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  “Yes, all right,” said Peter, “but stop talking so loudly! And I don’t like lobster. I’ll have something plain.”

  “Ham?” suggested Rupert, and ordered iced soup, ham, hot rolls, lobster salad, deviled chicken, minted new potatoes, raspberry fizz, two cold beers, and Neapolitan ices with strawberries to follow.

  “Are you sure you have enough money?” asked Clarry, as this appalling array of food was piled all around them. “What if you haven’t?”

  “We’ll leave you to wash the dishes, and me and Pete’ll run for it,” said Rupert cheerfully. “Come on, tell me the news! Have you had any more parties? Has Mr. Morgan taught you how to play his Spanish guitar? How is lovely Vanessa? Why aren’t you in Cornwall? Did they miss me at school, Pete, when I wasn’t there for speech day?”

  But it was impossible to talk properly, impossible even to believe they were here, in this ridiculous hotel, and that here was Rupert, and that very soon, in less than an hour, he would be gone, and meanwhile he had bought them all this food, so how could they not eat it, and suddenly there was less than thirty minutes for him to catch his train, so here was another cab, lurching horribly at the bends, and Rupert would be leaving them at the station, and how could you say good-bye in a cab?

  It was awful. He was gone. Clarry and Peter walked silently home together, parted without words, and spent the afternoon being clammily, privately sick.

  Thirteen

  CLARRY HAD TO KEEP REMINDING herself that the thing that mattered most of all was that Rupert was happy. Every day, while her family complained, Clarry remembered the happiness of Rupert. The grandparents actually planned to visit him in his training camp, in an effort to intervene. They even demanded that Clarry’s father should go along with them.

  “I don’t see what I could possibly be expected to do,” he said petulantly to Clarry. “It’s not as if we . . . the boy . . . Rupert and I . . . were close.”

  “No,” agreed Clarry, and wrote to warn Rupert:

  The grandparents and Father are coming to see you. They think there still might be a way of getting you back.

  “I think Rupert really loves being in camp with his friends,” she said to her father. “Can’t you tell the grandparents not to worry?”

  “Not to worry about the waste of years and years of expensive education? Not to worry that there is a chance that their grandson will be at war? Of course he won’t, he’s not even trained and it will be over by Christmas, but even so . . . no, Clarry, I don’t think I can tell them not to worry.”

  He went off with them a day or two later, and came back in a temper.

  “Blasted boy turned up on a motorbike,” he fumed. “Told us he was planning to buy a banjo! I didn’t hear an intelligent remark from him all afternoon, let alone a word of apology to anyone. He sent you his love, for what it’s worth.”

  “Did you give him that cake Mrs. Morgan and I made for him?” asked Clarry.

  “I didn’t go all that way to deliver cake!” snapped her father, and stamped grumpily away.

  Grandfather has gone to London to see a friend who might help him, wrote Clarry to Rupert. The friend is in the army. He still wants to get you out. What are you doing all this time in camp?

  Lots of things! wrote back Rupert. Trick biking (I am getting really good at jumps). Cooking (once we roasted a whole pig), signaling with Morse code and field telephones, tremendous games of football, thirty players on each side, more sometimes, miles and miles of exploring. We make maps afterward of villages, and orchards, and where to find mushrooms, and pubs with warm fires.

  Clarry, who had no idea how much had been left out of this description, thought it sounded wonderful. Peter was back at school for the autumn term and so not able to share Rupert’s letter, but Vanessa read it. Vanessa said, “That poor pig, but I do love cracklings! They did it on a spit, just like in the olden days.”

  “Did they?”

  “Well, that’s what it looked like. He drew a little picture in his letter to me. . . . I think he’s enjoying himself. But what will he do next? Everyone except my dad says the war will be over by Christmas. . . . Clarry?”

  “What?” Clarry jerked herself back from the last words she had noticed. In his letter to me . . .

  “I know he wants to be sent abroad. . . .”

  “Does he?”

  “So he says. But there are awful casualties already. They bring them back on trains.”

  “Trains?”

