went and kissed her instead. The skin of her face felt like crinkled paper.
‘I’ve had a very happy day,’ she said when Belle Frye and I had reached the kitchen door. ‘I’ve had a lovely day,’ she said, not seeming to be talking to us but to herself. She was crying, and she smiled in the lamplight, looking straight ahead of her. ‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘Yet again.’
We didn’t know what she was talking about and presumed she meant the tennis party. ‘Yet again,’ Belle Frye repeated as we crossed the stable-yard. She spoke in a soppy voice because she was given to soppiness. ‘Poor Mrs Ashburton!’ she said, beginning to cry herself, or pretending to. ‘Imagine being eighty-one,’ she said. ‘Imagine sitting in a kitchen and remembering all the other tennis parties, knowing you’d have to die soon. Race you,’ Belle Frye said, forgetting to be soppy any more.
Going home, Joe and Arthur sat in the back of the truck with Dick and Betty. Colin Gregg had ridden off on his bicycle, and Mr Bowe had driven away with Mrs Tissard beside him and Mr Tissard and Miss Sweet in the dickey of his Morris Cowley. My mother, my father and myself were all squashed into the front of the truck, and there was so little room that my father couldn’t change gear and had to drive all the way to the farm in first. In the back of the truck Joe and Arthur and Dick were singing, but Betty wasn’t, and I could imagine Betty just sitting there, staring, thinking about Colin Gregg. In Betty’s bedroom there were photographs of Clark Gable and Ronald Colman, and Claudette Colbert and the little Princesses. Betty was going to marry Colin, I kept saying to myself in the truck. There’d be other tennis parties and Betty would be older and would know her own mind, and Colin Gregg would ask her and she’d say yes. It was very beautiful, I thought, as the truck shuddered over the uneven back avenue of Challacombe Manor. It was as beautiful as the tennis party itself, the white dresses and Betty’s long hair, and everyone sitting and watching in the sunshine, and evening slowly descending. ‘Well, that’s the end of that,’ my father said, and he didn’t seem to be talking about the tennis party because his voice was too serious for that. He repeated a conversation he’d had with Mr Bowe and one he’d had with Mr Race, but I didn’t listen because his voice was so lugubrious, not at all like it had been at the tennis party. I was huddled on my mother’s knees, falling asleep. I imagined my father was talking about Lloyd’s Bank again, and I could hear my mother agreeing with him.
I woke up when my mother was taking off my dress in my bedroom.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Is it because the tennis party’s over? Why’s everyone so sad?’
My mother shook her head, but I kept asking her because she was looking sorrowful herself and I wasn’t sleepy any more. In the end she sat on the edge of my bed and said that people thought there was going to be another war against the Germans.
‘Germans?’ I said, thinking of the grey, steely people that Mrs Ashburton had so, often told me about, the people who ate black bread.
It would be all right, my mother said, trying to smile. She told me that we’d have to make special curtains for the windows so that the German aeroplanes wouldn’t see the lights at night. She told me there’d probably be sugar rationing.
I lay there listening to her, knowing now why Mrs Ashburton had said that yet again it was all over, and knowing what would happen next. I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t help thinking about it: my father would go away, and Dick would go also, and Joe and Arthur and Betty’s Colin Gregg. I would continue to attend Miss Pritchard’s School and then I’d go on to the Grammar, and my father would be killed. A soldier would rush at my father with a bayonet and twist the bayonet in my father’s stomach, and Dick would do the same to another soldier, and Joe and Arthur would be missing in the trenches, and Colin Gregg would be shot.
My mother kissed me and told me to say my prayers before I went to sleep. She told me to pray for the peace to continue, as she intended to do herself. There was just a chance, she said, that it might.
She went away and I lay awake, beginning to hate the Germans and not feeling ashamed of it, like Mrs Ashburton was. No German would ever have played tennis that day, I thought; no German would have stood around having tea and sandwiches and meringues, smacking away the midges when night came. No German would ever have tried to recapture the past, or would have helped an old woman to do so, like my mother and my father had done, and Mr Race and Mr Bowe and Mr Throataway and Mrs Garland, and Betty and Dick and Colin Gregg. The Germans weren’t like that. The Germans wouldn’t see the joke when my father said that for all he knew Lloyd’s Bank owned Mrs Ashburton.
I didn’t pray for the peace to continue, but prayed instead that my father and Dick might come back when the war was over. I didn’t pray that Joe and Arthur and Colin Gregg should come back since that would be asking too much, because some men had to be killed, according to Mrs Ashburton’s law of averages. I hadn’t understood her when Mrs Ashburton had said that cruelty was natural in wartime, but I understood now. I understood her law of averages and her sitting alone in her dark kitchen, crying over the past. I cried myself, thinking of the grass growing on her tennis court, and the cruelty that was natural.
My father came back twice to the farm, unexpectedly, without warning. He walked into the kitchen, the first time one Thursday morning when there was nobody there, the second time on a Thursday afternoon.
My mother told us how on the first occasion she’d been crossing the yard with four eggs, all that the hens had laid, and how she’d sensed that something was different. The sheepdogs weren’t in the yard, where they usually were at this time. Vaguely she’d thought that that was unusual. Hours later, when Betty and Dick and I came in from school, our parents were sitting at the kitchen table, talking. He was still in his army uniform. The big brown teapot was on the table, and two cups with the dregs of tea in them, and bread on the bread-board, and butter and blackberry jam. There was a plate he’d eaten a fry from, with the marks of egg-yolk on it. Even now it seems like yesterday. He smiled a slow, teasing smile at us, as though mocking the emotion we felt at seeing him there, making a joke even of that. Then Betty ran over to him and hugged him. I hugged him too. Dick stood awkwardly.
The second time he returned he walked into the kitchen at half past four, just after I’d come in from school. I was alone, having my tea.
‘Hullo, Matilda,’ he said.
I was nearly eleven then. Betty was sixteen and Dick was seventeen. Dick wasn’t there that second time: he’d gone into the army himself. Betty had left the Grammar School and was helping my mother to keep the farm going. I was still at Miss Pritchard’s.
I was going to be pretty, people used to say, although I couldn’t see it myself. My hair had a reddish tinge, like my mother’s, but it was straight and uninteresting. I had freckles, which I hated, and my eyes were a shade of blue I didn’t much care for either. I detested being called Matilda. Betty and Dick, I considered, were much nicer names, and Betty was beautiful now. My friend Belle Frye was getting to be beautiful also. She claimed to have Spanish blood in her, though it was never clear where it came from. Her hair was jet-black and her skin, even in the middle of winter, was almost as deeply brown as her eyes. I’d have loved to look like her and to be called Belle Frye, which I thought was a marvellous name.
