He had dreamed of coming back, every single night of National Service. Dreamed of these woods and the sound of the sea and, above all, of Verity. And now he’d been demobbed and was actually here, but his first thought, on getting off the train the day before, was that this was the end of the line. It wasn’t absolutely true – the branch line continued to King’s Lynn – but from here, there was nowhere else to go but the sea. And the sea made Arthur nervous. There had been an awful incident early on during the evacuation. He’d never been in the sea before. It often came back to him, that panicked feeling of putting his foot down, and finding there was nothing there. It turned out there was a shelf and a sudden drop so you could quickly get out of your depth. Peter saved him. He hadn’t wanted to admit he couldn’t swim. He never wanted to go back in after that. They’d tried to teach him and he learned the basics but he could never love it. It was yet another thing that the Frosts had, that he didn’t. He and Peter never spoke of it but it was there between them, a bond of indebtedness.

He kicked at a tuft of dune grass. It couldn’t be the end. He’d swapped one set of stifling rules for another, from the military to the rural. It wasn’t possible that the pointless ritual and play-fighting of National Service could be as close as he got to the outside world. He wouldn’t let it.

For a clever person Verity was remarkably blind. She never asked what he wanted, just assumed, like all her class, that he was happy with his lot. No university for him. She’d mentioned in her letters that she was applying to Oxford to read History, her father’s subject. He had an image of her, a black gown flying out behind her, late for a class, clattering on cobbled streets, among high spires. He thought of Jude the Obscure, which he had read at the grammar. He could see her there, toasting crumpets on a fire in an ancient room, a foppish youth fawning at her, she with an open book reclining on a sofa. There was a stubborn determination about her that could make it happen, as unlikely as it seemed, and he admired it; it was what he’d always loved about her. But him? No, not now, he’d had to give that up. National Service had been his university. And a funny kind of education that had been. She never seemed to see that he had once shared her dream.

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