shrubbery at the back of the summer-house. I didn’t notice them at first because they were almost entirely hidden by rhododendron bushes. They reminded me of the rugs half hidden beneath the tennis net.
Colin Gregg was going away again on Monday. He was being sent somewhere dangerous, he didn’t know where, but I’d heard Betty saying to my mother that she could feel in her bones it was dangerous. When my mother had revealed that she intended to visit Mrs Latham that evening I’d said to myself that she’d arranged the visit so that Colin Gregg and Betty could spend the evening on their own in our kitchen. But on the way back from the pictures they’d gone into the summer-house, their special place.
Even now I can’t think why I behaved like Belle Frye, unable to resist something. It was silly curiosity, and yet at the time I think it may have seemed more than just that. In some vague way I wanted to have something nice to think about, not just my imagining the war, and my prayers for Dick’s safety and my concern with people’s eternal lives. I wanted to see Betty and Colin Gregg together. I wanted to feel their happiness, and to see it.
It was then, while I was actually thinking that, that I realized something was the matter. I realized I’d been stupid to assume they could take the short-cut through the garden: you couldn’t take the short-cut if you were coming from the town on a bicycle because you had to go through fields. You’d come by the lanes, and if you wanted to go to the summer-house you’d have to turn back and go there specially. It seemed all wrong that they should do that when they were meant to be back in the farmhouse by eight o’clock.
I should have turned and gone away. In the evening light I was unable to see the bicycles clearly, but even so I was aware that neither of them was Betty’s. They passed out of my sight as I approached one of the summer- house’s two small windows.
I could see nothing. Voices murmured in the summer-house, not saying anything, just quietly making sounds. Then a man’s voice spoke more loudly, but I still couldn’t hear what was being said. A match was struck and in a sudden vividness I saw a man’s hand and a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes on the table, and then I saw my mother’s face. Her reddish hair was untidy and she was smiling. The hand that had been on the table put a cigarette between her lips and another hand held the match to it. I had never in my life seen my mother smoking a cigarette before.
The match went out and when another one was struck it lit up the face of a man who worked in Blow’s drapery. My mother and he were sitting facing one another at the table, on the two chairs with the red plush seats.
Betty was frying eggs at the range when I returned to the kitchen. Colin Gregg had had a puncture in his back tyre. They hadn’t even looked yet to see if I was upstairs. I said we’d all forgotten the time at the Fryes’, playing cards.
In bed I kept remembering that my mother’s eyes had been different, not like they’d been for a long time, two dark-blue sparks. I kept saying to myself that I should have recognized her bicycle in the bushes because its mudguards were shaped like a V, not rounded like the mudguards of modern bicycles.
I heard Colin and Betty whispering in the yard and then the sound of his bicycle as he rode away and then, almost immediately, the sound of my mother’s bicycle and Betty saying something quietly and my mother quietly replying. I heard them coming to bed, Betty first and my mother twenty minutes later. I didn’t sleep, and for the first time in my life I watched the sky becoming brighter when morning began to come. I heard my mother getting up and going out to do the milking.
At breakfast-time it was as though none of it had happened, as though she had never sat on the red plush chair in the summer-house, smoking cigarettes and smiling at a man from a shop. She ate porridge and brown bread, reading a book:
That day was horrible. Betty tried to be cheerful, upset because Colin Gregg was being sent to somewhere dangerous. But you could feel the effort of her trying and when she thought no one was looking, when my mother and Colin were talking to one another, her face became unhappy. I couldn’t stop thinking about my father. Colin Gregg went back to the war.
A month went by. My mother continued to say she was going to see Mrs Latham and would leave Betty and me in the kitchen about once a week.
‘Whatever’s the matter with Matilda?’ I heard Betty saying to her once, and later my mother asked me if I had a stomach ache. I used to sit there at the table trying to understand simultaneous equations, imagining my mother in the summer-house, the two bicycles half hidden in the bushes, the cigarettes and the ashtray.
‘The capital of India,’ I would say. ‘Don’t tell me; I know it.’
‘Begins with a “D”,’ Betty would prompt.
He came to the kitchen one evening. He ate cabbage and baked potatoes and fish pie, chewing the cabbage so carefully you couldn’t help noticing. He was scrawny, with a scrawny nose. His teeth were narrowly crowded, his whole face pulled out to an edge, like a chisel. His hair was parted in the middle and oiled. His hands were clean, with tapering fingers. I was told his name but I didn’t listen, not wishing to know it.
‘Where’d you get the fish?’ he asked my mother in a casual way. His head was cocked a little to one side. He was smiling with his narrow teeth, making my mother flustered as she used to get in the past, when my father was alive. She was even beginning to blush, not that I could see a cause for it. She said:
‘Betty, where did you get the cod?’
‘Croker’s,’ Betty said.
Betty smiled at him and my mother said quickly that Croker’s were always worth trying in case they’d got any fish in, although of course you could never tell. It sounded silly the way she said it.
‘I like fish,’ he said.
‘We must remember that.’
‘They say it’s good for you,’ Betty said.
‘I always liked fish,’ the man said. ‘From a child I’ve enjoyed it.’
‘Eat it up now,’ my mother ordered me.
‘Don’t you like fish, Matilda?’ he said.
Betty laughed. ‘Matilda doesn’t like lots of things. Fish, carrots, eggs. Semolina. Ground rice. Custard. Baked apples, gravy, cabbage.’
He laughed, and my mother laughed. I bent my head over the plate I was eating from. My face had gone as
