And Mrs Macarthy’s heard from Mother. She’s gone to France to be a nurse. I wish I could be a nurse, she said.

Then she stopped, remembering.

4

Waiting in the restaurants was a return to yesterday, the resentments, the bursts of superiority, the silences, the irrelevance and stupidity of the conversation overheard from other tables, today or then, almost but not quite, like the one-armed man in the uniform. There were many uniforms, of course. That clothed it with a difference. But deeper than the outer skin, you found the little pieces of debris from many emotional moods that would never quite fit together again. Even the annoyance at being kept waiting was unconvincing, something built on the pattern of habit. Or else it may be, she felt, that irritation is more intense for the unpunctuality of the people we know well than for those we know vaguely.

Catherine Standish sat looking at the bread a waiter brought. It was French bread, full of holes, the kind that looks as if bubbles have burst inside the baking dough. Remembering the strangeness of her first French bread, she regretted that it could become just bread. It was familiar, like the voices of the officers, that rippled in French or sauntered in English across the Paris restaurant. Because Paris had evolved from abstraction in the mind, a city of contemplated pilgrimage, into one of the places you passed through, getting somewhere, somewhere else. She was on her way with Rhoda Swansey from the hospital at Rémy to spend a fortnight at home. Paris was incidental. A night and a couple of railway stations. This is terrible, she felt. She wished he would come and buy her a drink.

But at least there was a flicker that October morning looking in the window of the little cheap jewellery shop, finding it registered still, the potency of paste bracelets and the rows of detached, diamanté heels. She had found at the back of her own reflexion the old sensations, half buried. She had gone right back and rooted in the heap of still unsatisfied, innocent desires, till her body slackened to another line, and her face grew unprotected in its self-confessed nostalgia. Any intrusion from the present, from the honking of the traffic or the pavement noises, would have been pointless, if achieved. Only the voice rang a bell. It came up out of the blue and gritty Paris morning, it fitted itself into her ear, it made itself part of the first personal intimate moment she had experienced in so many months.

If it isn’t Kitty Standish! she heard.

It was too close, too intimate, for a moment a nerve in her body that she wanted badly to suppress. It was too much like so many of your own failures compressed into the accents of another voice.

Well, she said, Willy!

She began to laugh. Because it was relief. They stood and laughed on the pavement. Their laughter bounded in the faces of the French with too insistent a bonhomie. She could feel that her cheeks were red. But she continued to laugh. It absolved her from the next move.