Foreign Land

CHAPTER TWELVE

By the start of the fifth month, each night had turned for Sheila into a long solitary adventure. She oscillated between sleep and wakefulness. During her minutes of sleep she had vivid and peculiar dreams. Every time she opened her eyes she found herself wanting to get out of bed and pee. The woman at the clinic said that all this was quite normal, and Sheila accepted it with placid curiosity. She had never been very interested in her own body; now she studied herself as if she were a new subject on her curriculum. Each symptom of pregnancy was a discovery to be welcomed, and Sheila warmed even to the varicose veins that were now showing like blue threadworms on her thighs and calves.

The luminous dial of the redundant alarm clock showed that it was 4.30. Tom was asleep under the duvet, exhaling gently like an old steam locomotive in a siding. Sheila slid from the bed and padded to the bathroom. Peeing (gallons!), she fancied that she could feel it move. Poor little squidge.

“Sorry, dear,” she said aloud in Cockney. Then, “Can’t a fellow get a bit of peace even in the bleeding womb?”

Down in the kitchen, she made a pot of weak tea. She liked London at this hour, its orangey glow, the distant, intermittent surf of long-distance lorries out on the A23. She liked waiting for the clatter of the first milk floats on the street and for the rim of violet, pigeon-coloured dawn over the roofs. It was a good time to work. Sitting in her dressing gown at Tom’s table, she opened the feint-lined notebook with the words HACK STUFF biroed on its cover.

Today she had to get a review in to the Observer. Eight hundred words on a new edition of the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle. She’d tried to start it yesterday, but had only got as far as the first sentence. “No wonder that the Carlyle marriage was childless: Thomas was baby enough to last Jane Welsh a lifetime.” It wouldn’t do. Of her last review (about women workers in rural Italy), the Observer’s literary editor had said over the phone: “Fine, fine. But don’t you think it’s a bit … ah … well, rather … slightly … shrill?” Sheila was afraid that the sentence about the Carlyles was definitely rather slightly shrill. She inked it out with a line of black loops and noticed to her surprise that she’d put sugar in the tea. She never took sugar. Was this the start of a pregnant craving?

She drew a flower on a long stalk in the margin and wrote: “Jane Welsh had more to get off her chest than most Victorian women: she was married to Thomas Carlyle.” She crossed that out too, and burped; another symptom. She stared at the paper, wrote Weird Dream and underscored it twice.

Every night lately, she’d been having anxiety dreams about the baby. It kept on cropping up in odder and odder disguises. Last week it had arrived in the shape of a ginger cat caught in the top of a tall tree. The cat had stared down at her, rheumy-eyed, its tail frisking the leaves. She’d tried to climb the tree to save it. The cat had hissed at her. She’d slipped, bloodying her knees and forearms on the bark. The cat had climbed on to a higher bough, where it turned into a bird and sang. That was all in the notebook. Then there was the one about the baby as a ragged old man. A dosser with a cider bottle. He was squatting on the doorstep in a filthy overcoat, hawking and spitting. She’d asked him inside. He’d sat at the table where she was working now, eating chocolate biscuits and sardines. As he ate he grew fatter and fatter and fatter, a roly-poly cuckoo in the nest. When Sheila’s cupboard was bare, the old man began to curse her. She had to stick her fingers in her ears to muffle the stream of obscenities that came gushing out of him—like blood, a flux of arterial blood, as she wrote later. As he cursed, she watched him shrivelling like a balloon with a puncture, and at the end of the dream he was just a sort of wizened rubbery thing, inches big, a scrap of rubbish on the floor. Summing it up, Sheila had written: Fear of inadequate lactation (?).

She’d woken from a funny one this morning. She seemed to have dreamed her way inside her own womb. It was a wild, dark place, with confused waters crashing on what seemed like a rocky beach. Standing there on the edge, she’d been ice cold with panic. She couldn’t see properly, but she could hear cries from a long way away. They came in gusts, with the wind — horrible cries, like pigs squealing, but human. Sheila plunged into the scummy surf, and was immediately out of her depth. She tried to swim towards the cries, but her schoolgirl breaststroke was agonizingly slow, and her mouth was choked with salt and slime. She swam and swam, sick with exhaustion and fright. Somewhere out there, it was drowning and she had to save it. Her legs seemed tangled up with seaweed, her arms were numb. Outlined for a moment against the dark roof of the place, she saw something — a raft or boat, perched on the lip of the enormous wave that was going to smash it to smithereens.

Then, suddenly, she had it in her hand. It was a broken walnut shell, and it had an occupant — a stiff little manikin, quite dead, like a plastic doll in a Christmas cracker. Angry, a child herself now, in a party dress, Sheila threw the tiny, beastly white thing into the fire, where it fizzled briefly and melted into a blob of goo. Sheila wept. Her own cries woke her and her first thought was that she must have scared Tom. But he was deep asleep; huge, reliable, real. She touched him to bring herself properly awake, and felt his drowsy penis stir comfortingly under her fingers.

In her notebook she wrote: Womb. Water. A tempest. Me alone on the beach. Yet the more she thought about her nightmare, the less that stormy place seemed like a womb. She remembered the pitiless wind pinning her dress against her body, the gravelly roar of the breakers at the water’s edge, the little boat on the wave.

That boat. It wasn’t her baby she’d been dreaming of, it was her father. Or perhaps it was her baby and her father both at once. But she felt intruded on — as if her father had come by night like an incubus, to take her by stealth in her sleep.

Of course. When she’d last called him, he had rabbitted on and on about going boating. His latest scheme was that he was going to sail around to London to see her. In his dinghy, or whatever. He bumbled and fluffed over the phone. It sounded to Sheila as if he was in danger of losing all of his remaining marbles.

“Father,” she said, “there are such things as trains, you know,” and tried to laugh him out of this infantile escapade. But he was unbudgeable. He said, “I’ll tie up to your doorstep. Won’t trouble you at all. Might be awfully glad of a warm bath, though. One gets rather smelly at sea.”

“Do take care, Father.”

“Roger. Will do.”

She was helpless. Everything about him grated on her now — the cracked gallantry, the old naval slang. She couldn’t deal with it at all. Not that she had ever got on with George; but the man she used to meet on his summer leaves hadn’t been like this. He’d been stiff, evasive, too polished by half, yet Sheila felt that if he only once relaxed his guard she might find someone there whom she could talk to. Well, there was no talking to the ramshackle figure on the far end of the phone.

“By the way,” he said, “I’ve grown a beard.”

“Really?” she said weakly.

“Yes. Not a patch on Tom’s, of course. Just a threadbare sort of chinwarmer, you know.”

“I look forward to seeing it,” Sheila said.

“I’m told it rather suits me,” he said with a glimmer of his old vanity, then spoiled it by saying, “I’m making a pretty thoroughgoing job of going to seed, you see.”

“Sea?” she said.

“Seed” said her father with his noncommittal upper-deck laugh.

For the rest of the day, scraps and echoes of this conversation kept on cropping up like burrs in Sheila’s head. She felt obscurely guilty. But of what? Then she felt indignant. Her father was breaking bounds.

“ETA ten days from now, with a bit of luck,” he’d said.

ETA? Oh, that. It really was too tiresome. She had stared out of the window of her study at the crocuses, already in full bloom on the back lawn. Tom must have planted them without telling her.

“I’ll call you up on the radio telephone when I get into the Thames.”

“Yes, do.” A crocus had fluttered up and settled in the tree. Sheila put her glasses on and looked more closely: all the crocuses were pigeons.

“Sheila?”

“Sorry, Father — you were saying?”

At 6.00, when the cheap rate started, her mother had rung. Sheila gave her a heavily edited report on George’s movements. “Hopeless! Simply hopeless!” her mother said, and Sheila tended to agree; but there was such undisguised satisfaction in her mother’s tone that she felt filially obliged to change the subject.

Now her father was sneaking into her dreams dressed up as a baby. Sheila didn’t think that fair at all. Sipping sweet tea by the window, she watched the birdbath and the piles of seasoning timber in the garden as they paled and sharpened in the dawn. In her notebook she wrote “Thomas Carlyle was …” but it was her father she was thinking of as she settled down to attack Carlyle.

Out on deck in the halflight it was dewy, damp and airless. The smell of dead fish and diesel fuel from the neighbouring boats seemed to have got deep inside George’s skull, where they mixed unsociably with the aftertaste of the whisky. He stood in a snakepit of wet coir ropes, hauling in hand over hand as he freed Calliope of her final attachment to Cornwall.

He reached out to the black and slimy stone of the quay wall and pushed, quite gently, easing the boat away from the berth. Her steep bow began to swing against the line of misty trees on the opposite shore. Her timbered bulk shifted like a sleeper turning slowly over in bed. George loved the mysterious tractability of the boat in the water: on land it was so damned hard to make anything shift the way you wanted it. Afloat, it was different: the pressure of a fingertip would move eleven tons of deadweight as cleanly and easily as if the boat was a brass washer on a film of oil. It made George, even with a hangover, feel a pleasant kinship with Hercules. Smiling emptily, he walked back from the bows to the wheelhouse where the engine grumbled underfoot in neutral, and started to pilot his estate out into the estuary.

Ahead, the water was a greenish gold, glossy as wax. Behind the boat, George’s wake tore and splintered it from shore to shore. He cut the revs to 1500, then 1000, until Calliope was inching past the town, quiet as a moth, trailing a skirt of gleaming ripples. He slipped by within a cable of the leading light on Culver Point: it winked at him inside its basket, a lazy red flash every ten seconds. In another minute, he was below Thalassa. For the very first time, he noticed the garden of the house — or rather its absence, for its outline had completely merged into the gorse and scrub of the surrounding cliff. His father’s precious cold frames and patent bird scarers had been swallowed up in the tangle.

“They say,” his father said with a little crow of scorn, “that the soil’s too poor to grow tomatoes here”, and led George out to a miniature glass pagoda that he’d put together out of broken frames and bits of string. With the air of a magician at a children’s party, he lifted the lid of this erection and pointed inside. In a cleft in the leaves something, undoubtedly, had happened: a single, hard green globule, about the size of a goat dropping. “What,” said his father, “do you suppose they’d call that? A pomegranate?” This miserable fruitlet was, he announced, “merely a prototype”. Next year, he was going to confound the people of St Cadix as he’d confounded his parishioners in Hampshire, with superior learning. He would bury them in hard green tomatoes to prove yet another of his indignant points.

