‘It may seem solemn and young to you. Don’t flatter yourself I’m the victim of remorse. I’m not. One has to go through with these things, I’ve decided. But don’t let’s blow on the ashes.’

‘We wouldn’t have to blow very hard.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘You admit that, do you?’

‘Yes. But I don’t want to do it.’

‘Why? Because of Pomeroy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to marry him, after all?’

‘I don’t know. He’s ridiculously class-conscious about sex. He’s completely uneducated in some ways, but—I don’t know. If he knew about last year he’d take it very badly, and I can’t marry him without telling him.’

‘Well,’ said Watchman suddenly, ‘don’t expect me to be chivalrous and decent. I imagine chivalry and decency don’t go with sex-education and freedom anyway. Don’t be a fool, Decima. You know you think it would be rather fun.’

He pulled her towards him. Decima muttered, ‘No, you don’t,’ and suddenly they were struggling fiercely. Watchman thrust her back till her shoulders were against the bank. As he stooped his head to kiss her, she wrenched one hand free and struck him clumsily but with violence, across the mouth.

‘You—’ said Watchman.

She scrambled to her feet and stood looking down at him.

‘I wish to God,’ she said savagely, ‘that you’d never come back.’

There was a moment’s silence.

Watchman, too, had got to his feet. They looked into each other’s eyes; and then, with a gesture that, for all its violence and swiftness suggested the movement of an automaton, he took her by the shoulders and kissed her. When he had released her they moved apart stiffly with no eloquence in either of their faces or figures.

Decima said, ‘You’d better get out of here. If you stay here it’ll be the worse for you. I could kill you. Get out.’

They heard the thud of footsteps on turf, and Cubitt and Sebastian Parish came over the brow of the hillock.

CHAPTER 4
The Evening in Question

Watchman, Cubitt and Parish lunched together in the taproom. Miss Darragh did not appear. Cubitt and Parish had last seen her sucking her brush and gazing with complacence at an abominable sketch. She was still at work when they came up with Watchman and Decima. At lunch, Watchman was at some pains to tell the others how he and Decima Moore met by accident, and how they had fallen to quarrelling about the Coombe Left Movement.