Collected Stories

2. The Summer-house

My father came back twice to the farm, unexpectedly, without warning. He walked into the kitchen, the first time one Thursday morning when there was nobody there, the second time on a Thursday afternoon.

My mother told us how on the first occasion she’d been crossing the yard with four eggs, all that the hens had laid, and how she’d sensed that something was different. The sheepdogs weren’t in the yard, where they usually were at this time. Vaguely she’d thought that that was unusual. Hours later, when Betty and Dick and I came in from school, our parents were sitting at the kitchen table, talking. He was still in his army uniform. The big brown teapot was on the table, and two cups with the dregs of tea in them, and bread on the bread-board, and butter and blackberry jam. There was a plate he’d eaten a fry from, with the marks of egg-yolk on it. Even now it seems like yesterday. He smiled a slow, teasing smile at us, as though mocking the emotion we felt at seeing him there, making a joke even of that. Then Betty ran over to him and hugged him. I hugged him too. Dick stood awkwardly.

The second time he returned he walked into the kitchen at half past four, just after I’d come in from school. I was alone, having my tea.

‘Hullo, Matilda,’ he said.

I was nearly eleven then. Betty was sixteen and Dick was seventeen. Dick wasn’t there that second time: he’d gone into the army himself. Betty had left the Grammar School and was helping my mother to keep the farm going. I was still at Miss Pritchard’s.

I was going to be pretty, people used to say, although I couldn’t see it myself. My hair had a reddish tinge, like my mother’s, but it was straight and uninteresting. I had freckles, which I hated, and my eyes were a shade of blue I didn’t much care for either. I detested being called Matilda. Betty and Dick, I considered, were much nicer names, and Betty was beautiful now. My friend Belle Frye was getting to be beautiful also. She claimed to have Spanish blood in her, though it was never clear where it came from. Her hair was jet-black and her skin, even in the middle of winter, was almost as deeply brown as her eyes. I’d have loved to look like her and to be called Belle Frye, which I thought was a marvellous name.

I made my father tea that Thursday afternoon and I felt a bit shy because I hadn’t seen him for so long. He didn’t comment on my making the tea, although he might have said that I hadn’t been able to before. Instead he said he hadn’t had a decent cup of tea since he’d been home the last time. ‘It’s great to be home, Matilda,’ he said.

A few weeks later my mother told me he was dead. She told me at that same time of day and on a Thursday also: a warm June afternoon that had been tiring to trudge home from school through.

‘Belle Frye has to stay in for two hours,’ I was saying as I came into the kitchen. My mother told me to sit down.

The repetition was extraordinary, the three Thursday afternoons. That night in bed I was aware of it, lying awake thinking about him, wondering if he’d actually been killed on a Thursday also.

All the days of the week had a special thing about them: they had different characters and even different colours. Monday was light brown, Tuesday black, Wednesday grey, Thursday orange, Friday yellow, Saturday purplish, Sunday white. Tuesday was a day I liked because we had double History, Friday was cosy, Saturday I liked best of all. Thursday would be special now: I thought that, marking the day with my grief, unable to cry any more. And then I remembered that it had been a Thursday afternoon when old Mrs Ashburton had invited everyone for miles round to her tennis party, when I had realized for the first time that there was going to be a war against the Germans: Thursday, 31 August 1939.

I would have liked there to be a funeral, and I kept thinking about one. I never mentioned it to my mother or to Betty, or asked them if my father had had a funeral in France. I knew he hadn’t. I’d heard him saying they just had to leave you there. My mother would cry if I said anything about it.

Then Dick came back, the first time home since he’d joined the army. He’d been informed too, and time had passed, several months, so that we were all used to it by now. It was even quite like the two occasions when my father had returned, Dick telling stories about the army. We sat in the kitchen listening to him, huddled round the range, with the sheepdogs under the table, and when the time came for him to go away I felt as I’d felt when my father had gone back. I knew that Betty and my mother were thinking about Dick in that way, too: I could feel it, standing in the yard holding my mother’s hand.

Colin Gregg, who’d kissed Betty at Mrs Ashburton’s tennis party, came to the farm when he was home on leave. Joe and Arthur, who’d worked for my father on the farm, came also. At one time or another they all said they were sorry about my father’s death, trying not to say it when I was listening, lowering their voices, speaking to my mother.

Two years went by like that. Dick still came back, and Colin Gregg and Joe and Arthur. I left Miss Pritchard’s school and went to the Grammar School. I heard Betty confiding to my mother that she was in love with Colin Gregg, and you could see it was Colin Gregg being in the war that she thought about now, not Dick. Belle Frye’s father had had his left arm amputated because of a wound, and had to stay at home after that. A boy who’d been at the Grammar School, Roger Laze, had an accident with a gun when he was shooting rabbits, losing half his left foot. People said it was a lie about the rabbit-shooting. They said his mother had shot his foot off so that he wouldn’t have to go into the army.

