‘Ah.’ She looked at the coach. ‘I was so pleased. We were only expecting a few.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Now she was near I saw that it wasn’t dandruff in her hair, it was wood-ash.

Hilda buttoned up her coat. ‘Excuse me, do you know somebody called Lesley Featherstone?’ she asked.

It made a change, for somebody else to ask this question. It made Lesley real again.

But the woman hadn’t heard; she was walking back towards the camp fire.

There were lots of Lesleys there, but none of them the right one. By lots, I mean they looked like her; I even saw the odd bobble-hat. They sat huddled round the fires, bundled up like crones. One of them smoked a pipe. Living outdoors had not only aged them, it had desexed them; they weren’t like women at all. None of them took any notice of Hilda and me, as we edged our way through the bushes, past their rumpled nests, flimsily roofed with plastic, past their clothes hung out to dry—or, in this weather, to stiffen. I averted my eye from their sleeping bags, so rudely exposed. They reminded me of my own belongings, flung out into the open to. be gazed upon by strangers. But these women had a choice. This time last week, I realized with surprise, I was walking up my own street for the last time.

Hilda gripped my arm. ‘I don’t want my clock back, actually,’ she confided. ‘Its insides kept falling out.’

She squeezed my arm. I felt uneasy; it must be this place. It was odd to be amongst so many women who hadn’t tried to make themselves attractive. Hilda, at least, wore matching boots and handbag.

Lesleys had come and gone, we heard. Lesley from New Zealand; another one; somebody called Les but the woman who remembered her had gone, now. None of them remembered our Lesley. We trudged through the mud. It was mostly Hilda who asked, virgin to sort-of-virgins. They weren’t alike, she and these peace women—God knows there was little resemblance—but they were similar in that I didn’t feel pulled, as a bloke, into some sort of battleground. Funny how, when I thought about women, military words cropped up. Eleni had called her make-up ‘war paint’.

We moved out of the mud, onto some yellowed turf. Tut-tutting, Hilda took out a handkerchief and rubbed her boots. Through the fence I could see no missiles, jutting like male members into the sky. All I saw was drab, wintry countryside. Hilda didn’t know where they were kept, nor did I, but a blue-nosed woman in a beret told us that all the nuclear warheads were kept underground.

‘Like marriage,’ I joked. ‘You don’t realize they’re there until one day—whoosh!’