Will you, Connie? Eden said. All right, then, Connie’s the Germans. Now you must run away and hide. Before the French and English attack.

Connie went slowly up the hillside to where the elder bushes began. She felt almost gratefully the scratches coming on her legs, the touch of twigs, the cool-warm of concealing leaves. She lay against leaves, her heart beating, or the ground, it was difficult to tell, the thumping which swelled around you, the beating in the ears. She was lumpy, she was ugly, even if Mrs Macarthy, she heard through the door, had tried to call it plain.

The English and French began to advance. You could hear the firing of a French gun. There was a swishing in the undergrowth. And soon it was over.

You’re our prisoner, Elyot said.

Am I? she answered, doubtfully. Then we can begin something else?

Not until after the War, said Eden.

You’re our prisoner for the duration of war, said Elyot, in the voice of Mr Macarthy reading from the paper over marmalade.

It was true enough. She believed this.

We’re going to put you in prison, said Eden.

Eden’s eyes were bright. She talked very quickly as they marched down the hill, and the blood came jerking into her cheeks. She could never control her excitement. Sometimes Elyot was surprised. But he also admired her, unadmittedly, at moments like these, beside the frightened placidity of Connie Tiarks. You marched down the hill, and you were getting somewhere, in the warm, dusty afternoon, either Somerset or Flanders, you were marching towards some something which it was difficult to describe.

This is the prison, Elyot said.

Connie groped in darkness past the rakes and hoes, and what must be the mowing machine. The light outside sawed out the shape of door. Voices came to her fitfully. Soon it would be tea, she said. She stood quite placidly, waiting for time to bring her release. She could stand very long like this. It was easy. There were no words. These were what frightened her, the quick, flashing words of Eden, and Elyot’s calmer, commanding ones.

Outside the light grew purple on the Channel. Julia walked among the currant bushes. Julia often sighed now. She said it was the War.

I wish it was over, Elyot said.

What? asked Eden.

Why, the War.

Oh, she said. The War.

They trailed through the cooling grass. As if the house had fallen back, and the tool shed containing Connie Tiarks, and they were alone in a sudden and fearful intimacy. He did not like to be with Eden then. It was difficult enough to cope with the beating of his own heart. He could scarcely understand his own fears, without the additional dependency of hers.

Sometimes he went off alone by himself. It was a relief on stuffy afternoons, when words were tied to the root of your tongue, to find yourself in the seaward lane. His thoughts rambled directionless, between the hawthorns, branching, solitary, and instinctive. He walked with his head hung down, his lips pushed forward, watching the movement of his own feet. Sometimes a cart grated in the lane, staggered above and past the hawthorns, with an old man calling out from on top of a load. He liked to pass the old men on carts in lanes, because they were not disturbing. It was still being alone. It was still being yourself, in the presence of cowparsley or nettles. Just the grunt of an old man and the smell of hay or seaweed drifting past. You walked on. You walked round and against the hill, where the wind had combed out the trees into peculiar shapes. And just beyond that was the bay that they called Ard’s Bay, though nobody could tell you why.