At church on Sundays the Reverend Throataway used to pray for victory and peace, and at school there was talk about the Russians, and jokes about Hitler and Göring and most of all about Goebbels. I remembered how old Mrs Ashburton used to talk about the previous war, from which her husband had come back with some kind of shell-shock. She’d made me think of Germans as being grey and steely, and I hated them now, just as she had. Whenever I thought about them I could see their helmets, different from the helmets of English soldiers, protecting their necks as well as their heads. Whenever I thought of the time before the war I thought of Mrs Ashburton, who had died soon after she’d given her tennis party. On the way home from school I’d sometimes go into the garden of Challacombe Manor and stand there looking at the tall grass on the tennis court, remembering all the people who’d come that afternoon, and how they’d said it was just like my father to say the tennis party was a lot of nonsense and then to bring on beer and cider at the end of the day. The tennis party had been all mixed up with our family. It felt like the last thing that had happened before the war had begun. It was the end of our being as we had been in our farmhouse, just as in the past, after the previous war, there must have been another end: when the farm had ceased to be the home-farm of Challacombe Manor, when the estate had been divided up after Mrs Ashburton’s husband hadn’t been able to run it any more.

When I wandered about the overgrown garden of Challacombe Manor I wondered what Mr Ashburton had been like before the war had affected him, but I couldn’t quite see him in my mind’s eye: all I could see was the person Mrs Ashburton had told me about, the silent man who’d come back, who hadn’t noticed that everything was falling into rack and ruin around him. And then that image would disappear and I’d see my father instead, as he’d been in the farmhouse. I remembered without an effort the brown skin of his arms and his brown, wide forehead and the way crinkles formed at the sides of his eyes. I remembered his hands on the kitchen table at mealtimes, or holding a newspaper. I remembered his voice saying there’d been frost. ‘Jack Frost’s been,’ he used to say.

When I was twelve I began to pray a lot. I prayed that my father should be safe in heaven and not worried about us. I prayed that Dick should be safe in the war, and that the war would soon end. In Scripture lessons the Reverend Throataway used to explain to us that God was in the weeds and the insects, not just in butterflies and flowers. God was involved in the worst things we did as well as our virtues, he said, and we drove another thorn into His beloved son’s head when we were wicked. I found that difficult to understand. I looked at weeds and insects, endeavouring to imagine God’s presence in them but not succeeding. I asked Belle Frye if she could, but she giggled and said God was a carpenter called Joseph, the father of Jesus Christ. Belle Frye was silly and the Reverend Throataway so vague and complicated that his arguments about the nature of God seemed to me like foolish chatter. God was neither a carpenter nor a presence in weeds and insects. God was a figure in robes, with a beard and shreds of cloud around Him. The paradise that was mentioned in the Bible was a garden with tropical plants in it, through which people walked, Noah and Moses and Jesus Christ and old Mrs Ashburton. I could never help thinking that soon the Reverend Throataway would be there too: he was so old and frail, with chalk on the black material of his clothes, sometimes not properly shaved, as if he hadn’t the energy for it. I found it was a consolation to imagine the paradise he told us about, with my own God in it, and to imagine Hitler and Göring and Goebbels, with flames all around them, in hell. The more I thought about it all and prayed, the closer I felt to my father. I didn’t cry when I thought about him any more, and my mother’s face wasn’t all pulled down any more. His death was just a fact now, but I didn’t ever want not to feel close to him. It was as if being close to him was being close to God also, and I wanted that so that God could answer my prayer about keeping Dick safe in the war. I remembered how Mrs Ashburton had worked it out that by the law of averages some men have to come back from a war, and I suggested to the robed figure in charge of the tropical paradise that in all fairness our family did not deserve another tragedy. With my eyes tightly closed, in bed at night or suddenly stopping on the journey to school, I repetitiously prayed that Dick would be alive to come back when the war was over. That was all I asked for in the end because I could feel that my father was safe in the eternal life that the Reverend Throataway spoke of, and I didn’t ask any more that the war should be over soon in case I was asking too much. I never told anyone about my prayers and I was never caught standing still with my eyes closed on the way to school. My father used to smile at me when I did that and I could faintly hear his voice teasing Dick about his smoking or teasing my mother about the Aga cooker she wanted, or Betty about almost anything. I felt it was all right when he smiled like that and his voice came back. I felt he was explaining to me that God had agreed to look after us now, provided I prayed properly and often and did not for a single instant doubt that God existed and was in charge. Mrs Ashburton had been doubtful about that last point and had told me so a few times, quite frightening me. But Mrs Ashburton would be in possession of the truth now, and would be forgiven.

My thoughts and my prayers seemed like a kind of world to me, a world full of God, with my father and Mrs Ashburton in their eternal lives, and the happiness that was waiting for the Reverend Throataway in his. It was a world that gradually became as important as the reality around me. It affected everything. It made me different. Belle Frye was still my friend, but I didn’t like her the way I once had.

