The air had cooled but that was pleasant. Showers threatened and the odd drop of rain pattered on pavements, but he couldn’t mind. The streets were lit with lamps that threw off a crown of fuzzy light. He steered her through the drunks and minglers, an arm protectively around her shoulders, which was not the done thing at all. He crossed the road, glancing left and right for cars and carts, heading towards Glasshouse Street. He didn’t see the woman with the fistful of white feathers. Didn’t, for a moment, understand what it meant. She walked right into him, a shove not an accidental collision; the force caused her hat to slip over her eye. She pushed a feather into his hand and stupidly he clasped it. Swayed slightly. He shouldn’t have taken grip. He should have let it fall to the floor, because once he had hold, he didn’t know what to do with it next, and it mattered. Should he drop it on the pavement? No, he couldn’t. It seemed disrespectful, inflammatory. Tuck it in his buttonhole and laugh at her? He couldn’t be flip, not about the war. The images that were tattooed to his eyelids even when he fell asleep, the tangy smell of burning that stayed in his nostrils and the taste of death that doused his tongue re-emerged. Overpowering him again. Suppressed for just twenty-four hours after all. He pushed the feather hastily into his jacket pocket, took Vivian’s arm and hurried on by.

‘Why don’t you do your duty?’ the woman yelled after him. She was blowsy, a bit chubby; a wide, fat mouth that swallowed up her entire face with spite and fury.

Vivian and Howard didn’t swap a word or a glance but carried on to the door of the club just fifty yards away. When they reached it, Howard wondered if the woman’s accusation had made it this far too. Who had heard? Not that it mattered who else had picked up on her outrage. He had, and that was enough to ruin the evening.

‘We don’t have to go in,’ Vivian whispered gently.

‘No, perhaps not.’

They went back to their little hotel room. The door banged and rolled on its hinges. Locking them in. Locking the world out. They made love again. This time it was quieter but somehow more.

39

THINGS SPEEDED UP when she was with him; she felt very much alive. When they were awake, she had to touch him all the time. Feel him under her hands, just to be sure he was real. She traced her fingers across the tense white knuckles that blistered through the skin on his hand, along his arm, watching as his follicles pushed up his hairs in reaction to her touch, across the bulge of his bicep and then down over his collarbone. She concentrated on every warm swell, every hard bone, the indents, the rises. The frame of him. The man he was. Her finger traced past the broad chest and neat stomach, down the line of hair that blossomed, and then she kissed him there, took him in her mouth. Her stomach tugged with strict and guilty joy.