But the next year he was dead, and George’s mother was buying her vegetables in tins and packets; an odd vice in which she took a lot of pleasure. “Have you heard of Surprise peas, dear?” she asked George. “Such a boon. You just pop them into boiling water and they swell up and turn green. They’re really rather clever.”

Steering the boat under the house, George wanted to apologize to his father about the garden. Had a lot on my plate, you know — always did mean to get round to it. He looked up at Thalassa’s narrow face. There were slates missing from the roof, and its black windows gaped. He noticed that an old lawnmower lay strangled inside the brown birdsnest of Russian Vine against the kitchen wall. Swinging the wheel hard to port, he snatched a last glance at the house. How absurd ever to have thought of it as home: the only homely thing about the place was his own eagerness to be away from it. He pushed the engine to full ahead. The rev counter dickered up to 2800 and a bluff and rolling wake began to build around Calliope’s stern. The deserted house stared after him, its porch and windows contracting in a joyless know-it-all smile.

The rocks at the harbourmouth were sinking and surfacing like turtles, but the sea itself was still. George steered between the rocks — feet planted wide on the wheelhouse floor, shoulders hunched, the long visor of his cap wagging rhythmically from side to side as he searched the water ahead. In the sharp morning air, the surface was riddled with faint twists and curlicues of smoke. George didn’t much like the look of what he saw: the dewpoint must be very low. Squaring up to the sea like a boxer, watching his footwork and his guard, he waited for it to make the first move. In the black account book that he kept on the shelf by the wheel, he wrote:

Dep. St Cadix Hr. 0615. Log 0037.3. Course set: 093°. Bar 1002, rising (?). Calm. Vis—

He stopped here, for the vis. was definitely rum. It looked alright — it seemed as if you could see for miles and miles under this bland and steadily brightening sky. The trouble was that half the local headlands had gone absent without leave. The day mark on St Cadix Head was clear enough: he could even see the paint moulting on its red stripes. But where were Nare Head, the Dodman, Greeb Point? They’d vanished clean off the face of Cornwall — and where they should have been there was just sea, innocently shining, placid as a carp pool in the grounds of a ruinous abbey.

He held the little handbearing compass to his eye and squinted through it at the daymark, watching the numbers spin in their dish of damping fluid. They settled, wobbling a little, at 282°, then climbed to 285° and past 290°. At 294°, St Cadix Head faded out into a clear horizon. George read the log: Calliope had travelled just over a mile between the first bearing and the moment when the headland had dissolved into the sky.

He sat at the chart table, ruling off the bearings from the daymark together with his course and distance travelled. The elementary, elemental triangle gave George a deep twinge of reminiscent childish pleasure. There wasn’t really much, he supposed, that he was awfully good at; but he was good at this — this magical monkey business with protractors, soft pencils and heavy old boxwood parallel rules. The only nickname he’d ever had was on Hecla, when they’d called him Oz (after “The Wizard of Oz” with Judy Garland had been screened on the flight deck one balmy Saturday night off Cape St Vincent). Oz might have got a little rusty since, but he still remembered most of his old tricks.

“That’s our position, sir,” he said aloud in the empty wheelhouse, drawing a neat circle round the cross at the bottom of the triangle and labelling it with the time and log reading. His Known Point of Departure. From now on, unless the vis. cleared, he’d have to go by Dead Reckoning.

“Dead Reckoning, gentlemen, was good enough for Columbus, so don’t despise it. You won’t be called on to discover America with it, but — ah, good morning, Mr Grey!”

“Morning, sir. I’m sorry, sir.” Commander Prynne watched him in silence as George shuffled in to the empty chair beside Cadet Carver.

“Mr Grey, we were just discussing that primitive old seaman’s solace, next in importance only to his rum ration, Dead Reckoning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Indeed …” Prynne whiffled happily at his class; “we might do a little experiment in Dead Reckoning with the, ah, unfortunate case of Mr Grey.”

The classroom was still called The Little Folks Den, a survival from 1939 when Pwllheli had been a Butlin’s Camp. All four walls were decorated with a waist-high frieze of grinning gollywogs. Above the gollywogs were pinned sheaves of Admiralty orders. The furled blackout curtains in the windows were pale with chalk dust. George stared at the blank page of his Nav. Notebook, fearing to catch old Prynne’s housemasterly eye.

“To start our DR track, we have to know one thing only. Our Known Point of Departure. Where, in other words, did we start from?”

George, obedient to a fault, wrote: “1. Known Point of Departure.” For a hopeful moment, he thought Prynne had forgotten him.

“Mr Grey?”

“Sir?”

“Your place of birth, please, Mr Grey.”

“Sorry, sir?”

“You must have started out from somewhere. Where were you born?”

It was too awful. Feeling perfectly idiotic, George said, “Er … sort of … a bit outside … Winchester, sir. In a village, sir.”

The class laughed. Oh, the shame of it, when you were a brand-new officer cadet, destined to command!

Prynne seemed to soften slightly. “It’s not a very precise position, is it, Mr Grey? But the good navigator has to make the most of whatever gen he has to hand, and if you think that ‘er sort of a bit outside Winchester sir’ sounds pretty ropey, I think I can promise you that you’ll meet worse at sea. So, for Mr Grey’s known point of departure, we’re stuck with sort of a bit outside Winchester. Mr Ives, I wonder if you’d care to do a spot of inspired guesswork, if it’s not too early in the morning for you?”

“No, sir. Yes, sir.”

“The co-ordinates of Winchester, if you please. Do you know it? Very imposing cathedral there. A little north and west of Portsmouth.”

“Yes, sir. I’m not sure, sir. About, oh, 51 north and 1 degree west, sir?”

“Yes, that’ll do. Though I rather think you’ve managed to put poor old Winchester somewhere in Sussex, which it wouldn’t like at all. Never mind.” He chalked up the letters KPD on the blackboard and wrote 51.00°N 1.00° W beside them. “Now we have the vexed question of Mr Grey’s intended destination. He has, we must assume, been sailing from Winchester in a brave if, as we now know, forlorn attempt to be punctual for his Navigation class here in Pwllheli. Can anyone give me the co-ordinates, in exact figures this time, of Pwllheli? Yes, Mr Owen.”

“52 degrees, 54 minutes north, 4 degrees 25 minutes west, sir.”

“Good. I do wish you wouldn’t look so confounded with wonder at Mr Owen’s genius, Mr Usherwood. We did go through all this last Tuesday.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now all we need is the course steered. Erratic, one might say. But let’s give Mr Grey the benefit of the doubt and take it that he consulted his charts and plotted a direct line from the original seat of King Arthur’s Round Table to Gimlet Rock. Any volunteers? Mr Farmer has the look of a man born with a compass rose in his head. Yes.”

“Three one five, sir.”

“Winchester to Pwllheli … three … one … five.” The chalk squealed on the board. “Now we have to face up to the matter of Mr Grey’s speed. We’re clearly not dealing with one of the fastest ships of the line.” He was whiffling again. George, looking up cautiously, saw that the curious noise made by the Commander to show he was happy was actually produced by loosening his false teeth and blowing through them. Prynne was now jigging his snappers up and down with the point of his tongue. The sight made George feel fractionally better about being ragged by the old man.

“Known point of departure. Course steered. Speed. Mmm. I don’t like the look of that speed at all. The duration of passage so far, from a bit outside Winchester to a bit outside Pwllheli, seems to have been somewhere in the region of eighteen years. Yes, Mr Grey?”

“And seven months, sir,” George said, determined to poker-face it out.

“And seven months.” Commander Prynne addressed himself in marvelling silence to the gollywogs on the walls, the squad of drilling cadets beyond the window, the flies that were buzzing against the ceiling and, finally, the navigation class. He whiffled contentedly for several seconds and said, “What, ah — kept you, Mr Grey?”

“I slept through the—”

But Prynne wasn’t going to be cheated of his endgame. “Ah. Foul tidal streams all the way, no doubt. Years spent becalmed in fog, hundreds of miles lost in leeway. How long, Mr Grey, I wonder, did you have to stand hove-to in storm conditions? Eighteen years and seven months. Hmm. Gentlemen, this is an occasion worth hoisting all our flags for. Here at last is Mr Grey, one of His Majesty’s bravest and most battered little corvettes, struggling into safe harbour under jury rig. (I rather think, Mr Grey, that if you try reaching up behind your starboard ear, you’ll find some spindrift there. Is it spindrift? Or just shaving soap?)”

George wasn’t late for Nav. class again. At the end of the course he passed out top in Navigation; streets ahead of Carver, who came second.

Calliope swayed a little on the invisible swell — just enough to remind George that he was afloat. The last grey shoulder of cliff had gone and the whole world was water now, with George its hub. He carried the circular horizon with him as he inched eastwards along his magnetic track at five and a quarter knots. The tide, such as it was, was with him too: the Channel, slowly filling up with green Atlantic water, was a sluggish river, its current easing the boat over the ground away from Cornwall to Plymouth and beyond. To his Dead Reckoning position, George added a mile and a half for the fair tide. How was it that old Prynne explained the term? “The ancients,” the Commander said, “always called an uncharted sea a ‘dead’ sea. Dead Reckoning is how you feel your way through an unknown world. It is exactly the same method that a blind man uses to make his way across a room. He counts his steps.” To prove the point, Ives had been blindfolded and despatched on a tricky voyage across the sandpit and the putting green to Admin, where he collided with Lieutenant Wates and sank.

George, following the drill, reported his course and position to Falmouth Coastguard over the radio telephone. “Destination not yet known,” he said. “I am a white, ketch-rigged trawler yacht. One person on board. Over.”

“Will you spell your vessel’s name please. Over.”

George said: “I spell: Charlie Alpha Lima Lima India Oscar Papa Echo. Over.” It was nice to find the jargon coming back pat on cue, like being able to speak Portuguese again.

“Thank you, Calliope. Have a pleasant voyage. Out, and listening on 16.”

George left the radio switched on, for company. He wasn’t alone: beyond the rim of haze, the Channel was full of ships. He listened to their captains calling.

“Par Pilots, Par Pilots, this is Vivacity, Vivacity, Vivacity. Over.”

No answer. Vivacity sounded fretful and down in the mouth as her captain repeated his appeal for his lost pilot. Far away on the starboard bow there was — not so much a ship as the shadow of a ship, suspended high in the sky. George saw her masts and deckworks faintly printed, like an over-exposed photo, on the air. Christ, but she wasn’t so far away at all! A moment later her wash came rolling in out of the haze. Calliope tipped and lurched. George heard a doggish scuffle going on down below. His books must be falling about over the saloon floor. When he looked for the ship again, she was gone.