One wet afternoon she and I clambered into Challacombe Manor through a window that someone had smashed. We hadn’t been there since the night of the tennis party, when we’d found Mrs Ashburton crying and she’d given us pieces of chocolate. We’d run out into the night, whispering excitedly about an old woman crying just because a party was over. I wouldn’t have believed it then if someone had said I’d ever think Belle Frye silly.

‘Whoever’s going to live here?’ she whispered in the dank hall after we’d climbed through the window. ‘D’you think it’ll just fall down?’

‘There’s a mortgage on it. Lloyd’s Bank have it.’

‘What’s that mean then?’

‘When the war’s finished they’ll sell the house off to someone else.’

All the furniture in the drawing-room had been taken away, stored in the cellars until someone, some day, had time to attend to it. People had pulled off pieces of the striped red wallpaper, boys from the Grammar School probably. There were names and initials and dates scrawled on the plaster. Hearts with arrows through them had been drawn.

‘Anyone could come and live here,’ Belle Frye said.

‘Nobody’d want to.’

We walked from room to room. The dining-room still had a sideboard in it. There was blue wallpaper on the walls: none of that had been torn off, but there were great dark blots of damp on it. There were bundled-up newspapers all over the floor, and empty cardboard boxes that would have been useless for anything because they’d gone soft due to the damp. Upstairs there was a pool of water on a landing and in one of the bedrooms half the ceiling had fallen down. Everywhere there was a musty smell.

‘It’s haunted,’ Belle Frye said.

‘Of course it isn’t.’

‘She died here, didn’t she?’

‘That doesn’t make it haunted.’

‘I can feel her ghost.’

I knew she couldn’t. I thought she was silly to say it, pretending about ghosts just to set a bit of excitement going. She said it again and I didn’t answer.

We crawled out again, through the broken window. We wandered about in the rain, looking in the outhouses and the stables. The old motor-car that used to be in one of them had been taken away. The iron roller that Dick had rolled the tennis court with was still there, beside the tennis court itself.

‘Let’s try in here,’ Belle Frye said, opening the door of the summer-house.

All the times I’d come into the garden on my own I’d never gone into the summer-house. I’d never even looked through a window of Challacombe Manor itself, or poked about the outhouses. I’d have been a bit frightened, for even though I thought it was silly of Belle Frye to talk about ghosts it wouldn’t have surprised me to see a figure moving in the empty house or to hear something in one of the stables, a tramp maybe or a prisoner escaped from the Italian prisoner-of-war camp five miles away. The Italians were black-haired men mostly, whom we often met being marched along a road to work in the fields. They always waved and were given to laughing and singing. But even so I wouldn’t have cared to meet one on his own.

In the centre of the summer-house was the table that had been covered with a white cloth, with sandwiches and cakes and the tea-urn on it, for the tennis party. The tennis marker was in a corner, placed there by Dick, I suppose, after he’d marked the court. The net was beside it, and underneath it, almost hidden by it, were two rugs, one of them brown and white, a kind of Scottish tartan pattern, the other grey. Both of these rugs belonged in our farmhouse. Could they have been lying in the summer-house since the tennis party? I wondered. I couldn’t remember when I’d seen them last.

Facing one another across the table were two chairs which I remembered being there on the day of the party. They were dining-room chairs with red plush seats, brought from the house with a dozen or so others and arrayed on one side of the tennis court so that people could watch the games in comfort. These two must have been left behind when the others had been returned. I was thinking about that when I remembered my father hurriedly putting them into the summer-house at the end of the day. ‘It’ll maybe rain,’ he’d said.

‘Hey, look,’ Belle Frye said. She was pointing at an ashtray on the table, with cigarette-butts and burnt-out matches in it. ‘There’s people using this place,’ she said, giggling. ‘Maybe an escaped prisoner,’ she suggested, giggling again.

‘Maybe.’ I said it quickly, not wanting to pursue the subject. I knew the summer-house wasn’t being used by an escaped prisoner. Our rugs hadn’t been there since the day of the tennis party. They were part of something else, together with the cigarette-butts and the burnt-out matches. And then, quite abruptly, it occurred to me that the summer-house was where Betty and Colin Gregg came when Colin Gregg was on leave: they came to kiss, to cuddle one another like they’d been cuddling in the rhododendrons after the tennis party. Betty had brought the rugs specially, so that they could be warm and comfortable.

‘I bet you it’s an Eye-tie,’ Belle Frye said. ‘I bet you there’s one living here.’

‘Could be.’

‘I’m getting out of it.’

We ran away. We ran through the overgrown garden on that wet afternoon and along the lane that led to the Fryes’ farm. I should have turned in the opposite direction after we’d left the garden, but I didn’t: I went with her because I didn’t want her silliness to spoil everything. I thought it was romantic, Betty and Colin Gregg going to the summer-house. I remembered a film called First Love, which Betty had gone on about. It had Deanna Durbin in it.

