. She’d decorated it herself. He remembered that the wallpaper was yellow and she’d hung a white lace curtain in front of the window. They’d kissed and fondled each other there, nothing more, and then afterwards she’d gone back home. It had all felt very odd to him, he’d never been able to understand why Charlotte had this room at all when she hardly ever went there. She’d said it was an indulgence, and she could afford it. It was a dream she’d once had: it meant something to her. She couldn’t explain more than that. The last time he’d been in her room she’d begun to tell him about a visit to Paris and then Florence which she’d made with her father.

Something stirred now in his memory but wouldn’t come to the front. ‘Do you know who painted this?’ he asked. The woman shook her head. ‘Where did you get it?’ She seemed evasive, shrugged, said she couldn’t remember, maybe her dad had picked it up somewhere – he had a cart, people gave him things. It had been in his shed for years and now he’d passed on she’d been left to clear everything out. He could have it for sixpence. The frame might be of some use.

She didn’t have a bag, but she wrapped it for him in a piece of brown paper and obligingly tied it with string, making a little loop for him to hold it by. He thanked her profusely, feeling suddenly more cheerful, and gave her a shilling instead of sixpence. She was right, the frame might fit one of Stella’s own canvases if she didn’t care for the painting. It was a good-quality frame, dirty but easily cleaned. Shame he couldn’t clean it before giving it to her, but all he had to do it with was a handkerchief. It occurred to him that he might say he had bought it in an art gallery but she would know he couldn’t possibly have had time. He would have to tell the truth. Strange how telling the truth so often seemed unappealing these days. His brain was forever tempting him to embroider and enlarge, to make up stories where there were none. It wasn’t that he sought to make drama out of the prosaic – quite the contrary. To have bought the little picture in an art gallery would have been ordinary, normal, whereas to find it among a heap of rubbish in a street market was, by contrast, exciting.

Paddington Station was chaotic and he had trouble making his way to the right platform. There was a group of people bang in the centre with great piles of luggage surrounding them and he had to step carefully over suitcases and cardboard boxes. The people were foreign. At first, all he registered was that they were not speaking English, and then he realised they were German. They were poor-looking people, not in the least threatening, their features drawn, their attitude one of exhaustion, but he started to sweat and had to stop to take deep breaths to steady himself. He remembered the Gare de Montparnasse, and lying on the stretcher, barely able to move, and the small, slight woman in black, wearing a hat with a green ribbon in it, who had bent over him and asked if he wanted water. He’d said yes, and she’d turned and asked, in French, one of the orderlies to pass her a beaker of water. He’d wondered what she was doing there. She didn’t look like a nurse. No, she’d said, she was an artist, she lived in Paris, though she was Welsh. She had calmed him for a moment. Amid all the hubbub and confusion she was quiet. She’d touched his cheek lightly with her hand before she moved on.

The train was half-empty. He settled himself comfortably and unwrapped the painting, propping it up on the seat opposite so that he could study it. Stella would see things in it which he could not. He was used to that. She was always explaining to him what paintings were ‘about’ and he hardly bothered any more challenging her interpretations, though often he considered she spoke absolute twaddle. This particular painting would be a test. What did he think it was ‘about’? Nothing much. It was a painting of a corner of a room, an attic room, with a small table and a wickerwork chair in it. No people, though he realised that the flowers on the table and the coat and parasol on the chair indicated a human presence, a woman probably. ‘What does it say to you?’ Stella was always asking him in that affected way she had where art was concerned. He didn’t think it ‘said’ anything. It was restful, quiet, calm, that was all. If it said anything, it was speaking in whispers which he couldn’t hear. Once the train passed Plymouth, he fell asleep. Not properly asleep, but into a doze. This was happening a lot lately. He didn’t sleep well at night but instead went into a state of suspended animation which was not at all restful. He’d been like that in hospital, in France, always hazily aware of what was going on around him without being able to respond to anything they said to him. A nurse would ask if he were awake and he would be unable to reply that yes, he was, and in pain. She would pass on, convinced he was out for the count. It was how he imagined it would be to have had an anaesthetic which had only half-worked, leaving him conscious only to a dangerously limited extent. No good going to a doctor about it. He had too many other reasons to seek medical advice, all of them much more pressing.

