They’d laid him on a couch. People moved about. There were lights and voices. Somebody was telephoning for an ambulance. Immediate operation, and a lot he couldn’t follow. Hands sponged his face.

Well, thank God, thought Edward, they’ll do me in between them, that’s certain.

Book Two

BOOK TWO

1920

Chapter I

I

LILY, with her feet up on the chintz window-seat, her cheek resting against the oak shutter, thought: How tired I am. How terribly tired.

It was past eleven, already. Kent, on the box of the victoria, drove round and round the sundial like a clock. The August morning was warm and heavy and moist. The elm-tops were steamy. The atmosphere was drowsy with inaudible vibrations of the distant mills.

Lily thought: It will be like this always. Until I die.

From right across the valley, overlooked by the other window of her bedroom, at the back of the house, sounded the thin wild mournful whistle of a train. A pang caught at Lily’s throat and her eyes filled with fresh tears. I ought to be glad to think of dying, she thought. This moved her. She uttered a sob, but others did not follow. She wiped her eyes. Almost immediately she had put away her handkerchief, more tears began to trickle down her face.

This year she had taken more and more to crying when alone. It was becoming easy, a habit. She knew this and must stop. Somebody, or several people, had told her to be brave. Be brave, she repeated to herself. But now that word had no meaning. It sounded rather idiotic. Why should I be brave? Lily thought. Who cares whether I’m brave or not? I’m all alone. Nobody understands or cares. She let the tears stand in her eyes, run down her cheeks, spill into her lap. While the War was still on it had been different. She could be brave then. While the War was still on her grief had had some meaning. She was one of thousands. They seemed to be encouraging each other, standing together. There was patriotism and hatred. You saw cartoons in newspapers and posters on walls. Lily reminded herself that all these mothers and widows, or nearly all of them, were alive to-day. But they no longer counted. No, we’re done with now, she thought. There’s another generation already.

And at the thought of this new generation, so eager for new kinds of life and new excitement, with new ideas about dancing and clothes and behaviour at tea-parties, so certain to sneer or laugh at everything which girls had liked and enjoyed in nineteen hundred—at that thought Lily felt not a pang of sadness but a stab of real misery. She was living on in a new, changed world, unwanted, among enemies. She was old, finished with. She remembered how, in schoolroom days, she and a friend had giggled at their middle-aged governess.