‘I’m going to tell,’ Belle Frye said, stopping for breath before we came to the Fryes’ farmyard. Her eyes jangled with excitement. There were drops of moisture in her smooth black hair.

‘Let’s have it a secret, Belle.’

‘He could murder you, a blooming Eye-tie.’

‘It’s where my sister and Colin Gregg go.’ I had to say it because I knew she’d never be able to keep a secret that involved an Italian prisoner of war. I knew that even if no prisoner had escaped people would go to the summer-house to see for themselves. I knew for a fact, I said, that it was where Betty and Colin Gregg went, and if she mentioned it to anyone I’d tell about going into Challacombe Manor through a broken window. She’d said as we’d clambered through it that her father would murder her if he knew. He’d specifically told her that she mustn’t go anywhere near the empty house because the floor-boards were rotten and the ceilings falling down.

‘But why would you tell?’ she cried, furious with me. ‘What d’you want to tell for?’

‘It’s private about the summer-house. It’s a private thing of Betty’s.’

She began to giggle. We could watch, she whispered. We could watch through the window to see what they got up to. She went on giggling and whispering and I listened to her, not liking her. In the last year or so she’d become like that, repeating the stories she heard from the boys at school, all to do with undressing and peeping: There were rhymes and riddles and jokes that she repeated also, none of them funny. She’d have loved peeping through the summer-house window.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

‘But we could. We could wait till he was home on leave. We needn’t make a sound.’ Her voice had become shrill. She was cross with me again, not giggling any more. Her eyes glared at me. She said I was stupid, and then she turned and ran off. I knew she’d never peep through the summer-house window on her own because it wasn’t something you could giggle over when you were alone. And I knew she wouldn’t try and persuade anyone to go with her because she believed me when I said I’d tell about breaking into Challacombe Manor. Her father was a severe man; she was, fortunately, terrified of him.

I thought about the summer-house that evening when I was meant to be learning a verse of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and writing a composition, ‘The Worst Nightmare I Ever Had’. I imagined Betty and Colin Gregg walking hand in hand through the overgrown garden and then slipping into the summer-house when it became dusky. A summer’s evening it was, with pink in the sky, and the garden was scented with the blossoms of its shrubs. I imagined them sitting on the two dining-chairs at the table, Colin telling her about the war while he smoked his cigarettes, and Betty crying because he would be gone in twelve hours’ time and Colin comforting her, and both of them lying down on the rugs so that they could be close enough to put their arms around each other.

In the kitchen while I tried to record the details of a nightmare all I could think about was the much pleasanter subject of my sister’s romance. She was in the kitchen also. She’d changed from her farm-working clothes into a navy-blue skirt and a matching jersey. I thought she was more beautiful than usual. She and my mother were sitting on either side of the range, both of them knitting, my mother reading a book by A.J. Cronin at the same time, my sister occasionally becoming lost in a reverie. I knew what she was thinking about. She was wondering if Colin Gregg was still alive.

Months went by and neither he nor Dick came back. There were letters, but there were also periods when no letters arrived and you could feel the worry, for one of them or the other. The war was going to be longer than everyone had thought. People looked gloomy sometimes, and when I caught their gloom I imagined bodies lying unburied and men in aeroplanes, with goggles on, the aeroplanes on fire and the men in goggles burning to death. Ages ago France had been beaten, and I remembered that in a casual moment in a Scripture class the Reverend Throataway had said that that could never happen, that the French would never give in. We would never give in either, Winston Churchill said, but I imagined the Germans marching on the lanes and the roads and through the fields, not like the cheerful Italians. The Germans were cruel in their helmets and their grey steeliness. They never smiled. They knew you hated them.

Belle Frye would have thought I was mad if I’d told her any of that, just like she’d have thought I was mad if I’d mentioned about praying and keeping my father vivid in my mind. She was the first friend I’d ever had, but the declining of our friendship seemed almost natural now. We still sat next to one another in class, but we didn’t always walk home together. Doing that had always meant that one of us had to go the long way round and avoiding this extra journey now became an excuse. Not having had Dick and Betty to walk home with for so long, I’d enjoyed Belle Frye’s company, but now I found myself pretending to be in a hurry or just slipping away when she wasn’t looking. She didn’t seem to mind, and we still spent days together, at the weekends or in the holidays. We’d have tea in each other’s kitchens, formally invited by our mothers, who didn’t realize that we weren’t such friends. And that was still quite nice.

Sometimes in the evenings my mother used to go to see a woman called Mrs Latham because Mrs Latham was all alone in the Burrow Farm, three miles away. On these occasions I always hoped Betty would talk to me about Colin Gregg, that she’d even mention the summer-house. But she never did. She’d sit there knitting, or else writing a letter to him. She’d hear me say any homework I had to learn by heart, a theorem or poetry or spelling. She’d make me go to bed, just like my mother did, and then she’d turn on the wireless and listen to Monday Night at Eight or Waterlogged Spa or Itma. She’d become very quiet, less impatient with me than she’d been when we were younger, more grown-up, I suppose. I often used to think about her on those nights when my mother was out, when she was left alone in the kitchen listening to the wireless. I used to feel sorry for her.