“Benevolence, Benevolence, Benevolence. This is Fidelity, Fidelity. Do you read, please? Over …”

Lulled by the voices on the VHF, by the even rumble of the diesel and by the cradle motion of the water, George felt himself drifting off track. He checked the compass card as it swayed against the lubberline, but it was steady: 090, 092, 094, 093. Right on course. The autopilot was ticking as smoothly as a clock, and the spokes of the wheel shifted, a fraction of an inch at a time, back and forth, back and forth, as the boat felt for its heading. The merchant navy chaps all called the autopilot Lazy Mike: with Lazy Mike standing his watch at the wheel, George was free to get on with the serious business of navigation.

Known Point of Departure … A guillemot dived to port, making a clean hole in the water. George patted his pockets, searching for pipe and tobacco. The sea ahead was as uniform as the silvering on a mirror: the horizon swivelled round its edge as if the boat was turning in slow circles, while the compass stayed on 093, wedged there, apparently, by a piece of grit in the works. George wasn’t fooled by this old dodge. He sucked on his empty pipe and willed the horizon to stop moving. It steadied for a moment, like the compass card, and began to spin the other way. Dizzied, George sat at the chart table: with a pair of dividers he measured off six nautical miles and applied them to his speculative pencil line over the wreck-strewn sea floor.

Paddington Station. With Alex Maitland. Yes. January of ’44. The sea did funny things to one’s subconscious: it seemed as if the bright haze ahead was lifting, to disclose something that he thought he’d left far astern. Filling his pipe, watching out for flotsam, he headed for this unexpected seamark.

It was the sense of letdown he felt first. He hadn’t been to London since he was a child. He’d hoped for some dramatic pandemonium — searchlights, sirens, sandbags. But there was nothing like that. The city looked insomniac and dingy. No-one bothered even to carry his gasmask any more. On the cab ride to Alex’s house in Earls Court they saw bombsites already looking like ruins from some other, ancient war, fading behind a tangle of loosestrife and nettle. The people on the streets were pallid, fat and spotty, as if they’d spent the last few years doing nothing but guzzle porridge. In their rationbook clothes they looked turned out on the cheap, like so many pieces of utility furniture.

Alex said: “Don’t you love London’s dear old ugly mug?”

George didn’t, but said yes, he did, because he was still in awe of Alex, who’d been to Harrow and smoked Russian cigarettes through a holder. He was also rather hoping to fall in love with Alex’s sister, not yet met. It was Melissa (he’d already fallen in love with her name) who’d asked Alex to bring a friend to Mrs Holland’s dance.

“Lissa says there isn’t a man left in London. I think she’s expecting me to bring the entire Navy.”

George feared for his church hall quickstep, but phoned his father to say that his leave had been cancelled. In the cabin he shared with Alex on the corvette Larkspur he practised the slow-slow-quick-quick-slow routine, holding a cushion to his chest. The cushion was Melissa, whose picture was conveniently pinned up over Alex’s bunk between Mae West and Norma Shearer.

He didn’t fall in love with Melissa. Neither Alex nor her photo had revealed that she was built like a beanpole and talked non-stop through her nose. Apparently she’d been going around with a bunch of greyjobs, and her word of the moment was “wizard”. It was wizard that George had been able to show up, simply wizard; Alex was looking absolutely wizard, and the news of his impending second stripe and transfer to destroyers was too wizard for words. George, aghast at the thought of the way he’d held Melissa cheek to cheek, squarely blamed Melissa for leading him up the garden path.

The dance, at someone’s house in South Kensington, was a revelation. The blackout curtains, which were up on all the windows, weren’t there to hide the place from attack by the Germans. It was English eyes that these people must have been afraid of — the envious, prying eyes of the men and women out on the street. For, as you passed through the hallway with its marble pillars, you entered a world where there were no shortages, no rationing, no war … just pots and pots of gaiety and money. A Negro in a red tuxedo was conducting a jazz band. There was a man with champagne in an ice bucket. (Whoever managed to get champagne — or ice — in 1944? And how?)

“Tricia seems to have rustled up quite a decent crowd,” Alex said.

“Oh, wizard! Shampoo!” said the gregious Melissa.

George stared. He had never seen such people. London people. They shouted and pealed at each other over the noise of the music. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody had that expensive, freshly laundered smell of eau de cologne and special soap. George felt embarrassed in his new dress uniform: as far as he could see, he and Alex were the only men in the room who weren’t wearing d.j.’s. (Surely they couldn’t all be conchies?)

He danced once, stiffly, out of duty, with Melissa, then found himself alone on the edge of a particularly loud group. A fat man with thick lips and a bloated, bullfrog face was bawling like a baby: “Dull! Dull! Dull! Dull!” He glared shortsightedly at George for a moment and said, “I think I am quite possibly the dullest man on earth”, as if he expected George to contradict him. George didn’t. He gazed back at the man, involuntarily fascinated, like a rabbit in the headlights of a motor car. He stared at the very dead carnation which the man wore in the lapel of his overtight, grease-spotted dinner jacket and at the flecks of white rime at the corners of the man’s mouth. The man clicked his fingers at George as if he was summoning a waiter. “I mean, just look at Johnny here. Johnny’s not dull at all. Johnny’s making history, don’t you see!”

George backed away, but there was no visible escape route except out across the floor through the dancers. A dozen people at least now were looking at him as if he was some kind of lab specimen. They must have mistaken him for someone else.

The fat man said: “Doesn’t it make you utterly ashamed to meet a fighting man? It simply churns the guilt round and round in me whenever I see Johnny. Always so friendly, always so unpatronizing. And I think, but why — oh why? — can’t I fight this beastly war for myself?”

George couldn’t make it out at all. He wasn’t sure whether the fat man was about to burst into tears or if this was some clever, nasty, London game at his expense.

“It’s our friend Johnny here who makes me want to declare a moratorium on Art for the duration. When Johnny brings the smell of the battlefield into the drawing room, he makes the whole idea of Art seem perfectly ridiculous. No, honestly, look at him! Isn’t he quite simply more real than anyone else here? If you want the spirit of the age, my dears, don’t, for heaven’s sake, ask for it from Wystan Auden; ask for it from Johnny.”

A wandering man with a bottle of Scotch peered over the tops of the heads of the group. “Cyril talking balls again?” he inquired, moving on.

The fat man ignored the interruption. “And it’s all very well our letting Johnny fight for a world fit for us to live in; but what are we going to do to make a world fit for Johnny? I can’t bear it. All our rubbishy little poems and rubbishy little paintings. When I see Johnny, I feel worthless and fraudulent. How are we ever going to ask Johnny to forgive us?”

It was awful. George wanted to knock the man down. He was being made to look a bloody fool by this damned pansy drunk. But he felt boiled and wordless. He stood rigidly upright, the blood gone from his face, his hands fiercely clenched at his sides.

“But what will Johnny do and where will Johnny go? Whenever I hear the word ‘Peace’, I’m afraid that all I see is an ugly politicians’ world of barbed wire and passports. The thing that bothers me is that I simply can’t imagine Johnny ever again being able to listen to “The Ring” at Salzburg, or wandering freely from the Cote D’Azur to the Sistine Chapel. After this war, do you see Johnny sipping Calvados in Pamplona or tramping through the ruins of Mycenae? I have to confess I don’t myself. And that seems to me to be one of the questions that ought to be right at the top of our agenda now. Where will Johnny go?”

George saw that the man, smiling now, was reaching out to lay his pudgy hand on George’s shoulder. Ducking angrily away, George said, “Anywhere, so long as it’s a bloody long way away from people like you.”

As soon as he heard himself saying the words, he wished that he’d swallowed them. They sounded priggish and schoolboy. No sooner had he set foot in London than he’d publicly disgraced himself. It was dreadful. He felt ashamed and sick. He wondered if he ought to sneak quietly away into the dark street. The thought that he’d have to find his hostess and thank her first, and that he’d have to go home sometime to the Maitlands’, stopped him.

Then, suddenly, there was a woman, laughing. Laughing? “Well done, you,” she said, “it’s always nice to see someone squashing Cyril.”

“Is he always like that?”

“In his off moments, yes, pretty much so. I think he was rehearsing for an editorial.”

“Who is he?”

“Cyril? He does Horizon. You know.”

George found words in his mouth again. “I know a thing or two about horizons, actually. One has to. As a navigation officer. It’s almost the first thing you learn — how to tell a true one from a false one.”

“Oh, that’s rather good. Yes. Sonia — Michael — did you hear that? Johnny here has got a new name for Cyril’s rag. He calls it False Horizon. He’s in the Navy. He should know.”

“Actually … I’m not Johnny, in fact. Actually … I’m George.”

For some reason, everyone seemed to think that this was funny too. For the next few minutes, almost everything he said was met with peals of appreciative laughter. He’d never known success so easily come by.

It was during a break in the conversation, when George was basking in this sudden celebrity, that he realized. Horizon! It was the magazine that Alex was sent every month. “Even at sea one ought at least to try to keep up,” Alex said, and the two subs passed Horizon between them. Sometimes Alex read poems from it aloud. Only yesterday, George had been reading a long article in it by George Orwell, a writer whom George always kept an eye out for, and only partly because of Orwell’s first name. Why hadn’t someone told him that the fat man was Cyril Connolly? It was mortifying. To come back from London saying that he’d met Cyril Connolly was one thing; to admit what had actually happened was quite another. Going back over the scene in his head, he found himself biting his lip in remorse.

Yet still — he was swamped in the company of smiling girls. He danced. He fetched new glasses of punch for everyone. He was modest about the one, mercifully uneventful, Atlantic convoy on which he’d sailed. The Negro bandleader, stomping and grinning, put down his tenor sax and sang “Get that tiger! Get that tiger! Get that old tiger rag!” and the whole room, led by a party of Americans, did an athletic new dancestep called the Jive, in which girls’ dresses swirled round their waists and showed their rigging of suspender belts and nylon stocking tops.

Where, in that ocean of swimming, friendly faces, was Angela Haigh? Did someone introduce them? Had he cut in on her during a dance? Had she been one of the people around Connolly? All George could see now was an intimate pool of gloom in a corner, and Angela’s face, huge-eyed under bangs of pale and fluffy hair. She was saying, “But don’t you simply dread torpedoes?”