The light in the carriage was now very dim. Opening his eyes, fighting against his feelings of lethargy, he found himself staring again at the painting. He could hardly make it out. It was just a matter of shadows, the curtained window now the only light patch. He’d never lived in an attic. The cottage had one, but it was tiny and they used it to store cases and suchlike. Stella intended to clear it out and turn it into another bedroom, but she hadn’t got round to it, and he himself had seen no need to do so. What did she want another bedroom for? There were two, one each, and they had no children.

It was dark when he got off the train, deeply dark, no moon, no stars. Walking home, the painting under his arm, he felt pleased with himself.

*

Stella thought the rooms in the cottage were too small, a succession of three rooms leading from one to another. She longed to knock down walls and make a space in which she could move and breathe easily, but it was impossible to contemplate – these walls were almost as thick as the solid exterior walls. All she’d been able to do was get Alan to lift off the connecting doors, leaving each room open, so that at least from one corridor-like end to another there was now a sense of distance. And she’d put down a single dark-green runner, going the whole length of the stone floor. But she still felt confined. Only in her studio, the glorified shed, her hut in the garden, did she feel comfortable. It was an ugly hut but inside its flimsy walls the room was large and square and there was plenty of light from the windows all around.

But in the winter, it was too cold to work in it for long. Alan had fixed up a paraffin heater, and she wore thick jerseys and always had a scarf knotted round her neck, but eventually the cold would numb her hands. Today, though, it was summer, but she had worked in the cottage itself since Alan was not there to distract her. It wasn’t that he was noisy – he was a quiet man – but that his very presence broke her concentration. Even when she could not see him, she could somehow feel him there.

She wished he could get a job that would take him out of the cottage in a regular way, a nine-to-five job, but there was no sign of that yet. He wasn’t well enough. The doctor provided him with certificate after certificate, attesting to his poor health, and now of course there was the new worry, his eyesight. But she’d made her mind up: if he was going to lose his sight, as he feared, she was going to insist that they left this cottage. They would not be thrown together so absolutely. She envisaged a modern house with two rooms either side of a wide hall, his on one side, hers on the other, and some common ground at the back. He would be upset, loving the cottage as he did, but she would not care. It looked pretty from the outside, and its situation on the headland above Charlestown harbour was attractive, but once inside she felt stifled. She had said nothing to Alan at the time, not wanting to hurt him when he had been hurt quite enough. They were near the sea and she had told herself that was what she wanted.

Throughout the war, when she was living so far from the sea, she had yearned for the sight of it and vowed she would never move from the coast again. She walked most days on the beach here benefiting from the sea air and the invigorating winds. Place mattered in the end. She’d felt disorientated and adrift during her years in London.

She had been painting all day. The moment Alan had departed she set up her still life – a jug, flowers in it, a plate alongside with a single red apple on the edge. They were positioned on a small table underneath the window, a round occasional table covered with a piece of green silk. The jug, a milk jug which held a pint and a half, was white, the flowers – roses – pink and white, the pink blooms almost fully opened, the white ones still in bud. The plate was green, but a paler green than the cloth. The light coming through the leaded window was not strong but she wanted just that faint touch of light. She painted in water-colours, though oils were her preferred medium, because they were easier to manage in the cottage and because this still life was meant to be quick and delicate. The result was better than she had expected. She’d caught the fragility of the pink petals about to fall, the tight strength of the white unopened flowers, the roundness of the apple. Eight hours’ work and something to show for it. Maybe it would sell, if she framed it.

She’d given herself a year to see if she could make even a slender living out of painting, a year as a reward for getting through the war. Alan had encouraged her. He had his pension, he could support them, and he had bought this cottage, right away from it all, out of money left to him by his parents. But in that first year after the war was over, she had made no money and spent a good deal. The hut had cost money, humble though it was, and so had all the materials she needed: the easel and paints, and canvases and paper. Alan had said not to worry, she shouldn’t expect success in a year. So a second year went by, in which she sold two paintings. She’d thought it might be the beginning of some modest success but it hadn’t proved to be so. Alan said it didn’t matter, but it mattered to her. Not the success itself but the encouragement it would have provided. She needed it: she had so little confidence, untrained as she was.