And then, in that familiar sudden way, Colin Gregg came back on leave.

That was the beginning of everything. The evening after he came back was a Saturday, an evening in May. I’d been at the Fryes’ all afternoon and when we’d finished tea we played cards for an hour or so and then Mrs Frye said it was time for me to go home. Belle wanted to walk with me, even though we’d probably have walked in silence. I was glad when her father said no. It was too late and in any case he had to go out himself, to set his rabbit snares: he’d walk with me back to our farm. I said goodbye, remembering to thank Mrs Frye, and with his remaining arm Mr Frye pushed his bicycle on the road beside me. He didn’t talk at all. He was completely different from my father, never making jokes or teasing. I was quite afraid of him because of his severity.

The sheepdogs barked as I ran across our yard and into the kitchen. My mother had said earlier that she intended to go over to see Mrs Latham that evening. By eight o’clock Betty and Colin Gregg were to be back from the half past four show at the pictures, so that I wouldn’t be in the house alone. It was twenty past eight now, and they weren’t there.

I ran back into the yard, wanting to tell Mr Frye, but already he’d cycled out of sight. I didn’t at all like the idea of going to bed in the empty house.

I played with the dogs for a while and then I went to look at the hens, and then I decided that I’d walk along the road to meet Betty and Colin Gregg. I kept listening because at night you could always hear the voices of people cycling in the lanes. I kept saying to myself that my mother wouldn’t want me to go to bed when there was no one in the farmhouse. It was very still, with bits of red in the sky. I took the short-cut through the garden of Challacombe Manor and I wasn’t even thinking about Betty and Colin Gregg when I saw two bicycles in the shrubbery at the back of the summer-house. I didn’t notice them at first because they were almost entirely hidden by rhododendron bushes. They reminded me of the rugs half hidden beneath the tennis net.

Colin Gregg was going away again on Monday. He was being sent somewhere dangerous, he didn’t know where, but I’d heard Betty saying to my mother that she could feel in her bones it was dangerous. When my mother had revealed that she intended to visit Mrs Latham that evening I’d said to myself that she’d arranged the visit so that Colin Gregg and Betty could spend the evening on their own in our kitchen. But on the way back from the pictures they’d gone into the summer-house, their special place.

Even now I can’t think why I behaved like Belle Frye, unable to resist something. It was silly curiosity, and yet at the time I think it may have seemed more than just that. In some vague way I wanted to have something nice to think about, not just my imagining the war, and my prayers for Dick’s safety and my concern with people’s eternal lives. I wanted to see Betty and Colin Gregg together. I wanted to feel their happiness, and to see it.

It was then, while I was actually thinking that, that I realized something was the matter. I realized I’d been stupid to assume they could take the short-cut through the garden: you couldn’t take the short-cut if you were coming from the town on a bicycle because you had to go through fields. You’d come by the lanes, and if you wanted to go to the summer-house you’d have to turn back and go there specially. It seemed all wrong that they should do that when they were meant to be back in the farmhouse by eight o’clock.

I should have turned and gone away. In the evening light I was unable to see the bicycles clearly, but even so I was aware that neither of them was Betty’s. They passed out of my sight as I approached one of the summer-house’s two small windows.

I could see nothing. Voices murmured in the summer-house, not saying anything, just quietly making sounds. Then a man’s voice spoke more loudly, but I still couldn’t hear what was being said. A match was struck and in a sudden vividness I saw a man’s hand and a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes on the table, and then I saw my mother’s face. Her reddish hair was untidy and she was smiling. The hand that had been on the table put a cigarette between her lips and another hand held the match to it. I had never in my life seen my mother smoking a cigarette before.

The match went out and when another one was struck it lit up the face of a man who worked in Blow’s drapery. My mother and he were sitting facing one another at the table, on the two chairs with the red plush seats.

Betty was frying eggs at the range when I returned to the kitchen. Colin Gregg had had a puncture in his back tyre. They hadn’t even looked yet to see if I was upstairs. I said we’d all forgotten the time at the Fryes’, playing cards.

In bed I kept remembering that my mother’s eyes had been different, not like they’d been for a long time, two dark-blue sparks. I kept saying to myself that I should have recognized her bicycle in the bushes because its mudguards were shaped like a V, not rounded like the mudguards of modern bicycles.

I heard Colin and Betty whispering in the yard and then the sound of his bicycle as he rode away and then, almost immediately, the sound of my mother’s bicycle and Betty saying something quietly and my mother quietly replying. I heard them coming to bed, Betty first and my mother twenty minutes later. I didn’t sleep, and for the first time in my life I watched the sky becoming brighter when morning began to come. I heard my mother getting up and going out to do the milking.