No-one in his life had paid attention to George as Angela did in that corner. Her eyes and mouth were framed in the same rapt, astonished O. When he offered to go off and forage for more drinks for them both, she said, “Oh! Would you? Really?” as if she’d never been extended such an exquisite courtesy before. And when he returned with two glasses of punch, she sipped hers, paused for a moment, and said, “Bliss!” Being with Angela was not quite real, in quite the nicest way. It was a little like being in the pictures … Clark Gable and Merle Oberon. But then, George supposed, that was London for you. Being in London, with these London people, must be like living your whole life in the pictures. Feeling himself beginning to drown in Angela’s lovely gaze, he tried to focus on the tiny spray of blackheads that showed under the powder on her forehead, but found himself enchanted by the blackheads too.

“I had a friend,” Angela said, in a voice midway between a whisper and a sob. “Toby Carraway. He was on convoy duty. Lost at Sea.”

“Rotten luck,” George said.

“Tragic,” Angela said. “I can’t bear to think about it. Toby was such a darling. You’d have loved him.”

George felt an unworthy twinge of relief at the fact that Toby Carraway was dead, and spent the next sixty seconds feeling ashamed of himself for the thought.

“It makes one seem so pointless” Angela said, meaning that it made her seem pointless, but that this only enhanced the general, overwhelming pointfulness of George.

Dancing with Angela, as the floor thinned of couples and the lights went down, he felt her hand move from his right shoulder to the bare skin at the back of his neck. Experimentally he increased the pressure of his palm against the small of her back. They were hardly even pretending to shuffle on the floor now. He could feel Angela breathing against his throat. It was heartstopping — she was so warm and weightless. The thin silk stuff of her dress moved under his hand against her skin. When the number came to an end, they stayed standing there alone together, as serenely entangled as a pair of week-old kittens in a basket.

Then Alex was there, looking oddly out of sorts.

“Well — see you back at the house, then? You know the way? Hullo, Angela.”

“Oh-hullo, Alex.”

“Better keep an eye on that man,” Alex said and laughed, an awkward titter. It sounded as if he’d been hitting the punch pretty hard.

When he was gone, and George and Angela were walking back to their drinks, Angela said, “Poor Alex.”

“Why ‘poor’?” George asked. The word seemed wrong for Alex on every count he could think of.

“Oh. You know. Alex is such a silly darling.”

A little later they were in the almost-dark of a room smelling of piled winter coats. A man in a collapsed bow-tie put his head round the door and said, “Any sign of Hattie? Anyone seen Hattie? Oh — sorry.”

Angela, snuggling in George’s arms, said, “You’re going to die. I know you’re going to die. You’re going to go away to sea and be killed!”

It was thrilling, the way Angela said it. The air in the room was thick with the excitement of the idea. George, torn between wanting to comfort and wanting to worship this wonderful girl, this lovely, generous innocent, kissed her. Angela’s mouth was open — as open as it had been when she gazed at him as he talked in the ballroom — and their tongues touched. He tasted her saliva, its toxic feminine secretions of attar and mint with (as he now seemed to remember) a trace of dry gin.

She drew her face away from his for a moment and said, “All I can think of is horrible things. Mines. Torpedoes. Those depth things—”

George, always at his most reliable on technical matters, said, “You only have to worry about depth charges if you’re in a submarine.”

“Don’t laugh at me. Ever.” And suddenly he was wrapped in her arms and she was kissing, kissing, kissing, as if each kiss would ward off another of her dreaded torpedoes.

He could feel the firmness of her stomach pressed against his own. How could anyone be so candid and so kind? She made every girl he’d ever met seem sly and commonplace. Mouth to mouth with Angela in the dark cloakroom, George felt ashamed of ever having given a second thought to the Vivienne Beales and Judith Pughs of the world.

It was inconceivable that she should know what she was doing — she had begun on a tender, sleepy-slow encircling of him with her stomach and thighs. For George, there was an unbearably sweet comfort in the movement. A gentleman — a real London person — would have somehow eased himself gently away from that lovely sway and ripple of her. But George couldn’t. He clung to Angela, adoring her, half choking on her kisses; he was airborne. Her tongue was reaching deep in his mouth, quivering against his palate. He—

Oh, Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ!

He had lost everything. It was unspeakable. Beastly. For the first time in his life, he’d met a girl whom he could love — who might even, once, have loved him back. And he’d disgraced himself. Worse than that. He’d polluted her, Angela, the purest creature alive. He couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear himself. He’d behaved like a bloody animal.

Yet she was still holding him. She was so guileless. She wasn’t aware of what had happened. Perhaps there was still just a ghost of a chance left to him, if only—

She said: “Was that nice for you, darling?”

“Uh … what?” He didn’t quite understand. He realized that he must be a bit plastered with the punch.

“Was it … ever so specially nice?”

Oh, Angela! Oh, the utter forgivingness of True Woman!

Her mouth was close to his ear. She said, “I can feel your wetness on me.”

What happened next was extraordinary and rather frightening. For she began to pummel him with her body in what seemed like a fit of sudden rage. He felt punished as she ground herself against him, wordlessly, panting a little, her head turned away to one side.

“Angela?” he said. “Angela!”

He stumbled backwards under her weight, into a soft wall of overcoats on pegs. He heard a silk lining tear somewhere behind his head. Angela’s assault on him abruptly stopped.

“Angela?” He didn’t know what to expect. He feared that she might be about to slap his face or, worse, shout to the world that he was a disgusting brute. “Er … Angela … are you … all right?”

“Bliss!” Angela said in a polite voice. George planted a succession of bewildered kisses in her hair.

He hung on tight, not to Angela now but to the grabrail of braided rope on the wheelhouse ceiling. He was hyperventilating (one of Vera’s medical words) and shaky on his pins. He was so stiffly tumescent that it hurt.

And he was hearing voices.

“Tillerman. Tillerman. Tillerman. This is Crystal Jewel. Crystal Jewel.”

Sitala was calling for Prudence, Vigilance for Rattray Head, Par Pilots for British Aviator. Crazy. George reached over his head to switch the captains off: dark patches of sweat showed on his shirtfront; his fingers, searching for the buttons on the VHF, felt sluggish and unwieldy as if a fuse had blown somewhere high up in his central nervous system. He tried to focus on the glittering haze ahead of the boat, but there was nothing there on which he could get a bearing — no distance, no shape or detail, no shade or gradation in the light. The needle of the log pointed unwaveringly at 5.5 knots, but he might as well have been free falling at a thousand miles a minute out in space.

“Bliss,” said Angela, and he felt the reminiscent pressure of her groin, coquettishly nuzzling his unruly member.

But she wasn’t a memory. He wasn’t idly dreaming Angela. She was a stowaway. Somehow she must have sneaked on board in port when he wasn’t looking. She hadn’t paid a penny for her passage, and George was stuck with her. Her sandalwood perfume and the green-apple fragrance of her hair blotted out the smell of timber, salt and burned diesel. It wasn’t what George had planned for himself at all. He was out at sea, in fog, with Angela and her old genius for choosing her moment to boot him in the guts.

“God Almighty,” George said, hanging from his strap, as passive as a carcass on a butcher’s hook. Breathing in, he felt a miniature bolt of forked lightning in his chest.

“Sweetie,” Angela said. The cloakroom was now lit by a bare 40 watt bulb. She picked up a white woollen coat which was lying in a scrambled heap on the floor, and handed it to him. He noticed the expensive label inside the collar: it had been made by someone in Paris.

“You can walk me home.”

The band was still playing in the ballroom. “Shouldn’t one say thank you to … er … Mrs Whatsit?” George said.

“Why?” She looked orphaned inside her big, untidy coat. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, her tongue parting his lips with a quick little wriggle. “You can thank me instead, silly.”

It took them an hour to walk the half-mile to the Haighs’ house in Bolton Gardens. They stopped to embrace under the gaunt planes in Onslow Square, and stopped again in Sumner Place, Cranley Gardens and Thistle Grove. The blistering stucco streets were as quiet as catacombs, every house shuttered and dead.

“Hold me!” Angela said; and George, exalted, in a high fever of pride and love, hugged her in the folds of his naval greatcoat with its silver buttons and saw South Kensington through a delirious fog of tears.

On the Old Brompton Road, Angela said: “Darling, what was it that you said to Cyril Connolly?”

George said: “Oh … nothing, really. You know.”

“People said you were awfully clever. Olga said you totally épaté’d him.”

“I didn’t realize who he was, actually.”

“Oh, Georgiekins! You are clever. You’re the cleverest man in London. Aren’t you?”

Kissing her (at the corner of Gledhow Gardens), George basked in her praise, as sleek as a seal on a rock. But he wasn’t basking now. Heard in the wheelhouse, Angela’s remark didn’t sound like a compliment at all. It was a perfectly clear and straightforward question. After four hours in George’s exclusive company, she was beginning to harbour some serious doubts on the matter of his famous intelligence. And no wonder. For the first time ever, George and Angela were understanding each other very well. They were even in agreement about something. The sheer novelty of the occasion made George feel a bit better: he lowered himself from the strap to the seat by the chart table and began to update his dead reckoning — until he saw that his last DR position had been pencilled in only seven minutes before.

Next morning, feeling ill with hope and apprehension, he rang her at 10.30 from the Maitlands’. A maid answered, and it was a scary age before Angela came to the telephone. “George? Georgie! I thought you’d sailed away on your horrid ship and I’d never see you ever again.”

They lunched at Rules. They took in a show at the Vaudeville. They dined at the Connaught Grill where Angela (the angel) paid. All day George had the feeling that they were being tracked by a ghostly film camera. There were misty long shots of them in the streets; and as Angela leaned forward over a grizzled lamb chop and shook a bang of fluffy hair away from her eyes, the camera zoomed in close to dwell lovingly (as George dwelt lovingly) on the tiny, jewellike droplets of perspiration in the sweet cleft above her lip.

When George returned to Earls Court, the Maitlands were curiously stuffy. They didn’t seem to recognize the extraordinary personage whom George had become in the last twenty-four hours. He felt that his love deserved to be admired and wondered over by the sub-lunar world, and that the Maitland household was being pretty bloody stingy when it came to coughing up its dues of admiration and wonder.

Alex, of course, must be rotten with envy. He’d expected that. But he was hardly inside the house before Mrs Maitland gave him a cool glance from her chair in the little chintz-filled drawing-room and said, “Well: I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m for Bedfordshire.”