  “From France.”

  “But there’s sea. How . . .”

  “Oh, Clarry, of course they put them on ships in between! I might be a nurse. A VAD. The VAD is the Voluntary Aid Detachment. Think how wonderful I’d be!”

  “But what about living in Paris, designing beautiful clothes?”

  “Well, obviously that’s off, until afterward at least. I’m leaving school, anyway.”

  “Vanessa!”

  “Well, I’m a dunce, Clarry, let’s face it! My dad’s being recalled to active service in the navy. He was hardly retired for even a year. Simon’s away at school. So Mum wants to close the house and go and stay with her aunt, my great-aunt that is. She lives in a village nine or ten miles out of town. And I’m bored with school, I’d rather do something real. I’d be a wonderful nurse, I can’t bear sick people! I’d have them better in no time, just to stop them annoying me!”

  Clarry laughed and said, “But are you old enough?”

  “Probably, and I’m so tall I can look older if necessary!”

  “That’s cheating!”

  “Everybody cheats!”

  “What did your dad say about the war, Vanessa?”

  “Easier to start than finish,” said Vanessa, suddenly serious, “and definitely not over by Christmas, this year or next.”

  Vanessa’s father was right. Christmas came, with no Rupert returning. Vanessa was away training and Simon was with his mother and his great-aunt. However, on Christmas morning, Peter produced gifts for the first time in his life: a pencil box filled with pencils and a tiny knife to sharpen them with for Clarry, and a Christmas card for his father, a careful engraving of a big plain building surrounded by fields and beech trees.

  “Er?” said his father, looking at it.

  “It’s school,” said Peter helpfully. “The art master made Christmas cards to help raise money for the chapel roof. That’s the chapel. That’s my form room this year. That’s the door for staff and visitors, but we have to go in at the side. You can’t see where I sleep because the dorms are round the back. I thought you might be interested.”

  “Well, thank you,” said his father. “Very . . . er . . . thoughtful. What’s this, then, Clarry?”

  Clarry, who had hurried forward with her own presents before Peter made any more pointed remarks, said, “Open it! Happy Christmas, Father! There’s yours, Peter! Happy Christmas to you too!”

  It was a scarf for each of them, knitted by herself, green for her father, striped dark and light blue for Peter.

  “That’s actually quite nice,” said Peter, sounding very surprised indeed, and Clarry’s father said, “So that’s what you’ve been up to!” as if he had been worried about far worse, and then completely stunned them both by producing two small packages of his own.

  In each was a watch, an actual silver watch, ticking.

  Peter was so startled that he let down his guard enough to exclaim, “Gosh! Gosh!” while Clarry stared at hers with tears running down her cheeks. How often had she tiptoed down two flights of stairs from her room to check the time in the hall? Or raced across town, fearing she was late, pausing by shop windows, searching for clocks?

  “Thank you,” she said at last. “A watch will help with everything! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  And so, despite no Rupert and no party, the extreme toughness of Clarry’s roast chicken, and the oddness of her Christmas pudding, it was quite a happy day in the tall narrow house.

  In the New Year they had news from Rupert that
he was being posted to France. He sent a jubilant letter to Clarry.

  Nothing could be better! Bonjour, la belle France, and good-bye, dusty old Oxford! Clarry, I rely on you and Peter to pass on all the gossip!

  “Hurrah!” said Clarry. “The grandparents won’t be able to get him now, however many people Grandfather goes to talk to in London!”

  “Are you mad?” asked Peter. “La belle France! I bet he doesn’t even know what he’s fighting for.”

  “He’s not fighting. He’s not a proper soldier,” said Clarry. “He wants some fun, that’s all.”

  “There’s wanting fun,” said Peter, “and there’s shooting people!”

  “Rupert would never shoot anyone!”

  Peter looked at the photograph that had arrived with the letter. It showed Rupert in uniform, holding a gun. He had signed it: Au revoir, mes amis! À bientôt!

  “He thinks he’s in France already,” said Peter. “I suppose he won’t have to shoot anyone if he can get close enough. That’s a bayonet fitting on his gun.”

