She is a child on her parents’ farm in Vermont. It is autumn. October. The leaves are just changing color, mostly at the tops of trees. Fistfuls of red, bright yellow, orange. Martha can smell the apples, ripe, ready to be picked. Macintosh. Golden Delicious. Granny Smith. Around the trees the air is heavy with the smell of rotting leaves, fruit going bad, the earth. But the apples, when she holds one to her nose, smell clean. They are so crisp that when she bites into one she can’t hear anything but its crispness.
Tonight, Diana has made lamb. It is tough, dry. But there is mint sauce and roasted potatoes. The girl has brought home apples, shiny red ones that looked obscene when she held them out to Nigel. Then she went into the kitchen and began to peel and slice them, working hard, her face wrinkled with concentration.
As always, dinner is silent. There is the scraping of forks and knives against china. The clock ticking. Nothing more. Until the girl breaks the silence. She always does.
“You worked hard on this lamb, didn’t you Diana?” she says. Nigel’s wife cringes at the familiarity, not even Mrs. Smith, but Diana.
“Do you know what my mother back in Vermont used to do? She would sear the meat first with garlic and rosemary. That infused the meat. She always made a moist, tasty lamb.” Martha smiled then, as if she hadn’t just insulted her mother-in-law.
Diana stops chewing and looks at Martha, this stranger in her home, this interloper when she most needs to be alone and private in grief.
“Wait until you taste the apple pie I’ve baked,” Martha continues cheerfully. “I’ve been saving flour for weeks to have enough. Aren’t rations just the worst possible thing?”
No, Diana thinks, but doesn’t say it. They all know the worst possible thing because it happened to them.
Martha sighs and leans back in her chair. “Robin loved my apple pie,” she says.
His name seems to hang there, bouncing between them, a light thing, a magical thing.
Nigel clears his throat. The dry lamb is caught there, unable to be swallowed.
Martha gets to her feet and clears the plates of uneaten food. She brings out the pie. Holding it out to them like a gift. It is so high, and lightly baked with a fluted crust and the smell of apples and cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, an exotic thing really.
She gives them each a fat wedge of it, the steam escaping, rushing the aroma into the air. Diana wants to hate this girl’s pie, but the taste is so alive that she cannot hate it. She must eat it. She cries as she eats it, but she cannot stop.
NIGEL GETS THE news of the war from the radio and from his friend John who comes to visit every Tuesday for tea.
They know war, these men. They’d fought in the last one together. John was with Nigel when he lost his leg. He stayed with him, holding a cloth to the place where Nigel’s leg had been to keep him from bleeding to death. When a man has done that for you, he is in your life forever.
Today with the tea, Nigel serves slivers of what is left of the girl’s pie. “Apple pie, eh?” John says. “That’s what Americans eat, isn’t it? And hot dogs?”
He tells Nigel the news. Germany is winning this war. There is no doubt about that.
AT NIGHT SHE PLAYS the same record over and over.
Missed the Saturday dance . . . heard they crowded the floor . . .
“Why doesn’t she go home?” Diana asks from her side of the bed. She has a book open but she is not even pretending to read it. “Back to Vermont?”
Nigel is facing the wall. “I don’t know,” he says.
“I don’t want her here,” Diana says with conviction.
Nigel doesn’t answer.
“Did she say where it is she goes every morning?” Diana asks him.
“No.”
“Did you ask her?”
“I will,” he says. “I promise.”
IN HIS STUDY the next morning, Nigel takes off the artificial leg. It irritates the stump that is left from his real leg. He gets blisters, sores, an ache that nothing can take away. But with it off, and a few glasses of sherry, and some salve on it, he can almost forget the pain.
He watches Martha bound down the stairs, hair flying. Always off in the same direction. He rubs the thing that is missing. It is tender there, but he rubs gently.
There are fields at the farm. Endless fields of hay stacked in neat bundles and clover everywhere. The grass smells sweet. Martha presses her face right into it, feels the wet dirt and the soft grass, pushes her face into it and breathes deeply.
FROM THE BENCH where Martha waits she always sees the same woman walking through the park. At first, Martha thought she was old with her white, wild hair and her blotchy face. But now she realizes that the woman is probably no more than fifty. Her eyes are the blue of the autumn sky in Vermont—deep and clear.
“Winston Churchill is the father of my child,” the woman tells anyone who will listen. “He’s the father of my daughter, Poppy. I only want what’s mine.”