He remembered Angela on the Maitlands—“Sweet, of course, but rather too middle class, don’t you think, darling?” George thought Mrs Maitland’s remark was tiresomely middle class: her “Bedfordshire” made him wince. After she’d gone upstairs Alex made cocoa with dried milk, which was pretty middle class too.

George, in as careless a voice as he could manage, said: “Took Angela to the Connaught. They manage to do quite a decent meal there still.”

Alex said: “You’re not serious about Angela, are you?” His cigarette holder dangled from his fingers at an effete angle. He was blowing a smoke ring.

George smiled a superior, sophisticated, still waters run deep, my lips are sealed sort of smile; a smile that William Powell might have been glad to copy.

Alex said, “Since you seem to know about these things, what with going to dinner at the Connaught and everything … I’d have thought that Angela was obviously quite a tasty hors d’oeuvre, but I can’t really see her as anyone’s idea of a proper entrée, frankly.” He made a finicky show of tapping his ash off the end of his cigarette into the fireplace.

George couldn’t believe what he’d heard. For a moment he grinned, as if Alex had said something clever and amusing in the wardroom. Then he said, “Stand up.”

“Oh, come on, George!”

“Bloody stand up!” His eyes were prickling.

Alex shrugged. The funny abstracted look on his face was like a doctor’s, hearing out a maundering patient.

“Stand up!”

Alex was only half-way out of his chair when George hit him. He went down like a detonated chimney stack: nothing much happened at first, then suddenly a lot did. Separate bits of Alex seemed to topple, one after another. A spindly side table crashed under one of his knees and lay wrecked on the floor beside him. His lip was bleeding. He picked his burning cigarette out of the carpet and fitted it with difficulty back into its holder.

George looked up nervously overhead: he was afraid of Mrs Maitland’s intervention. But the house seemed asleep. He said, “I’m sorry about the table,” and took an awkward pace forward. He wasn’t sure about how things should go from here. When a chap knocked down another chap for insulting a lady, ought he to offer to give the other chap a hand up afterwards? He said, “I’ll pay for it of course.”

Alex stared at him. The man was smiling. He said, “Bugger the stupid table. And — George?”

“What?” He held out his hand to Alex who was still on all fours. The hand wasn’t taken.

“Bugger you.”

By noon the next day, with only eight hours of leave still left to him, George was engaged to Angela. Well, not quite engaged. But as good as. There was no ring, no terrifying interview with Mr Haigh, who was away at his office in The Minories and not expected back till six; he hadn’t even — exactly — asked the Question. But somehow, miraculously, Angela was going to marry him. She talked in a dramatic whisper of a Special Licence.

“My own sweetie!” she said. “We’ll épater everybody!”

The whisper was partly practical, for they were in Angela’s bedroom, having stolen there on tiptoe past the elderly crook-backed maid whom Angela called The Gorgon. In broad daylight, without even pulling the curtains, Angela reached behind her back and undid the straps of her brassière.

“Kiss?” she said.

George had never seen a woman’s bare nipples before. Angela’s nipple was encircled by a little palisade of quite long pale hairs. He loved each single hair. Weak with gratitude and wonder, he kissed, and felt her nipple swell and stiffen between his lips.

“Oh, Georgie!” Angela said in a strange little girl voice, as she cradled his head in her hands, “I’m so frightened you’re going to be killed”.

Paddington Station was full of men in uniform saying goodbye to girls. George too. At last he was part of the great, grown-up London world. It was a triumph to be George as he stood there with the other men, Angela (she was crying, the sweet darling) clasped in his arms. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Alex Maitland with his mother at the far end of the platform. Poor old Alex. George pitied him, rather, for his innocence.

They avoided each other when the train stopped at Plymouth. It was Alex who arranged to bunk with Webb, while George got Peter Neave. For the two weeks before Alex’s transfer to a destroyer came through, things were definitely gruesome: in that time, Alex said only one thing to George in private. “Grey?” he said. “Don’t you think that you really owe my mother a letter?”

But George was far too busy writing letters to Angela to bother with bread-and-butter notes to stuffy, middle class Mrs Maitland. It was lucky that Larkspur was refitting, for the amount of paper passing by almost every post between Plymouth and Bolton Gardens would have been a serious embarrassment to the creaky mailship service. George wrote more often, but Angela’s letters were much more beautiful. Each one began with a detailed list of shops visited and people seen. This sometimes ran to as many as four pages. Then she’d come to the bit that George hungered after: she dreaded for him; he was always in her thoughts; she had been having nightmares in which George’s ship was on fire, sinking, lost, or caught in a wild typhoon. Reading these letters, George thought what a humbling thing it was to be loved by a girl who cared for you more than she cared for anyone alive. He kept her letters under his pillow and spent quite a lot of time at night thinking with agonized pleasure of Angela’s nipples and their enchanting circlets of bright hair.

It really was extraordinary, that business about the hair. Hadn’t he seen topless pin-ups? Perhaps they weren’t around much in ’44. You booby! George, his pipe alight and drawing nicely now, thought: but it’s all right-it’s not too late — I don’t have to go through with this. It was still early: the sun, just visible now as a fuzzy disc in the thinning haze, was still well to the east, standing at an angle of 035° or 040°. He wasn’t committed yet. Not really. Angela wasn’t pregnant or anything. He could escape. No-one would blame him. Not even Angela’s parents. For an insane, trance-like instant, George saw himself getting away scot-free from the future. You could do it. It’d be just the same as grabbing the wheel and steering Calliope clear of …

… the tanker towering on the starboard beam. It was higher than the sun. Its great riveted plates, like armadillo scales, were scarred with patches of dry rust. The thing was moving at what must be 20 knots at least, bearing down on him. Calliope’s hull was drumming with the vibration of its screws. If to starboard red appear, It is your duty to keep clear! He yanked the wheel free of the autopilot and hauled it round to starboard. The wheelhouse went dark. He was racing past the ship’s side, with a narrow ditch of streaming, swollen water between the two vessels, the rusty plates going by in a blur, and Calliope making a sudden, sickening speed like a truck running out of control on a mountain road. With a rush of light, the tanker was astern and he was tumbling in her wake. He saw the single star and stripes of a threadbare Panamanian flag hanging limp on the jackstaff.

“Bastard!” He was out in the cockpit, stumbling and sliding. His knee banged into the side of a locker. “Bloody thoughtless bastards!” There was nobody in sight on the tanker, no human outline against the windows of the bridge. The buggers were below — playing cards or sniggering over girlie mags. He’d come within four feet of being smashed to bits by Lazy Mike.

“You SHIT!” George yelled from the galvanized steel pulpit on his stern. The tanker trembled, shimmered and turned into

its own ghost.

“Temper temper!” Angela said.

“Oh, Christ—” George said, diving for the wheel to rescue Calliope from the helpless figures of eight that she was making in the tanker’s wash.

“That sort of language may go down very well in your barrackroom, or whatever they call it in the Navy, but it really won’t do here.”

“Sorry, Daddy,” George said, seriously worried for the state of his cardiovascular equipment. It felt as if he had about five gallons more blood than was good for him thrashing around in his veins.

“What age do you think you are, George? Twenty-five years old?”

Not for the first time, George choked back the temptation to point out to Vera that, for someone with the build of a Russian lady discus thrower without the justification of the discus to go with it, she was hardly in a position to nag him about the condition of his heart. He watched the compass card swerving and tilting in its bowl and inched it round to 093°.

Something went wrong with Larkspur’s steering gear and her rudder had to be rehung. George got five days’ shore leave. He spent it in Bolton Gardens — though to put it flatly, like that, “in Bolton Gardens”, was ridiculously inadequate. For five days it seemed to George that he was as close to living in heaven as any man could bear.

Never had he found something he could love in its entirety as he loved the Haighs’ house in Bolton Gardens. It was, of course, consecrated by the fact that Angela lived there; but without Angela the house would still have been an object of wonder. The most ordinary things in it made George marvel. The lavatories, for instance. The Haighs had two, not counting the ones in their three bathrooms. They smelled prettily of potpourri, fresh towels and sweet peas. Each one was supplied with pictures and a rack of books and magazines. When the Haighs condescended to open their bowels, they did even that in style, inhaling the scent of lavender and leafing through Tatler and Vogue. Amazing.

It was as if the only life that George had known before had been scaled-down and fiddly, like a Hornby Double-0 gauge train set. Staying at the Haighs’, he saw for the first time what it meant to be Life Size. He couldn’t get over the sheer bigness of it. When you went into the Haighs’ first-floor drawing-room, it wasn’t so much like entering a room as being admitted to a park with a ha-ha, woody avenues and long vistas. The armchairs and sofas were set at great distances from each other, across lake-like stretches of carpet, of a pale and delicate blue. When people talked in the Haighs’ drawing-room, its scented spaces lent to the conversation a curiously operatic volume and grandeur.

“I saw Cicely Beech in Town today,” called Mrs Haigh from the south-west corner. “She was in Fortnums. With her youngest. Henrietta’s nearly three now. Quite the little madam.”

“Oh — sweet!” Angela said from the far north.

“Anyone for a drop more sherry?” sang Mr Haigh, chiming in from the east in his surprisingly high tenor. “How’s George’s glass?”

For quite the most wonderful thing in the Haighs’ wonderful house was the way in which Angela’s parents were being nice to George. He’d expected fireworks. On the train up, he’d been daydreaming about eloping with Angela to Gretna Green, and had feared that five days didn’t give them sufficient time to qualify for marriage under Scottish law.

But it wasn’t like that at all. When he arrived at Bolton Gardens, Mrs Haigh had even pecked his cheek; and Mr Haigh, on his return from the Minories, shook hands with George and said, “So you’re George,” as if he was actually pleasantly surprised by the gangling sub-lieutenant in his hall.

Beside the Haighs, George felt awkward and grubby. It was as if life at the rectory had condemned him to be always two or three baths behind these astonishingly clean and polished people. His uniform had been put on clean that morning, but he still felt that he gave off a bad smell and that Angela’s parents were being extraordinarily kind in not noticing, or pretending not to notice, it.

Mr Haigh wanted to know all about Larkspur. George told him all about Larkspur—her tonnage, her gunnery, how the Asdic worked. After half an hour in Mr Haigh’s company, he even felt sufficiently at his ease to do his imitation of old Prynne’s lesson in Dead Reckoning. Mr Haigh laughed. Angela, sitting on the arm of George’s chair, said, “Isn’t he just bliss, Daddy?”