  “What’s a bayonet fitting?” asked Clarry.

  “It’s a long, thin . . .” Peter suddenly stopped. What use, after all, to frighten Clarry? He tried to speak more flippantly. “Rupert had better watch out for German boys. They might want some fun too.”

  But it was hard to hide the despair he felt, for Clarry in this comfortless house, for ridiculous Rupert, for the summers that were so far away, for all the Ruperts and Clarrys caught up in this hardly understood war, and for himself, and his aching stiffened leg that would always hold him apart. Presently he reached out for Clarry’s hand, and later he began to cry, and after a while Clarry whispered, “Does it hurt?” and he said, “Yes. Yes, it does. I’m sorry.”

  Fourteen

  THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS ENDED, PETER went away again, and Clarry took the Christmas cards off the mantelpiece. She kept the engraving of the school by the beech trees and looked at it often. Rupert used to complain that it was a very long wet walk from anywhere and she could completely see what he meant. And he wrote to her from France:

  We are staying in an old farmhouse. There is an enormous hearth, you could stand six Clarrys in a line under the chimney! We light great fires there and roast chestnuts. A little cat comes to sit with us. Her name is Mina. We buy bags of chestnuts at the market and apple cider, and once, oh, Clarry, terrible shining pink sausages made of TRIPE. Here comes Mina just now with a mouse! Am I supposed to roast it with my chestnuts?

  It sounded safe enough, as far as Clarry could tell. At that time her life was almost blank when it came to news of the war. Her father never left his newspapers about. Whatever Peter knew he didn’t communicate. Vanessa might have been useful, but she was suddenly busy in a hospital at Southampton that she had wheedled her way into through a friend of her mother’s. Vanessa seemed to be constantly exhausted and constantly in love.

  “Goodness, Clarry, it’s glorious!” she told her. “Glorious and awful and exciting all together. So, so different from school! And I’m useful! I’ve never been useful before! I’m doing my patriotic duty! Hurrah!”

  The war had brought new words and phrases and that was one of them. “Patriotic duty.” Mrs. Morgan used it too. Mrs. Morgan said she no longer had time to waste with such things as cleaning the front steps, or queuing to buy lamb chops for Clarry’s father’s dinner. “I should be doing other things,” she told him when, pinch-faced with temper, he sent away his lentil soup. “I could be doing my patriotic duty and packing shells for twice what I get paid here, and more thanks too!”

  “Shells,” that was another word that became more often used. “Shells,” and “shellfire.” Always when Clarry heard it, her mind jumped to the fans and spirals and fragile treasures she had collected on the Cornish beaches, summer after summer. Pink and white and daffodil yellow. Pearl and indigo blue. “A rain of falling shells,” Clarry caught the phrase one day as she hurried home from school. It sounded entrancing.

  But the words that she heard most often were “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Over and over, when the post was late, or the streets not swept, or when the school-dinner fish was even less appealing than usual. There was a war on, and Clarry made herself consider it: actual war, armies, nothing to do with a rainbow shower of seashells. Fighting.

  How did an army fight?

  On the other side of the river from Clarry’s home the town was full of troops, but Clarry, closing the front door quietly in the early morning, or trudging home in the gray dusk laden with schoolwork, saw nothing of this. The only armies she had ever seen had been in the toy-shop window. Often she had paused to admire the soldiers there, armed to the teeth, arranged in patterns on a bright green cloth. Miniature horses, drummer boys, foot soldiers, and captains under flags, bright and neat as scarlet paint could make them, lined up in squares and diamonds against another army, equally delicious, in silver and blue.

  “Charge!” Clarry expected someone would cry, when all was arranged and the wind had caught the flags just right, and the horses were beginning to prance. Then there would be a great rushing forward and mingling of colors and the buglers would blow vivid encouraging notes and at the end the patterns would be completely rearranged on the bright green grass. The new patterns would show who had won and advanced, and who had lost and been pushed back, and that, Clarry supposed, was how a battle was fought, except with real people.