At breakfast-time it was as though none of it had happened, as though she had never sat on the red plush chair in the summer-house, smoking cigarettes and smiling at a man from a shop. She ate porridge and brown bread, reading a book: Victoria Four-Thirty by Cecil Roberts. She reminded me to feed the hens and she asked Betty what time Colin Gregg was coming over. Betty said any minute now and began to do the washing up. When Colin Gregg came he mended one of the cow-house doors.

That day was horrible. Betty tried to be cheerful, upset because Colin Gregg was being sent to somewhere dangerous. But you could feel the effort of her trying and when she thought no one was looking, when my mother and Colin were talking to one another, her face became unhappy. I couldn’t stop thinking about my father. Colin Gregg went back to the war.

A month went by. My mother continued to say she was going to see Mrs Latham and would leave Betty and me in the kitchen about once a week.

‘Whatever’s the matter with Matilda?’ I heard Betty saying to her once, and later my mother asked me if I had a stomach ache. I used to sit there at the table trying to understand simultaneous equations, imagining my mother in the summer-house, the two bicycles half hidden in the bushes, the cigarettes and the ashtray.

‘The capital of India,’ I would say. ‘Don’t tell me; I know it.’

‘Begins with a “D”,’ Betty would prompt.

He came to the kitchen one evening. He ate cabbage and baked potatoes and fish pie, chewing the cabbage so carefully you couldn’t help noticing. He was scrawny, with a scrawny nose. His teeth were narrowly crowded, his whole face pulled out to an edge, like a chisel. His hair was parted in the middle and oiled. His hands were clean, with tapering fingers. I was told his name but I didn’t listen, not wishing to know it.

‘Where’d you get the fish?’ he asked my mother in a casual way. His head was cocked a little to one side. He was smiling with his narrow teeth, making my mother flustered as she used to get in the past, when my father was alive. She was even beginning to blush, not that I could see a cause for it. She said:

‘Betty, where did you get the cod?’

‘Croker’s,’ Betty said.

Betty smiled at him and my mother said quickly that Croker’s were always worth trying in case they’d got any fish in, although of course you could never tell. It sounded silly the way she said it.

‘I like fish,’ he said.

‘We must remember that.’

‘They say it’s good for you,’ Betty said.

‘I always liked fish,’ the man said. ‘From a child I’ve enjoyed it.’

‘Eat it up now,’ my mother ordered me.

‘Don’t you like fish, Matilda?’ he said.

Betty laughed. ‘Matilda doesn’t like lots of things. Fish, carrots, eggs. Semolina. Ground rice. Custard. Baked apples, gravy, cabbage.’

He laughed, and my mother laughed. I bent my head over the plate I was eating from. My face had gone as hot as a fire.

‘Unfortunately there’s a war on,’ he said. ‘Hard times, Matilda.’

I considered that rude. It was rude the way he’d asked where the fish had come from. He was stupid, as well. Who wanted to hear that he liked fish? He was a fool, like Stupid Miller, who’d been at Miss Pritchard’s school. He was ridiculous-looking and ugly, with his pointed face and crushed-together teeth. He’d no right to say there was a war on since he wasn’t fighting in it.

They listened to the news on the wireless and afterwards they listened to the national anthems of the countries which were fighting against Germany. He offered my mother and Betty cigarettes and they both took one. I’d never seen Betty smoking a cigarette before. He’d brought a bottle of some kind of drink with him. They drank it sitting by the range, still listening to the national anthems.

‘Good-night, Matilda,’ he said, standing up when my mother told me it was time to go to bed. He kissed me on the cheek and I could feel his damp teeth. I didn’t move for a moment after he’d done that, standing quite close to him. I thought I was going to bring up the fish pie and if I did I wanted to cover his clothes with it. I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have been embarrassed.

I heard Betty coming to bed and then I lay for hours, waiting for the sound of his bicycle going away. I couldn’t hear their voices downstairs, the way I’d been able to hear voices when Betty had been there. Betty’s had become quite loud and she’d laugh repeatedly. I guessed they’d been playing cards, finishing off the bottle of drink he’d brought. When I’d been there Betty had suggested rummy and he’d said that not a drop of the drink must be left. He’d kept filling up Betty’s and my mother’s glasses, saying the stuff was good for you.

I crossed the landing to the top of the stairs that led straight down into the kitchen. I thought they must have fallen asleep by the range because when a board creaked beneath my feet no one called out. I stood at the turn of the narrow staircase, peering through the shadows at them.

Betty had taken one of the two lamps with her as she always did. The kitchen was dim, with only the glow from the other. On the table, close to the lamp, was the bottle and one of the glasses they’d drunk from. The two dogs were stretched in front of the range. My mother was huddled on the man’s knee. I could see his tapering fingers, one hand on the black material of her dress, the other stroking her hair. While I watched he kissed her, bending his damp mouth down to her lips and keeping it there. Her eyes were closed but his were open, and when he finished kissing her he stared at her face.

