“If I’d known you’d do that I might not have given it to you.” She stared at his hand on the book. “You’ll be all right, though? You haven’t hurt your hands badly?”

“Only cuts.”

She nodded, smiled briefly, and looked away.

He watched her as she looked around the room, seeing the now-familiar walls anew through Edie’s eyes. The rows of plain beds were rather at odds with the grandeur of the plasterwork ceiling. Ferguson, in the next bed, picked at his blanket and stared at Edie from behind. His hands looked clawlike, Harry thought, as if the tendons had shrunk. Sometimes Ferguson’s clawlike hands beckoned at him when he wanted to talk. His voice was a thin thing and sounded as if it came from very far within him. His lips seemed to want to stick together, seemed, with a glistening whiteness, to want to glue in his words. Harry had to lean in close to hear, but Ferguson’s too-close words smelled sour. He was starting to dread the beckon of Ferguson’s fingers. He watched him watch Edie now and then suddenly Ferguson’s eyes flicked and connected with his own. Did he wink? Did he really just see Ferguson wink? Harry felt a rush of affronted protectiveness. He wanted to get out of the bed and hit Ferguson, whether his lungs were rotten or not.

“I’m not sure that the flowery bedspreads are entirely soldierly,” Edie said.

He refocused on her face. “The firmness of this mattress is appropriately military.”

“It is very nice to see you, even pale and bedraggled and bandaged.” Edie looked at her hands in her lap.

“We should do this more often.”

She looked up. “Please, not in these circumstances.”

The sunlight made bright rectangles on the parquet. Johnson in the bed across was snoring. The smell of the larkspur was making Harry slightly nauseous. He felt Edie’s blue-green gaze on his face. It prickled on his skin.

“It’s terribly quiet in here,” she said. “They’re all listening, aren’t they? It makes me feel noisy and clumsy and indiscreet—like everything that I’m saying is a pronouncement on a stage.”

“Isn’t it? I can’t stand the quiet. I am glad of your noisy indiscretions.”

In truth, when it was quiet he could still hear the roar of the incoming shell. Its echo seemed to have got stuck in his head, as if it were ricocheting in his skull. In his dreams the wire was still writhing around him.

“You’re jittery,” she observed.

“What makes you say that?”

She nodded to the matchbox that he was turning between his bandaged fingers. “Fidget.”

“Sorry. My springs are all wound up tight and it takes a while to remember how to relax, but I’ll get there.” He rattled the matchbox and put it down. Ferguson was still staring.

“Forgiven.”