  But even with real people, in Clarry’s mind, the event was essentially the same. The armies rested at night. The horses were taken care of. The green grass was as clean and crisp at the end as it had been at the beginning. That was Clarry’s understanding of a battle, and if someone had told her the soldiers did not fight on Wednesday afternoons and Sundays she would not have been surprised.

  At school any war gossip was quickly subdued. Of course, in morning assembly they prayed for the army, except on Fridays, when, perhaps because it was fish for lunch, the navy had its turn. “ ‘For those in peril on the sea!’ ” sang the girls, and of course the seas were perilous, that was well known from poetry.

  The numbers included in Those in Our Thoughts Today were slightly increasing, and from time to time a girl’s shoulders might shake when a particular name was read, but that was all. The no-fussing tradition was extremely useful in times of war. It was all very vague and distant. Rupert was in France, and Peter did not approve, but so far as Clarry knew, the only certain awfulness that her cousin had had to bear was the shining pink sausages.

  “What is tripe?” she asked Mrs. Morgan one evening.

  “Very delicate,” said Mrs. Morgan. “I do a tripe supper for Mr. Morgan on his birthday with milk sauce and onions.”

  “Rupert had it in sausages,” Clarry told her.

  “French?” asked Mrs. Morgan.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I daresay worse will come to him than tripe over there.”

  “What?” asked Clarry fearfully.

  “Garlic,” said Mrs. Morgan, slapping a dreadful gray dishcloth all over the table. “Frogs! Snails! Wait till he comes to a plateful of snails! Move your elbows, I can’t wipe round you! There! I’ll be off. I’ve done you and your father a pot of broth to hot up. Mutton. Should last two days. Can you stew some apples for after?”

  “Of course,” said Clarry.

  “Then I’ll be off and you stop worrying about your cousin. He’s the sort who can take care of himself.” That was true, and that was how, through the silence of the people around her, the stoicism at school, the absence of newspapers, and the terrible cooking of Mrs. Morgan, Clarry remained almost entirely ignorant of what was going on in France.

  Fifteen

  RUPERT WAS DEALING WITH HOMESICKNESS by writing letters. There were rules about this. They weren’t supposed to mention where they were, or details of what they were doing or who was doing it with them. Or even the weather, but everyone did write about the weather, and it generally got through uncensored. After all, should a German spy m
anage to get hold of the mailbag, would it really surprise him to discover that it had been another rainy day for the British? The armies were so close together that if the British were getting rained on, then the Germans would be equally soggy.

  Sending letters was free, and everybody wrote them. Rupert and his friends filled bagfuls every day. Rupert didn’t very much mind not being able to describe what they were doing, because so far it hadn’t felt like war. They’d been working on a new base camp, miles behind the front lines in Belgium and France.

  So far Rupert had spent his time unpacking stores; building a cookhouse, a dining room, and a washroom; organizing a football team; and dismantling, cleaning, and putting back together the battery’s new heavy guns. The guns would have been more exciting if they had had more ammunition. Then they could have practiced firing them more than once a week, not that he would have been allowed to write home about that.

  Clarry’s letters were the easiest. Chestnuts and the little cat Mina had been followed by his new skills at cooking, the eerie sounds of foxes in the middle of the night, and the difficulty of getting hold of banjo strings. Vanessa had different information, in case she and Clarry should happen to share.Vanessa had the sea journey (because her father was in the navy), the marketplace, and a good-bye in French (Bonne chance, bonne nuit, ma belle amie; he and Vanessa always did silly good-byes on their letters). The thin lovely girl he had met in Ireland had a mixture of Clarry’s and Vanessa’s letters, with Vanessa’s ending. She was in England now, in London, where her grandparents lived. His own grandparents got a postcard telling them not to worry and sending his love to Lucy the pony. The girl with pink lipstick who had cheered him up at the station café got a postcard too, although he didn’t know her name. He drew a picture of her smiling face above the name of the café, wrote the station and the town, and hoped it would reach her. He thought it probably would.