She heard him coming along the track leading from the road. He was whistling. She went to the door and opened it, and stood in the darkness waiting, hearing his whistling, hearing his feet crunch the stones beneath them. There was a hint of rain in the wind, soft gusts blowing into her face, and far off at sea the sound of a ship’s horn. He stopped a few feet away from her and stared. She glanced behind her, to see what he might be looking at, and then felt his arms round her. ‘Your hair,’ he whispered, ‘it looked on fire … with the light, behind.’ His coat smelled of smoke and she had a sudden image of all the crowds he’d passed through during his day, their smells absorbed by the jacket he wore. ‘Take your coat off,’ she said, and helped him. It dropped to the floor and he would not let her pick it up. First, he had to embrace and kiss her, hugging her to him fiercely. All she did was yield, but it was enough. ‘So?’ she said, when at last they were sitting down. ‘Good news, yes?’

‘Good news,’ he said, and repeated what they’d said at Moorfields. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he finished. ‘And look, I’ve brought you a present, to celebrate.’

She was surprised by the brown paper package. And then she felt bewildered. ‘What is it?’ she asked, stupidly. ‘A painting. I thought you might like it, or if you don’t, you could use the frame for one of your own.’ Slowly, she took the wrapping off, and stared. It was so unusual, so odd of Alan to have been attracted to such a quiet picture. ‘Well?’ he asked. She went on staring, holding the painting first at arm’s length and then closer. She asked him where he had got it, and listened carefully while he related his story, adding to it his theories about where the little painting had come from. ‘The frame is expensive,’ he said. ‘Whoever framed it didn’t paint it, I bet.’ ‘The frame is wrong,’ she said, ‘all wrong,’ and she began to turn it over to remove it. Once the canvas was in her hands, she felt relieved – it was like taking off an ornate dress and finding a simple petticoat underneath, so pure in its cotton simplicity and lack of adornment. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Alan was happy. This was such a rare event that it confused her. She knew how to comfort him when he was sad or in pain, she even knew how to lift his spirits a little when he was depressed, as he often was, but Alan happy was such a rare occurrence it was hard to adapt to. She suddenly saw him as he must have been before the war – carefree, eager, optimistic. Even the burn did not look so ugly, with his smile pushing it to one side and his suddenly bright eyes catching attention instead. He seemed no longer a damaged man and she no longer felt like his nurse. He wouldn’t let her make him something to eat but insisted on going into the kitchen and banging about making them both scrambled eggs and toast. The toast was burned and the eggs over-scrambled, but they were presented with a flourish and eaten with relish. Then he opened a precious bottle of malt whisky and they drank some of it in front of the fire.

How, she wondered, as she often did, had Alan and she ever come together?

*

The sun streamed through the windows of her hut, lighting up every dancing speck of dust as Stella swept the floor. She stopped to admire the swirling patterns in the air. The door was open while she cleaned and she could see the white horses riding on the sea. She was not going to try to paint today. Later she would walk with Alan, if he decided his leg was up to it. Her water-colour of the day before, her still life, was propped up on a chair. She was going to frame it herself, in a narrow, plain wooden frame, and then take it down to the pottery, to Conrad Jenkinson, who might sell it for her. He sold his own pots there and let other people display their artistic efforts at no charge. (It was he who had sold Stella’s two paintings last year.) Conrad knew real artists, he was a friend of Dod Proctor, and would not have let her show her paintings in his place if they had been embarrassingly bad (or so Stella told herself).

There was nothing hanging on the hut’s walls, which were not much thicker than plywood and shook alarmingly in any strong wind, but at one end Alan had built a broad shelf, right across, and here she displayed her work when it was finished until she decided whether it was worth taking to Conrad. She had four awaiting judgement, as well as the latest still life. Cleaning the shelf first, she put Alan’s present up with the other paintings, and stepped back. She felt herself blushing, a slow heat spreading through her, and put her hands up to her face, unable to understand what was causing her discomfort. Slowly, her eyes went from left to right and back again, and each time she stopped at Alan’s offering. Something was there, she could sense it. Something that made her own work instantly brash. Worse than that – shallow, empty, flat. There was no meaning in what she had done, no feeling. In despair, she rushed forward and laid her pictures face down and then retreated again to look at the unknown artist’s work. To her relief, it did not look so powerful – it was the contrast with her own that had made it so dominant.

