He threw back his head and looked at the perpetuity of stars and the unfeeling and gleaming moon. He wondered whether Vivian was staring at the moon too. She’d told him she often did. He imagined her in her bedroom, a room he’d never actually seen. He wondered how many soldiers were looking at the sky. Praying to God for what? For peace, for survival, for a new pair of boots? The village was silent. Somewhere a back door banged, signalling that someone was visiting the privy; a dog barked and its master yelled at it. He put his hand in his pocket to dig out his cigarettes. He had none. His fingers touched a downy softness, and he pulled out the white feather that the angry, coarse woman had pushed on him. The war seemed so very far away. Since he’d taken Vivian as his own, the whispers of battle had withdrawn; he could not hear the men’s boots marching or the explosions. Of course these things were happening across the Channel and in reality he should never have been able to hear them on this shore, but he had, he always had. With her all the horror and sadness vanished into a phantom under the bed or a silhouette behind the dresser. She allowed him to forget the inexplicable dreadfulness.

Didn’t she?

SEPTEMBER 1916

43

VIVIAN EXAMINED THE scratches on her calves and smiled secretly to herself, her mind falling, with enthusiasm, back to the night before last when she and Howard had finally managed to be together, albeit in the less than glamorous surroundings of the barn. The smell of animals, hay and manure a backdrop to their loving. Earthy. She didn’t care where it had to be; the only important thing was being with him. The breath caught in her throat when she thought of him. Urgent and hard, satiated and slumped. Since London there had been nothing else for her. Whether she was playing with her baby or scrubbing out the chicken pen, she felt him all through her body. She felt him sit in her soul.

The summer was almost at an end; the air had a hint of coolness. An edge as autumn began to nip. Vivian had noticed the chill smoke-blue mist on the horizon this morning; it was dreamy. It had been a blustery day and she was in the garden, hair whipped across her face, bringing in the newly laundered sheets that had caught the breeze and now smelt and felt like potential. Enid came speeding through the house, calling her name. The maid followed hastily with a look of concern, but somehow sensed that she shouldn’t intrude and so fell back into the house, left Enid to it.

Vivian’s relationship with Enid had inevitably cooled as her relationship with Howard had intensified. It wasn’t that she wanted to lie or hide things from her dear friend, but she could not bring herself to talk of him in the usual way. She could not pretend things were unchanged and ask what he’d thought of the dumplings Enid had baked or whether she could pass on a message about sheep, but then nor could she tell his mother what she thought he was now: a miracle, a saviour, a lover. Speaking about what they had would inevitably lead to the trampling of the beautiful, ethereal essence of it. Other people’s words would make it ordinary and vulgar. Others would define it as an infidelity, a wrong. Vivian was sure Enid had not bought the story about their having business in London, so it was beyond awkward carrying on as though she had.