On his first evening, they dressed for dinner. George had never been in a house where you dressed for dinner. Someone had laid out one of Mr Haigh’s old dinner suits in his bedroom. It was a bit sloppy round the waist and an inch or two short in the arms and legs, but George, descending the staircase and studying himself in the full-length gilt mirror on the second floor landing, reckoned that he cut quite a dash in it. During the meal, his only twinge of fright came when Mr Haigh said, “So you were still at Pwllheli last August?” and George said “Yes, sir,” and Mr Haigh said, “When you and Angela met up.” George was just about to put Mr Haigh right on this one when Angela said, “Yes, don’t you remember, Daddy, when I went to stay with the Donnisons in Shrewsbury?”

“Oh,” Mr Haigh said, “you’re a friend of the Donnisons,” and George was saved, in the nick of time, by the arrival of the stewed mutton.

Everything was done properly at Bolton Gardens. When dinner was over, the ladies, meaning Angela and her mother, actually withdrew to the drawing-room, and Mr Haigh said to George, “Would you care for some port?”

“Yes, sir. Please, sir.” George’s knowledge of the form was a bit shaky here. Were you supposed to pass it from right to left or from left to right? And did it count if there were only two of you?

Mr Haigh put a decanter and a glass in front of him. “I’ve never been a port man, myself,” he said. “I’m down to my last three bottles of Drambuie, and I’m counting on you to win this war for me before I run out altogether.”

“Yes, sir,” George said, “I’ll mention it to the Admiralty.”

Mr Haigh laughed and sipped at his liqueur. “You’re not … planning to stay on in the Navy after the war’s over, are you?”

This was exactly what George had hoped to do. If there ever was a Peace (and people were beginning to talk now as if they really thought that the war could be over by as soon as the end of this summer), George didn’t want to lose the view from the bridge. By 1948—even earlier — he could be a lieutenant-commander, RN. After that — well, George (at least before he met Angela) had secretly toyed with the names of Captain Grey, and even Admiral Grey, and thought they sounded distinctly plausible. But it took less than a second in the Haighs’ dining-room to ditch his entire career in the regular Navy. He said: “Oh, no, sir. No, of course not.”

“That takes a load off my mind, anyway. I’m afraid that Angela wouldn’t make a very satisfactory service wife.”

Satisfactory? Surely that wasn’t the right sort of word to use of Angela?

“But London isn’t at all good for her either, you know.”

“No, sir.” So Angela was … ill … in some way that George didn’t know about. Or perhaps she was just delicate. Suppose she had — TB, or even cancer? It would be all right. George would nurse her. She wouldn’t have to lift a finger — he’d look after her.

“I’ve got a contact or two in the ship business in Newcastle-on-Tyne,” Mr Haigh said. “They might come in useful. Don’t know whether you’ve ever been up in that part of the world? It’s on the grim side, of course, but then, with Angela, that’s rather what one’s looking for, isn’t it? Something to bring her down to earth.”

George was lost. He poured himself a second glass of Mr Haigh’s port, said, “Sort of. Yes. I suppose so, sir,” and laughed nervously, man to man.

“Well. We’d better cross that bridge when we come to it. When you win the war for us, yes?” His face was turned fully towards George. His smile was tired. His head, almost completely bald except for a rim of black fuzz high around his temples, gleamed in the candlelight.

Returning his gaze from the distance of Calliope’s wheel-house, George saw a mixture of pity and embarrassment there. No, it was worse than that. It was shame. Mr Haigh was looking at him as if he’d just allowed George to be swindled out of his Post Office savings.

Returning his gaze across the dining table, though, George saw only kindliness there. Angela’s father was a Pretty Decent Type. A grown-up whom you could really talk to. He said, “Well, sir, I give it to September,” which was what Alex Maitland had said a day or two before he and George had ceased to be on speaking terms.

“I’ll act on that,” Mr Haigh said. “I take it as a considered professional opinion. By the way, I gather from Angela that you share my enthusiasm for the Cinema?”

That was odd. So far as George could remember, he’d never said anything about the pictures to Angela. “Well … I suppose I do go quite a bit. You know. When I haven’t got anything else on.”

“Do you like pubs?” Mr Haigh said, with a sudden vigour in his voice.

“I … don’t drink much, sir.” George was conscious of the port in front of him. He wondered if the second glass that he’d poured for himself had been a solecism — or whether the correct thing to do was to finish the whole decanter.

“Pabst,” Mr Haigh said disappointedly. “You know. ‘Pandora’s Box’? ‘Joyless Street’?”

“Not exactly, sir, no. I mean, I don’t think so. The last one I saw was ‘We Dive At Dawn’. In fact.”

“Yes, that’s Puffin Asquith, isn’t it? Yes, he’s quite good, I think, but don’t you find him a bit stagy? Of all those people, I’m afraid the only one I really like is Humphrey Jennings.” He stared at George for a moment and said, “‘London Can Take It’.”

“Yes sir,” George said, rather too reverently, before he realized that it was just another film title. They joined the ladies.

Later, Mr Haigh rigged up a screen at the far end of the drawing-room and showed some of the pictures that he’d taken with his own cine camera. George thought they were pretty good. They looked amateur only in their short length and the way they ran in silence broken by the whir and click of the projector. All of Mr Haigh’s early work featured Angela as its star. Angela aged three toddled diagonally down the screen through a meadow filled with buttercups and daisies. She held a flower in her fist and offered it to the camera. The picture froze.

“That was Provence in ’28,” Mr Haigh said.

In another filmlet, Angela cantered on a pony along a cliff in a stormy dawn. Her ride was intercut with studies of other kinds of motion: a motor car speeding along a new arterial road, a biplane taking off from an airstrip, a yacht heeling to the wind on a beam reach. It was titled “Motion Picture”. There was Angela exploring the streets of foreign cities, Angela eating a peach at a picnic, Angela tiptoeing through the gloomy recesses of the cathedral at Chartres, emerging into a pool of puddled light cast by a great stained glass window.

Then, suddenly, there was no more Angela. Her last appearance was when she was fourteen. After that Mr Haigh’s films went abstract. There were pictures of racing clouds, of rippling cornfields, of machines in factories, but not one of Angela.

“This one might appeal to George here,” Mr Haigh said. It was a rather long study, in slow motion, of waves breaking on a rocky beach. As far as George was concerned, it suffered from a single crippling defect: it didn’t star Angela.

“Awfully good,” George said. “I like the way you’ve used the light, sir.”

“It’s just time and patience,” Mr Haigh said. “I suppose everyone has a missed vocation. The cinema is mine. I’d give my eyeteeth to have made one proper movie.”

After the screen had been rolled up and put away and Mr and Mrs Haigh had gone upstairs, George said to Angela: “Darling, why did you tell your father that I was dead keen on the cinema?”

Angela gazed at him with huge and virtuous eyes. “But I wanted to make him love you,” she said. Then, rising to a challenge, “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s just that I don’t know anything about the cinema. Not that sort of cinema. Not … Pabst and stuff.”

“You’re accusing me!”

“No, darling! No!”

“Yes, you are, Georgie. I can see it in your eyes. You’re blaming me. Everything I do is wrong. I can’t bear it. And I love you so much—”

“Darling!” And he was holding her and saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, darling—” and feeling truly guilty, too, without knowing what it was that he was guilty of. But in a moment it was all right again: Angela was forgiving him. She even permitted him, after a brief period of prohibition, to slip his tongue between her lips. He could feel her cold tears on his own cheek, and promised before God, if there was a God, that he’d never be so thoughtlessly hurtful as he’d been (how could he have done such a thing?) a minute before.

In the morning, he dressed in the crumpled civvies that he’d brought with him in his kitbag. Angela laughed when she saw him. “Georgie!” Don’t you have a proper shirt? If I didn’t know you, darling, I would have taken you for the man who comes to read the gas. It’s too sweet. Mummie, just look at poor Georgie’s shirt!”

“It just looks like a shirt to me,” said Mrs Haigh, who was writing a letter and seemed annoyed at Angela’s interruption.

It just looked like a shirt to George, too. But he knew that Angela was right. After breakfast she took him to Jermyn Street and had him measured. When the man in the shop led George into a little leather-and-cigar smelling room behind, Angela came as well.

“He doesn’t want it cut too full round his tummy,” she said to the man. “And he wants lots of cuff.”

It was another delicious part of being Angela’s, this feeling of being taken in hand and being talked of over his head. And she knew so much, about all sorts of things. It was only in the wheelhouse that he saw that the girl was treating him like a doll. No wonder she doted on him. George must be unique in her experience — this man who would submit to being dressed, patted, scolded, kissed and spanked.

“He must have them by Thursday. Oh, please?”

The man in the shop said that was quite impossible, until Angela gave him the full treatment with her enormous eyes.

“There’s a war on, miss. We’re very short of staff.”

“But he’s going back to his ship. He’s a fighting man!”

“I don’t know, miss.”

“Oh, you will. I know you will.”

And it was agreed. A dozen shirts, cut to Angela’s detailed prescription, would be ready on Thursday and charged to Mr Haigh’s account.

About this last detail, George was a little frightened. He thought it looked uncommonly close to sponging.

“Daddy won’t even notice, silly. Anyway he loves to pay.”

“What exactly does he actually … well … do?” They had crossed St James’s Street to a treelined court where Angela said she knew a hotel which did quite decent cocktails.

“Daddy? Like I said. He pays for things.”

George laughed. “Pays for what things?”

“Well … you know, if someone wants to build a factory somewhere … things like that. Daddy … sort of pays for it. He works a lot with the government now. Munitions. You know.”

“He’s a … financier?” George said.

“Oh, sweetie, no! You make it sound as if he’s Jewish!”

The sky was suddenly wide open. The haze had gone. There was even just enough of a light wind from the north to think about putting up a sail or two. The water ahead looked bright and frosted. Nothing in sight except the sun.

George got out Tom’s sextant and fitted its brass telescope into the frame. Standing in the cockpit, he found the sun, reflected through a screen of smoked glass. Slowly turning the knurled screw on the arc of the sextant, he removed the sun from the sky and lowered it in a series of jerks until it rested like a warty fruit on the horizon. He’d always enjoyed this clever little operation. It was satisfying to be able to mess about so casually with the solar system: you could put the sun wherever you wanted it and rearrange the planets as if they were chessmen on a board. He read off the angle between himself and the sun from the vernier: 41° 27’. He timed his sight at 0937. And fifteen seconds.