She longed to dash off and show it to Conrad, but there was Alan to think about. The day was dedicated to him, and he would be up by now. Quickly, she finished the floor and closed the door on the newly clean and tidy hut. Leaving it, she always felt reluctant, whether she had been working well or not. It was her place. Alan never came in unless invited, and then he seemed uncomfortable. Strange, she thought, how a room, and in this case just a makeshift room, could take on an atmosphere. There was little in it that was purely personal except for her paintings, no belongings or furnishings that reflected her own personality, and yet the hut felt like hers. It was her.

She said this to Alan as they set off on the jagged cliff path. ‘How can a hut be me?’ she wondered aloud.

‘It isn’t,’ he said, ‘you just like to think it is. Rooms aren’t people. Anyone could walk into your hut and make it their own.’

‘Then why do I feel it is me?’

‘You’re a romantic, you like the idea of it.’ He stopped to pick up a stone and hurl it down to the sea. There was no splash that they could hear.

‘Well then, why do I like the idea of it? What does it say about me that I want to believe the inside of a wooden hut is me?’

‘You want something inanimate to belong to you. It’s the thrill of ownership.’

‘You’re not serious!’

‘No, I’m not. You are. I’m humouring you, can’t you tell?’ He was laughing, but she felt annoyed.

‘Don’t humour me, then. I don’t like it. I’m trying to understand myself, and you’re mocking me.’

‘Oh, Stella, really.’

‘I am. I want to sort myself out.’

‘What on earth is there to sort? You’re thirty years old, beautiful, healthy, loved by me, an artist …’

‘But am I an artist?’

‘So you don’t question the rest?’

‘I can’t question being thirty and healthy and to say I’m beautiful is too silly.’

‘You are beautiful, and loved. How can you ignore those facts?’

‘I’m only beautiful to you.’

‘Isn’t that all that matters?’

‘Alan, don’t. You keep teasing me, don’t.’

‘I’m not teasing you. Look at me.’ He stopped again, and turned her to face him, and held her face between his hands and stared into her eyes. ‘You-are-beautiful,’ he said, slowly, ‘and-I-love-you. There. Is that teasing?’

She broke away, and walked ahead. The path dipped alarmingly, running very near the edge. They would have had to go in single file for this bit anyway. She could hear Alan behind her, not able to move so rapidly, and on the steep section ahead coming out of the dip he would be slower still. It was stupid and ungrateful to feel upset, she knew that. Alan would never let her try to trace why she always felt disorientated and anxious about where she was and what was going to happen. He just said it was normal, that everyone who’d gone through the war, as he and she had, felt the same – unsettled, suspicious. But she felt it was something to do with her life before the war. She had never felt safe since she’d left Tenby. Alan wouldn’t let her explore that. He hated her to dwell on her life before she was with him – it was as though he were jealous of it. She’d wanted to take him to Tenby, to show him her childhood haunts, but he refused to go with her, and would not come and meet her mother who still lived in Victoria Street. The past, her past, was to be a closed book, because he wanted to blot out his own past, the war and what it had done to him. She wanted to talk about Emlyn, too, but Alan couldn’t even bear the sound of his name. She wanted to confess her shameful envy of Emlyn, of how she was consumed with jealousy, burning and horrible, when he went off to London, to paint. It was only twelve years ago but it seemed like a century. Emlyn’s talent was so obvious that she’d known hers was not in the same league, but still, she hoped and longed for the same opportunity. They had had one year together in London, when she’d followed him and was nursing at St Bart’s, the year before the war started, and then it was all over. Alan knew she was a widow, but he preferred to ignore the fact of her marriage entirely. In the same way, he rejected her own curiosity about his life before the war. She knew there had been someone else, but that was all. ‘It is a New Year,’ Alan had said at midnight on 31st December, ‘and a new decade. Here’s to the future. The past is not worth remembering.’ But she wanted to remember it. Sometimes she wondered if her urge to paint was an act of remembrance, of Emlyn, of trying to hang on, however pathetically, to what he had been.

