“What was it like? Before the war?” She knows she was alive then, a child, but it’s not what she means. Wireless, staticky Frank Bridge Variations a hairbrush for the tangled brain over the BBC Home Service, bottle of Montrachet, a gift from Pirate, cooling at the kitchen window.

“Well, now,” in his cracked old curmudgeon’s voice, palsied hand reaching out to squeeze her breast in the nastiest way he knows, “girly, it depends which war you mean,” and here it comes, ugh, ugh, drool welling at the corner of his lower lip and over and down in a silver string, he’s so clever, he’s practiced all these disgusting little—

“Don’t be ridic, I’m serious, Roger. I don’t remember.” Watches dimples come up either side of his mouth as he considers this, smiling at her in an odd way. It’ll be like this when I’m thirty … flash of several children, a garden, a window, voices Mummy, what’s … cucumbers and brown onions on a chopping board, wild carrot blossoms sprinkling with brilliant yellow a reach of deep, very green lawn and his voice—

“All I remember is that it was silly. Just overwhelmingly silly. Nothing happened. Oh, Edward VIII abdicated. He fell in love with—”

“I know that, I can read magazines. But what was it like?”

“Just… just damned silly, that’s all. Worrying about things that don’t—Jess, can’t you really remember?”

Games, pinafores, girl friends, a black alley kitten with white little feet, holidays all the family by the sea, brine, frying fish, donkey rides, peach taffeta, a boy named Robin…

“Nothing that’s really gone, that I can’t ever find again.”

“Oh. Whereas my memories—”

“Yes?” They both smile.

“One took lots of aspirin. One was drinking or drunk much of the time. One was concerned about getting one’s lounge suits to fit properly. One despised the upper classes but tried desperately to behave like them… .”

“And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—” Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can’t bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making a nice recovery, and by now she’s ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle, elbow—

But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed—the casement window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam again as all the house still shudders.

Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring in pain. The invisible train rushes away close over the rooftop… .

They sit still as the painted dogs now, silent, oddly unable to touch. Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me.

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(1)

TDY Abreaction Ward

St. Veronica’s Hospital