“These are English words for ugly.”
“Not at all. He’s tall with soft brown eyes. He’s quite gorgeous and I don’t think he has any idea, which is sweet.”
“Don’t forget you only care because he can offer you a job.”
“Which I need, thanks to you dropping me in it.”
“Well it’s your own fault if you won’t tell the truth to your mother.”
“Oh, but who does? You punish me too hard over one little kiss.”
Hilda affected puzzlement. “Kiss?”
“No! Oh, Hilda, don’t say you are over it already. I just spent the whole beastly day in the rain doing my penance for the Geoffrey Indiscretion.”
Hilda yawned. “Have Geoffrey, if you wish. He still flatly refuses to volunteer for the war.”
“As do you.”
“Which is why I need a man I can nobly support.”
“In absentia, though.”
“Oh, in furs.”
“Tom won’t sign up and I admire it. He . . . well, it’s just not him.”
Hilda widened her eyes. “Mary North!”
Mary smiled. “Well, and so what?”
“You are actually soft on the man!”
“No, no, but he has—oh, you know, eyes, and he is tall, and . . . well, I think it’s lovely that he thinks teaching is important, because I think so too.”
“Since when?” said Hilda.
“Since the moment they said I couldn’t. Why must we do what we’re told?”
“To keep life pleasant and convivial?”
“Says the girl smoking in the scullery! Why not say to Mother: ‘I shall smoke in your drawing room, and if you must replace those curtains then do let me pick you out a pattern that is not so exquisitely vile.’ She’d respect you for it.”
“She’d never let me visit again.”
“Which might force you to widen your circle of friends.”
Hilda blinked.
“Oh,” said Mary, “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that you’re the way you are, and I’m the way I am.”
“And you are determined to fall in love with Tom, apparently, just because it goes against all available grains.”
“One dinner, one lunch and three telephone calls. I hardly call it love.”
“What do you call it? Do you want him to give you the teaching job, or do you want, you know, him?’
Mary bit her lip. “Are both allowed?’
“If I said no, wouldn’t you only go and do it?”
Mary took her arm. “And we need to find you a nice soldier, do we?”
“An airman would do in a pinch. I draw the line at navy blue.”
“Nice girls do. I shall keep a lookout for you. Of course it is quite ridiculous in any case. There is no actual fighting, is there?”
“God no,” said Hilda. “They’re nice in uniform, not battle dress.”
November, 1939
AN ARTILLERY SHELL ROSE high over Salisbury Plain and slowed in the rain at the zenith of its arc. Beneath it the wide grasslands moved in a green blur, resolving around the azimuthal rim into the still marshes of Somerset and the unchanging hills of Dorset. With the scream of a fresh start the shell dropped from the sky and buried itself shallowly under the meadowland turf of the plain.
There was a deficiency in the impact fuse, and the shell did not explode. It lay in its pocket of black soil in the bed of a shallow ravine. Its mechanism trembled. The thing could barely contain itself.
Three miles distant, Alistair Heath stood in driving rain while a sergeant major screamed at him.
“WHAT MAKES MY GRASS GROW?”
“Blood, blood, blood!” the men replied.
“WHOSE BLOOD?”
“The enemy’s!”
“WHOSE ENEMY?”
“The King’s enemy!”
Alistair joined in the bayonet drill without enthusiasm. He had heard the shell falling—a stray from the gunnery range. The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.
He could not help thinking of shells as things he had always collected, with his sisters, on the beaches at Lulworth and Bracklesham. When the instructors spoke of firing them, he could not help seeing the dumpy 3.7-inch howitzers projecting cockles and scallops in looping trajectories over a blue horizon. Invariably the scallops, when he visualized them, were the jaunty little things from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
“HEATH!”
“Yes?”
“PERHAPS YOU BELIEVE YOURSELF TO BE ABOVE ALL THIS? ARE YOU GIVING THIS VITAL DRILL, MR. HEATH, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF YOUR GRACIOUS CONCENTRATION?”
“Oh yes, absolutely.”
“OH YES ABSOLUTELY WHAT?”
Alistair could not think what the man was driving at.
“Yes, I am giving it my full attention.”