Working from the almanac at the chart table now, he found the sun’s Greenwich Hour Angle and its declination. 267° 48’ and 1° 33’. South. That would put it somewhere over Mogadishu, George reckoned. He’d been to Mogadishu once. Bloody awful place. Next he gave himself an assumed position.

“And that’s another of the navigator’s funny quirks of character,” Commander Prynne said. “In order for this trick to come out, he always has to assume that he’s somewhere where he knows he isn’t.”

George assumed that he was in Plymouth. On Larkspur. That made a nice round figure AP. Scribbling sums on the corner of the Admiralty chart, he calculated his intercept. 23.5 miles Away. He ruled the line in and measured off the miles. It looked as if he was within a few cables of his Dead Reckoning position. In a little while he should be able to see the Eddystone.

“Georgie?”

Angela was in his room. In her nightie.

“What about …?”

“It’s all right. Their room’s miles away.”

He realized that he was still holding his toothbrush. He put it carefully down above the sink and wondered where on earth he’d put his dressing gown.

“Don’t I even get a goodnight kiss, then?”

And the two of them were tangled on George’s narrow bed, busy, gasping, all fingers and mouths. Angela’s nightdress was rucked up over her waist; George’s pyjama bottoms had come untied. For about forty-five seconds (less, if one was going to be really truthful), it was like being caught up and winnowed in a paradisal threshing machine. George was harvested first; it took Angela a few moments longer before she too came clear of the sucking and clinging and tumbling.

“Oh God!” George said, “God … God … God!”

They lay together in the sexy, fishy smell of themselves. George couldn’t believe himself. He felt as if he’d been decorated — that there should be letters after his name now. He’d got to Number Ten. Well, perhaps not quite Number Ten in the usual sense; but surely what he and Angela had just done counted for pretty much the same thing … didn’t it? Then, in his pride, he remembered that he and Angela were Deeply in Love and he felt shabby and callow for ever allowing himself to think like that. You nerk.

“Darling!”

“Sweetie …” She was actually holding his damp penis in her hand.

“You couldn’t get … have a baby like … that … could you?”

Angela giggled. “Georgie! Do you want me to tell you about the birds and the bees?”

It was her tone of voice that made him say, “Have you ever … done it?”

No answer. George said: “I wouldn’t mind. If you had … darling.”

She was suddenly sitting upright, holding a blanket up over her chest. Her eyes were fierce and appalled. “What a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to say!”

“Oh Christ, Angela, I’m sorry, all I meant was—”

“It’s too vile for words. It’s filthy. How could you? It’s because you’re a beast, isn’t it? It’s because you’ve done it with horrible prostitutes. In the docks. I don’t want to hear about it, George. Your women. The beastly things you do. You’ve got a disease! You’re infected! You’ve got VD!”

George wept. He said sorry a hundred times. He hated himself. He loved Angela. He told her that he was more ashamed of himself now than he’d ever been in his entire life. He tried to hold her, to comfort her for the dreadful thing he’d said, but it was a good ten minutes before Angela frostily began to allow herself to be mollified.

“Oh, George, it’s too awful,” she said happily. “I don’t know whether I shall ever be able to trust you again.”

It was another five minutes before George heard her giggle.

“What? Darling?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking.” She raised herself on one elbow and looked down on him. “Georgie? Do you think I’d look funny, wearing black?”

“Grunff!” George said, putting a circle round the cross of his position. He was just as ashamed of himself here as he was there, and hardly less baffled by Angela’s lightning manoeuvres. Christ, but she had him on the run now! He was skipping about for her like a miniature dachshund doing tricks for biscuits.

The Eddystone Lighthouse was showing now as a hairline crack on the horizon far away to the southeast. George took its bearing. 124°. Just right. He stepped out on to the foredeck and winched up the big tan mainsail, watching the wind uncrease it as it climbed the mast. He raised the jib, flapping and banging overhead, and walked back to the cockpit to tighten the sheet. His father was there — seated on the gas locker wearing his summer alpaca jacket and straw boater.

Fuddle-headed, George did his best to concentrate on hauling the jib in against the wind and wrapping the end of the rope around the wooden cleat. When he turned round, though, his father was still there, staring at the sea with much the same sort of suspicious disdain that he might have shown to a rally of Primitive Methodists. His lips were pursed, his eyes narrowed against the sun.

“You look cold,” George said. The rector’s dress was hopelessly wrong for a mid-March morning out at sea. “Shouldn’t you be wearing something warmer?”

His father shook his head distractedly. When he turned his face to George, it moved stiffly, like a tortoise’s, above the wattles of his neck.

“Mightn’t it be a good idea to wait for a while, old boy? And see how you both feel about it in six months’ time? Don’t you think?”

Calliope leaned to starboard in a long gust. The rector, arms spread along the gunwale, opened his mouth and let out a small bubble of fright. He’d never been good on boats. Crossing the Irish Sea, in a flat calm, from Liverpool to the Isle of Man in ’39, he spent the entire passage sitting rigid in a corner of the saloon holding The Times upside down in front of his face.

He said: “Of course, Angela does seem a frightfully nice girl.” Then, “What do you say, old boy — about giving it six months?”

Nice? Nice? How dare his father call Angela nice! George said: “We’re not waiting. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, Daddy, but there happens to be a war on. Chaps are getting killed, you know.”

His father gazed at the Eddystone, the one stable point in a gently rolling world. He looked as if he wanted to put his arms around the lighthouse and cling to it for dear life.

“Yes,” he said; “there’s that, of course. Though it’s an argument that could cut two ways, old boy.”

“There’s no ‘argument’ about it,” George said. “It’s fixed, Daddy.”

The rector’s hands fluttered on the gunwale. His unhappy eyes were hunting for his son. For a sickmaking moment, George saw that his father was actually a few years younger than he was himself. Poor bloody sod. He was muffing it so badly, too. George wanted to shake some life into him — if only he could make a present to his father of the words that the rector couldn’t find, perhaps …

“You’re only nineteen—”

Oh, damn you, Daddy, for that stupid, frightened, bald, uncalculating move!

“I’m old enough to be an officer! I’m old enough to fight this fucking war!”

“George!”

“All right, then, lovely war! Nice war! Pretty little war! Whatever you want! But just wake up, will you, to the fact that I’m a man and this is my life and I am running it, and if you don’t like it you can lump it!”

The words tasted leaden and stale in his own mouth. It was George, after all, and not the rector, who needed a fresh script. He felt lumbered, condemned to rehearse this old degrading patter of every son to every father. Poor father, poor son, trapped in the same leaky boat.

Pat on cue, his father said: “The last thing that either your mother or I want, old boy, is for you to be unhappy—”

“Then you won’t try and stop Angela and me from getting married—”

“No, George, I shan’t do that.”

The rector looked away at the curling wash behind the boat; the wind tugged the black half moon of his clerical stock clear of his pullover and made his thin jacket balloon round his chest. What a pair of scarecrows they must look, George thought: two old buffers, peevishly wrangling out of sight of land, one in a boater, one in a baseball cap … you’d have to laugh. But he couldn’t bear the thought of what was coming next.

His father reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and held out a sealed envelope to George.

“Every happiness, old boy,” he mumbled. Then he said it again, too loudly, “Every happiness.”

So his father had known all along that he’d lose. The envelope was addressed “For George and Angela, with love from Deny’s and Mary.” There was something uncomfortable in seeing his parents’ Christian names like that; they looked nude.

“Thanks awfully,” George said.

“You’d better open it, old boy. Save the suspense …” His father pretended to transfer all his attention to a tickle behind his ear, but the boat rolled again and he had to clutch at the toerail, his legs stiffly splayed, the wide turn-ups of his shiny trousers flapping.

Inside the envelope, a cheque for seventy-five guineas. For George’s father, it was a fortune, a king’s ransom. Seventy-five guineas, from the rector, whose favourite word was “rectitude”! To write a cheque like that, he must have lain awake at nights, conducting an auction with himself and watching the price of marriage steepen, from twenty to twenty-five, past thirty, and rocket through the ceiling of fifty. It was no wonder that the writing on the cheque didn’t look like his father’s hand at all but had an artificial copperplate precision, as if every letter had taken several seconds to inscribe. It was a cheque to make one doubt one’s eyesight, a cheque to frame and publish, a cheque perhaps designed to announce that the Greys were perfectly well able to hold up their heads with the Haighs of the world.

This, though, wasn’t what struck George about the cheque when he first saw it. His first thought was that he’d better tell Angela that it was for a hundred; seventy-five was so shabbily, transparently middle class. Seventy-five, in fact (and he hated that five), was Just about Typical. The other thing about the cheque was that it came from Lloyds Bank. Angela’s family all banked at Coutts, and George was planning to transfer his account there too. The trouble with Lloyds’ cheques was that they gave one away so, like cheap shirts.

“Thanks awfully, Daddy,” he said, a little less enthusiastically than when he’d taken the unopened envelope. “I know it’ll … come in jolly useful.”

His father watched the cheque disappear into George’s pocket as if he was following a conjuring trick in which turtle doves were going to sprout from George’s cuffs any moment now. He laughed — a dry, embarrassed little titter. “I thought you’d prefer money, old boy — when Mummy and I got married, all we seemed to get from people was bone china and sheets.”

George said: “Mr Haigh says he thinks he can rustle up an unused ’39 MG. Apparently the company owes him a favour.”

Suddenly sag-shouldered, the rector stared blankly out to sea. A broken fish crate floated past with two gulls standing on it face to face like a pair of bookends. The rector’s voice when it came back to George was thin and distant, filtered by the breeze.

“A motor car, George? Where do you think you’re going to get the petrol from to run a thing like that?”

George ducked his head inside the wheelhouse to check the compass course; stepping back, he found he had the cockpit to himself. With the engine switched off, there was only the slop and gurgle of his freshwater supply in its fifty-gallon tank, the irregular ticking of the autopilot and the creak of the planking on the frames as the hull flexed to fit the sea. He went below to put a kettle on the stove for coffee.

Down in the saloon, it was like being in an echo chamber full of noises. There were whispers, the rustle of dresses in a room, the sound of doors being opened and closed, a woman sobbing, a man’s distant laughter. No wonder people heard and saw such odd things when they sailed alone: listening to Calliope as she lolloped through the waves was a bit like putting one’s ear to a crack in the wall when one’s neighbours were throwing a party. It was lonely and cosy all at once.