I went on down the stairs, shuffling my bare feet to make a noise. The dogs growled, pricking up their ears. My mother was half-way across the kitchen, tidying her hair with both hands, murmuring at me.

‘Can’t you sleep, love?’ she said. ‘Have you had a dream?’

I shook my head. I wanted to walk forward, past her to the table. I wanted to pick up the bottle he’d brought and throw it on to the flags of the floor. I wanted to shout at him that he was ugly, no more than a halfwit, no better than Stupid Miller, who hadn’t been allowed in the Grammar School. I wanted to say no one was interested in his preference for fish.

My mother put her arms around me. She felt warm from sitting by the range, but I hated the warmth because it had to do with him. I pushed by her and went to the sink. I drank some water even though I wasn’t thirsty. Then I turned and went upstairs again.

‘She’s sleepy,’ I heard my mother say. ‘She often gets up for a drink when she’s sleepy. You’d better go, dear.’

He muttered something else and my mother said that they must have patience.

‘One day,’ she said. ‘After it’s all over.’

‘It’ll never end.’ He spoke loudly, not muttering any more. ‘This bloody thing could last for ever.’

‘No, no, my dear.’

‘It’s all I want, to be here with you.’

‘It’s what I want too. But there’s a lot in the way.’

‘I don’t care what’s in the way.’

‘We have to care, dear.’

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘My own darling,’ my mother said.

*

She was the same as usual the next day, presumably imagining that being half-asleep I hadn’t noticed her sitting on the man’s knees and being kissed by his mouth. In the afternoon I went into the summer-house. I looked at the two plush-seated chairs, imagining the figures of my mother and the man on them. I carried the chairs, one by one, to an outhouse and up a ladder to a loft. I put the tennis net underneath some seed-boxes. I carried the two rugs to the well in the cobbled yard and dropped them down it. I returned to the summer-house, thinking of doing something else, I wasn’t sure what. There was a smell of stale tobacco, coming from butts in the ashtray. On the floor I found a tie-pin with a greyhound’s head on it and I thought the treacherous, ugly-looking dog suited him. I threw it into the rhododendron shrubbery.

‘Poor chap,’ I heard Betty saying that evening. ‘It’s a horrid thing to have.’ She’d always noticed that he looked delicate, she added.

‘He doesn’t get enough to eat,’ my mother said.

In spite of her sympathy, you could see that Betty wasn’t much interested in the man: she was knitting and trying to listen to Bandwagon. As far as Betty was concerned he was just some half-sick man whom my mother felt sorry for, the way she was supposed to feel sorry for Mrs Latham of Burrow Farm. But my mother wanted to go on talking about him, with a pretended casualness. It wasn’t the right work for a person who was tubercular, she said, serving in a shop.

I imagined him in Blow’s, selling pins and knitting-needles and satin by the yard. I thought the work suited him in the same way as the greyhound’s-head tie-pin did.

‘What’s it mean, tubercular?’ I asked Belle Frye, and she said it meant you suffered from a disease in your lungs.

‘I expect you could fake it.’

‘What’d you want to do that for?’

‘To get out of the war. Like Mrs Laze shot off Roger Laze’s foot.’

‘Who’s faking it then?’

‘That man in Blow’s.’

I couldn’t help myself: I wanted it to be known that he was faking a disease in his lungs. I wanted Belle Frye to tell people, to giggle at him in Blow’s, pointing him out. But in fact she wasn’t much interested. She nodded, and then shrugged in a jerky way she had, which meant she was impatient to be talking about something else. You could tell she didn’t know the man in Blow’s had become a friend of my mother’s. She hadn’t seen them on their bicycles; she wouldn’t have wanted to change the subject if she’d looked through the summer-house window and seen them with their cigarettes. Before that I hadn’t thought about her finding out, but now I wondered if perhaps she would some time, and if other people would. I imagined the giggling and the jokes made up by the boys in the Grammar School, and the severity of Mr Frye, and the astonishment of people who had liked my father.

I prayed that none of that would happen. I prayed that the man would go away, or die. I prayed that my mother would be upset again because my father had been killed in the war, that she would remember the time when he had been in the farmhouse with us. I prayed that whatever happened she would never discredit him by allowing the man from Blow’s to be there in the farmhouse, wearing my father’s clothes.

Every day I prayed in the summer-house, standing close to the table with my eyes closed, holding on to the edge of it. I went there specially, and more vividly than ever I could see my father in the tropical garden of his eternal life. I could see old Mrs Ashburton walking among the plants with her husband, happy to be with him again. I could see the bearded face of the Almighty I prayed to, not smiling but seeming kind.

‘Oh, my God,’ was all my mother could say, whispering it between her bursts of tears. ‘Oh, my God.’

