But there was not much movement in any of the house. It was full of things that people had stopped using, or the things that Mrs Macarthy had collected as a girl, the glass slippers, and china lambs, and the certificates for choral singing with their signatures in yellow ink. Parts of the house were particularly still. The place at the end of the landing where potplants stood on a bamboo table, and where there were usually bodies of flies. It was breathless by the table of begonias, and the one rambling aspidistra that Mrs Macarthy made you sponge. Breathless, and hateful, like Mrs Macarthy’s kiss.

In the attic it was also still, but pleasant, under the stillness a sound of life, the creaking of heat or cold, the murmuring of insects that flew or built there. In the attic there were rows of apples and pears, that you ate occasionally, the ones from the back. It was good to sit and wonder the things that you wondered, and about the War, the killing, the people in the village whose men had been killed, the drained faces and the reddish eyes. Mrs Delbridge has lost a son, Mrs Macarthy said. Then everybody kept silent. Mrs Delbridge was different. Because her son, you did not say it, was dead. Mrs Standish has a dead son. It made you wonder, till your hands were sweat, if the sparrow lying stiff in the frost, if Elyot Standish could become this, or the graves of the dead people that you did not, could not have any connexion with. As if death. I don’t want to die, he said. He heard his voice, that was the voice of Elyot Standish, who would perhaps die. But there was some comfort in the buzzing of insects, in the smell of apples. He hung on to these to make sure, even if the echo of his own voice was a wondering still, a wondering if death.

The thought of death that is constantly with us, said Mr Macarthy in one of the sermons he once preached. But this was not altogether true. On the cliff path, for instance, against a mackerel sky, with the people gathering driftwood down below. Or racing Eden down the summer hill, when you fell panting on the bed of docks. Because Eden had begun to take part in things, no longer sitting in a pram, was part of this same being alive. She sat and listened to the sermons of Mr Macarthy. She sat picking at the pew. She lowered her head at the thought of death that is constantly with us, letting it pass over her, like the meaningless parts in older people’s conversation. There were many dead parts that you let pass. It was sometimes dull.

I want to be an airman, Eden said.

It made him snort. As if Eden. Well, he had to laugh.

You couldn’t be an airman, he said.

Yes, I shall.

She hated him.

You couldn’t even be an airwoman, he laughed.