He carried his mug of coffee back up to the wheelhouse and studied the horizon. About two miles off on the bow there were three ships steaming north in line, on course for Plymouth Sound. Warships, from the look of them. George focused his binoculars on them. Yes, that was the Navy: two destroyers and a frigate, out on manoeuvres. The frigate quivered unsteadily in the lenses as George took in its angular sharkishness, its immaculate paintwork of armoured grey. It was his colour — the colour of rain clouds, cinders, schoolboy trousers. As it headed closer, he could pick out its twin radar scanners rotating slowly on their stalks, and its big guns wrapped like parcels in tarpaulins.

He switched on the VHS to see if the warships were talking, and found the radio full of voices that made him start because they sounded so like his own. Younger, of course, and lighter in pitch; but George heard them as his voice. OK, Halifax, roger and out. He found himself repeating the words out loud as he watched the ships pass less than a mile to port. He followed them with the binoculars until they melted into the sky. Well, he’d had his chance to be on that course once. He’d be retired now anyway; and the chances were that he’d never have got beyond Commander; and he’d probably have found one of those girl scout service wives that Mr Haigh meant when he said “adequate”. He put the binoculars down and sipped his bitter instant coffee.

George and Angela were married by his father in his father’s church. The Haighs swept down from London in a Roman triumph, bringing hampers, top hats and tailcoats, cine equipment, two bridesmaids and a best man called Rodney whom Angela had found at a dance. Rodney had failed his Army medical on account of his asthma, and did quite a lot of this sort of thing, he said.

“Pity it’s too late to have a staggers,” he said on the wedding morning. “Had a bloody good staggers last week for a man called Tommy Jarvis.” Rodney had flap ears, tow hair and a spotty complexion which reminded George of a raspberry mousse. George was rather ashamed of him, but Angela called him Roo, out of the Winnie the Pooh books, and said he was a sweetie, really, who just adored making himself useful to people. George didn’t tell her that Rodney had just asked him for five pounds, which was what he called “the usual”.

But Angela was wonderful. She cut through the gloom of the rectory like a blaze of sudden light. She was so wonderful with other people, too. She asked George’s father how on earth he’d managed to find himself such a darling little church, and made the rector blush — a first, in George’s lifetime. To his mother she said she knew she couldn’t possibly hope to take as good care of Georgie as Mrs Grey had done, there was so much she didn’t know, so much to learn, and she just knew that in Mrs Grey she’d found a second mother, and wasn’t that too heavenly? George’s mother put her arms round Angela and cried fit to bust.

Angela neglected nobody. To Uncle Stephen and Aunt Eileen, who had come down from Scotland specially for the wedding and were staying at the rectory for a week, she said, “Oh, Scotland! I adore Scotland! It’s my very favourite! Do you have a simply huge castle?”

Uncle Stephen explained that they had a small house in the centre of Dumfries.

“Fibber!” Angela said. “You’re being modest, aren’t you? I don’t believe a word of it. Georgie? Your Uncle Stephen’s been leading me up the garden path.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, he has. He’s been telling me he’s only got a teeny little house in Scotland. I only have to look at him to see great big turrets and battlements, and acres and acres of wild romantic moorland absolutely swimming with grouse and funny old ghillies and salmon and stags and things. Don’t dare to disillusion me, darling, or I’ll die—”

George winked at his uncle and said, “Actually the King’s always trying to swap Balmoral for Uncle Stephen’s place, but Aunt Eileen won’t allow it because she says Balmoral would be far too poky for them.”

“You see!” Angela gave Uncle Stephen a skittish little push in the chest. “I knew. I’m always right. And I bet you’re a terrible old meanie to all your ghillies and people, too.”

Uncle Stephen and Aunt Eileen loved her. You could see. Though Angela’s wit was a bit above their heads. They weren’t used to the way that people talked in London. George supposed that Uncle Stephen’s managerial job (it had something to do with Scottish reservoirs) had never given him much of an entrée into Society.

The church service was, as Angela said afterwards, divine. George stood at the altar shivering with disbelief in his astounding luck. This was what grace meant, in the real, religious sense — a sort of marvellous, unasked-for providence that just descended on you, like that — from where else but heaven? He tasted the mouldysweet air of the church, felt Angela, veiled in a cloud of lace, standing close beside him, and believed absolutely in the existence of God for the first time since he was thirteen.

The organ music, Angela and Jesus were all mixed up with each other in a holy stew. Exalted, lost in the sheer wonder of the thing, George swam to his bride through a sea of beautiful words. His borrowed dress sword clanked on the stone as he and Angela kneeled together in front of his father, and George realized that if he was kneeling, it must be done already. He was — married.

He heard his father saying something about Isaac and Rebecca and heard his own voice crack on an Amen — the first word he’d ever spoken since becoming a Husband. He sneaked a glance at Angela’s clasped hands. The ring was there. He was aware of Rodney’s knees on an embroidered hassock just behind him, and of the folds of his father’s surplice out in front. Each cautious sensation — the sight of the worn red altar carpet, of the Mothers’ Union banner beyond the pulpit, of the grinning choirboy’s face in the front stall — was registered by George as an amazing novelty. So this was how the changed world looked to a married man.

Outside the church, Mr Haigh had set up his cine camera on a tripod. For several minutes, everyone was made to huddle in the porch, while Mr Haigh panned low over the wet tombstones in the churchyard. He filmed the old women from the village who were waiting by the wall, and a squall of rooks clattering into the sky from the elm trees. Then Angela and George walked arm in arm out of the church and down the gravel drive towards the lych-gate.

“Cut!” Mr Haigh shouted, and made them do it again.

They came out of church seven times. At George’s fifth step (amended to the seventh on Mr Haigh’s fourth take), they stopped, kissed, and Angela let a flower fall from her bouquet on to the gravel. Then they walked on towards the camera, unlinking their arms so that George could squeeze by on one side of Mr Haigh and Angela on the other.

“Do you remember the wedding sequence in von Stroheim’s ‘Greed’?” Mr Haigh asked George.

George’s father was talked into putting on full vestments and got three takes to himself. He strode through the nettles along the side of the church, robed in gold.

By now, the crowd from the village was packed along the churchyard wall. George saw Vivienne Beale there, and nodded at her, a star acknowledging a fan; and when the wedding party left through the gate, it was Vivienne Beale, George noticed, who threw the most confetti.

At the rectory, the Haighs had laid on a three-tiered wedding cake, smoked salmon, turkey breasts and a whole crate of Mumms champagne. Mr Lewis-White, the rector’s warden, said, “I haven’t seen a spread like this since war broke out,” while Uncle Stephen, who had a problem with rich foods, eyed the three trestle tables brought in from the church hall and said that in Scotland, of course, no-one saw much of the Black Market. Rodney’s speech (it was apparently included in the five pounds) went down rather badly. Mr Haigh said first that he wasn’t going to announce that he had lost a daughter and gained a son, then said it all the same. He seemed distracted, and kept on looking at his watch. George was desperate to be alone with Angela. Since becoming man and wife, they’d barely spoken; and at the reception Angela seemed like a glamorous intimidating stranger — the sort of person whom you see across a room but know you’re never going to meet.

At 2.45, and again at 3.00, Mr Haigh stood by the drawing room window gazing irritably across the uncut lawn to the fringe of trees that screened the rectory from the road. At 3.15, a hooded green MG TC arrived, driven by a man in a leather helmet and motoring gloves who said he had got lost trying to get off the Winchester by-pass.

At 4.00, George and Angela, filmed by Mr Haigh, left for Brighton in the green MG. Brighton had been picked for the single night of the honeymoon because it was reasonably convenient for Portsmouth, where George was due to join Hecla at 1600 hours the next day.) Angela drove, miraculously fast.

It was raining in Brighton and the sand-coloured sea came creaming slantwise up the beach in a south-westerly gale.

“Georgie, it’s far too rough for them to make you go tomorrow, it’s absurd!”

George, watching the sea through the net curtains of the hotel room, was inclined to agree: he’d been badly sick on Larkspur and dreaded the lumpy run down-Channel. Hecla was a “Woolworth carrier”—an old merchant ship, decked over to provide a skimpy flight deck for her twenty aircraft. She had a reputation as a bad roller. He said: “No, we’ll be fine, darling. There’s just a bit of a popple on the water.”

Dinner was dreadful. Angela sent hers back and told the waiter that she’d expected to come to a proper hotel and not to a fleabitten seaside boarding house. The waiter said that there was a war on.

Angela opened her eyes wide and said: “Really? Honestly and truly? A war? How utterly ghastly for you. Is it frightfully hush-hush, or can you tell us who it’s between?”

The waiter put on a frigid smile and beat a retreat to the pudding trolley.

Angela said, “Well, that épaté’d him, anyway. Oh, darling, I can’t bear to watch you eat yours, it looks perfectly disgusting … like dog-do!”

So George got very little dinner either.

The war had done for the hotel’s heating system and the room was damply cold. Though the windows were closed, the curtains stirred with the salty wind. The lamp by the bedside refused to work, the water in the bathroom was lukewarm and stained with rust. Angela complained of goose pimples and “blotches”.

“Oh, Georgie — I look such a frump, I hate myself. Hate! Hate! Hate!”

But the double bed with its stiff sheets was a glorious safe harbour. George and Angela lay in its warm shelter, listening to the gale rattling the window frames and to the dyspeptic gurgle of the hotel plumbing. It was, George thought, strangely like being a baby again, to be a married man. Their kisses now were soft and unhurried. Embracing, they were as moist and slippery as eels. George had a little difficulty with the rubber contraceptive. Angela helped.

Her sudden frantic violence always took him by surprise. Though her arms were tight around his neck, it was as if she’d taken leave of him. Pumping and thrashing, she came to her private climax, her voice a hoarse growl. “Georgie! Georgie! Don’t drown! Don’t drown! Don’t drown!”

He slept with his head cuddled to his wife’s breast.

He woke to laughter.

The water was chuckling against the hull — but it wasn’t that. The laugh was fuller, throatier, more like the rumble of a ship’s twin screws close by. But the sea was clear to the horizon. Fumes from the diesel must be getting to him. He stepped out of the wheelhouse into the cockpit. Where his father had been just a moment ago, Teddy was now sprawled in his scarlet University of Wisconsin tracksuit. Head thrown back, white teeth shining in the sun, he was banging a squash racket against his knee. And laughing.

“Oh, holy shit!” said Teddy and straightened himself up. “I’m sorry, fella.” Then he was off again.

“Oh, George, you sweet asshole! You wimp! You old scumbag!”