Betty was crying too, but crying would do no good. I stood there between them in the kitchen, feeling I would never cry again. The telegram was still on the table, its torn envelope beside it. It might have said that Dick was coming home on leave, or that Colin Gregg was. It looked sinister on the table because Dick was dead.

I might have said to my mother that it was my fault as well as hers. I might have said that I’d known I should pray only for Dick to be safe and yet hadn’t been able to prevent myself from asking, also, that she’d be as she used to be, that she wouldn’t ever marry the man from Blow’s.

But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say I’d prayed about the man, I just said it was a Thursday again.

‘Thursday?’ my mother whispered, and when I explained she didn’t understand. She hadn’t even noticed that the two times my father had come home it had been a Thursday and that the tennis party had been on a Thursday and that the other telegram had come on a Thursday too. She shook her head, as if denying all this repetition, and I wanted to hurt her when she did that because the denial seemed to be part and parcel of the summer-house and the man from Blow’s. More deliberately than a moment ago I again didn’t confess that I had ceased to concentrate on Dick’s safety in my prayers. Instead I said that in a war against the Germans you couldn’t afford to take chances, you couldn’t go kissing a man when your husband had been killed.

‘Oh, my God,’ my mother said again.

Betty was staring at her, tears still coming from her eyes, bewildered because she’d never guessed about my mother and the man.

‘It has nothing to do with this,’ my mother whispered. ‘Nothing.’

I thought Betty was going to attack my mother, maybe hammer at her face with her fists, or scratch her cheeks. But she only cried out, shrieking like some animal caught in a trap. The man was even married, she shrieked, his wife was away in the Women’s Army. It was horrible, worse than ever when you thought of that. She pointed at me and said I was right: Dick’s death was a judgement, things happened like that.

My mother didn’t say anything. She stood there, white-faced, and then she said the fact that the man was married didn’t make anything worse.

She spoke to Betty, looking at her, not at me. Her voice was quiet. She said the man intended to divorce his wife when the war came to an end. Of course what had happened wasn’t a judgement.

‘You won’t marry him now,’ Betty said, speaking as quietly.

My mother didn’t reply. She stood there by the table and there was a silence. Then she said again that Dick’s death and the man were two different things. It was terrible, she said, to talk as we were talking at a time like this. Dick was dead: that was the only thing that mattered.

‘They used to go to the summer-house,’ I said. ‘They had two of our rugs there.’

My mother turned her head away, and I wanted Betty to remember as I was remembering and I believe she did. I could sense her thinking of the days when my father was alive, when Dick used to smoke cigarettes on the way home from school, when we were all together in the farmhouse, not knowing we were happy. That time seemed to haunt the kitchen just then, as if my mother was thinking about it too, as if our remembering had willed it back.

‘He could never come here now,’ Betty said to my mother. ‘You couldn’t do it to Matilda.’

I didn’t know why she should have particularly mentioned me since it concerned us all, and anyway I felt it was too late to bother about me. Too much had happened. I felt I’d been blown to pieces, as if I’d been in the war myself, as if I’d been defeated by it, as old Mrs Ashburton had been defeated by her war. The man would come to live in the farmhouse. He would wear my father’s clothes. He would sit by the range, reading the newspaper. He would eat at the table, and smile at me with his narrow teeth.

My mother left the kitchen. She went upstairs and after a few minutes we heard her sobbing in her bedroom. Sobbing would do no good, I thought, any more than crying would.

I walked by myself through the fields. Dick’s death wasn’t the same as my father’s. There was the same emptiness and the same feeling that I never wanted to eat anything again or to drink anything again, but it was different because this was the second time. Dick was dead and we’d get used to it: that was something I knew now.

I didn’t cry and I didn’t pray. Praying seemed nonsense as I walked through the fields; praying was as silly as Belle Frye’s thinking that God was a carpenter or the Reverend Throataway saying God was in weeds. God wasn’t like that in the least. He wasn’t there to listen to what you prayed for. God was something else, something harder and more awful and more frightening.

I should have known that the man from Blow’s would be married, that he’d have a wife who was helping in the war while he was going on about a disease. It was somehow all of a piece with Betty wanting to hit my mother, and Mrs Laze shooting off her son’s foot so that he could stay alive, and God being frightening. Facts and images rattled in my mind, senselessly jumbled, without rhyme or reason. Dick was there too, dead and unburied in his uniform, something ordinary to get used to.

I sat in the sunshine on a bank that had primroses on it. I could have returned to the farmhouse and let my mother put her arms around me, but I continued to sit there, still not crying, remembering Mrs Ashburton saying that cruelty in wartime was natural. At the time I hadn’t understood what she’d meant, but I could feel the cruelty she’d spoken of now. I could feel it in myself, in my wanting my mother to be more unhappy than I was. Dick’s death was more bearable because she could be blamed, as Betty had blamed her in speaking of a judgement.