At the top of the incline, she sat down and waited, facing out to sea. It stretched, now sullen and grey, to the horizon, meeting a sky furiously busy with scudding clouds pushing across it. The early morning sun had almost gone, only flashes of it appearing hurriedly from behind clouds which grew bigger and darker every minute. The wind was coming from the west and would bring rain soon. They should go back. Alan would never manage to get round the headland. But he was stubborn. If she said that the path was proving too difficult and that they were going to get caught in the rain, he would insist on continuing. Turning back had to be his decision, and she would have to be cunning and help him make it.

She remembered seeing him for the first time in Netley’s Royal Victoria Hospital. She should not have been in the main building at all – her place was in the Welsh hospital, a large hut in the grounds holding 200 beds – but she had been sent over to ask for some extra pillows. She was lost, totally confused by the crowded, enormously wide and long corridors, not knowing which way she should go. The light was poor – all the lights were covered in brown paper shades – and she could hardly get past the iron bedsteads now in the corridors as well as the wards. She’d come to a halt, wondering whom she could ask for directions, and something had made her look up. There was a landing above, and a man standing on it, poised to come down the stairs. He was on crutches, and as she watched she guessed what would happen. When the man fell she was already halfway up the staircase and reached him in time to stop his falling the full length. She bent over him, soothing him, telling him to lie still and she would get help. He didn’t speak, but out of the corner of his right eye tears leaked onto the horrific burn covering his cheek. It had no dressing, and she could see it was as healed as it ever would be. Pity was what she felt. It was what all the nurses felt, all the time, pity, exhausting pity, the sort that drained them. Some of the soldiers hated it. Sympathy, concern, interest, yes – but not pity. It diminished them, made them feel less like men. But after the pity, when Alan had been carried back to the ward and she had gone to check he was recovered from his fall, pity was followed by admiration. He brushed aside her solicitous enquiries. ‘My own stupid fault,’ he said. That had been the beginning.

She made a point of smiling at him as he reached her so that he would not think she was offended by his dismissal of her wish to talk about herself. But still he asked if he was forgiven now, as he dropped down beside her.

‘Bloody leg,’ he sighed.

‘It does well,’ she said, patting the leg lightly on the knee, ‘when you think what the poor old limb has been through.’

‘Don’t tell me that at least I’ve got a leg to moan about.’

‘I wasn’t going to, I wouldn’t be so crass.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t, nurse.’

‘Look at those clouds.’

‘Rain.’

‘Will we shelter, or go on?’

‘Or go back?’

‘If you like. We won’t get so wet then.’

‘Go slowly, though. I’m not ready yet.’

She waited with him, reclining on her side, chewing a piece of grass and looking at him, but he didn’t return her gaze. He was looking out to sea, his chest rising and falling as he recovered his breath. ‘You are tying yourself to an invalid,’ her mother had said, though she had never met him. ‘It’s one thing working as a nurse, it’s another having to take your work home with you.’ She wasn’t nursing any more anyway. She’d given it up, the moment the war ended, and her mother was scandalised. ‘All that training, all that good you could do.’ But Stella hadn’t been able to throw off the knowledge she had. She was watching Alan now as a nurse, calculating what he was suffering, wondering if there was something she could do about it. When he began to get up, she helped him, and he said again, ‘Thank you, nurse.’

‘Don’t call me that,’ she said.

‘All right, thank you, artist.’

‘Alan!’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’m not an artist, you know that.’

‘Then what, who, is an artist? Someone who draws, paints, no? So you are an artist, good, bad, or indifferent.’

‘No. I play, I dabble, I try.’

‘You play, dabble and try all day long, then. That sounds like an artist to me.’

‘It’s embarrassing. I feel a fraud.’

‘I’m a fraud myself, I don’t find the term insulting.’

She was silent. They’d reached the broader path, where they could walk together, but she was still ahead. She knew what he meant: he considered himself a fraud as a man. It was best not to pick up on that. No good assuring him that as far as she was concerned he was a man and that she loved him as he was. Hadn’t she shown it? Hadn’t they lived together happily these two years, ever since the war ended? Never once had his being ‘a fraud’ mattered. They had what they had, and it was enough. If she had wanted a child she could have had one with Emlyn.

Alan went to lie down when they reached home. She went to her hut. When she opened the door, the little painting greeted her and once more a strange yearning filled her for something unobtainable.