She trips fussing about the dormitory, bothering other girls for puffs off of stale Woodbines, nylon-repair kits, sparrow-bright war-wisecracks passing for sympathy. Tonight she’ll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn’t. Does she? She can’t remember ever being so confused. When she’s with Roger it’s all love, but at any distance—any at all, Jack—she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall away melting to the coverlet coming there’s only room for Roger, Roger, oh love to the end of breath. But out of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness, run deeper than the War, the winter: he hates England so, hates “the System,” gripes endlessly, says he’ll emigrate when the War’s over, stays inside his paper cynic’s cave hating himself… and does she want to bring him out, really? Isn’t it safer with Jeremy? She tries not to allow this question in too often, but it’s there. Three years with Jeremy. They might as well be married. Three years ought to count for something. Daily, small stitches and easings. She’s worn old Beaver’s bathrobes, brewed his tea and coffee, sought his eye across lorry-parks, day rooms and rainy mud fields when all the day’s mean, dismal losses could be rescued in the one look—familiar, full of trust, in a season when the word is invoked for quaintness or a minor laugh. And to rip it all out? three years? for this erratic, self-centered—boy, really. Weepers, he’s supposed to be past thirty, he’s years older than she. He ought to’ve learned something, surely? A man of experience?

The worst of it’s that she has no one to talk to. The politics of this mixed battery, the professional incest, the unwholesome obsessions with who said what to whom in the spring of 1942 for God’s sake, outside of Grafty Green, Kent, or someplace, and who ought to have answered what but didn’t but told someone else instead thus provoking hatreds that have thrived wonderfully down to the present day—six years of slander, ambition and hysteria make confiding anything to anyone around here an act of pure masochism.

“Girl in distress, Jess?” Maggie Dunkirk on the way by, smoothing her gauntlets. On the Tannoy a BBC swing band is blaring hotly syncopated Christmas music.

“Got a fag, Mag?” pretty automatic by now, you guess, Jess?

Well— “Thought it looked somewhat like a bloody Garbo film around here, not at all the usual nicotine starvation, sorry wrong again, ta-ta… .”

Oh be on your way. “Thinking about me Xmas shopping.”

“What’re you getting the Beaver then.”

Concentrating on gartering her nylons, the older pair, up-in-front-down-in-back mnemonically stirring in wafts among her fingers, laundry-white puckered elastic being stretched fine and tangent now to the gentle front curve of her thigh, suspender-clips glittering silver under or behind her lacquered red fingernails, passing like distant fountains behind red topiary trees, Jessica replies, “Oh. Mm. A Pipe, I suppose… .”