The summer sun had tanned her face and hands and left a V shape on her neck. The rest of her was milky, almost transparent. Her nipples were magenta, the colour of lips stained with red wine. She was soft yet firm. The coarse hairs under her arms and between her legs presented themselves as a surprise that interrupted her smoothness. She had a mole on her hip. He caught her staring at his freckled shoulders with equal fascination and wonder. They explored one another with a frankness that felt refreshing and pure, although it should have made them colour, the places their lips, tongues and fingers found. The things they did to one another. As he climbed on top of her and then inside her, she smiled, almost lazily; an acceptance of a magnificent inevitability. It was feverish, furious and reckless. He grunted and quivered; she moaned and shook. It felt astonishing. It felt crucial and true. They merged; she was in every fibre of his body. For the first time since France, he saw a body as something other than an ugly tool used to dam up the onslaught of war. A feeling of bliss and possibility built and built inside him, so wonderful it was almost fearful. He was bearing an intolerable weight, feeling a relentless and incredible thirst. He let it go. At once the weight was lifted, the thirst quenched. He wanted to scream out, but she put her hand over his mouth and instead he made a sound that was neither a howl nor a bark but something akin. He’d never made such a sound before. It was like a fox at night, animalistic, a relief. Real. Whole. She was beautiful, peaceful.

When he rolled off her, he thought there might be silence or awkwardness, but she giggled and asked, ‘What took us so long?’ He assumed she meant what had taken them so long to initiate it, rather than the actual act, because he thought his timing was spot on for that. They lay, flopped, in among her pale cotton clothes and his rough darker ones. Sticky. Alert. Luxuriating in their loving. She didn’t move to cover herself up, and her lack of modesty rang with innocence, punched his heart.

‘I wasn’t sure how you felt about me,’ he admitted.

‘For someone so exquisite, you seem surprisingly unaware of the effect you have on people.’ She rolled towards him and kissed his chest.

He wasn’t unaware, he’d just been unsure of her. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Starving.’

They devoured the slices of cold ham and cheddar cheese, eating them on thick slices of crusty bread with mustard and pickled onions. He thought that perhaps they ought to be shy about how pickled onions might make their breath smell, but considering where they’d just had their mouths, coyness and inhibition seemed puerile. They drank his wine. He was glad that he’d paid Mr Walker three times what it was worth. He’d paid double because the wine was rare and hard to come by at the moment, and its price once again over because he was who he was, a man who wouldn’t go to war. It was worth every penny.