He saw me, broke into a smile, and strode toward me. He was taller, browner. Of course he wasn’t really taller, just thinner. I didn’t remember those lines in his cheeks and around his eyes. Everything, his uniform, his body and face, looked equally scrubbed and scaled away as if he’d been blasted all over by sand. He probably had. “Yvette!” he exclaimed, and then laughed. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. Where else would you be but with Célia. You look very well!”

His teeth were white against his tan. It was lovely to see him laughing and it spread to me, it was such a relief to be jolly.

“I do not!” I ran one finger under my eye. “I have circles like a panda!”

“A panda who’s very well, then.” He became serious. “What happened, Yvette? I wasn’t told much . . .”

I related the story, the 109 and the cannon shell and the Perspex. When I got to the bit about no goggles, he gasped.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t know, James.”

“I’m in a different squadron now. I only found out about Peter last week.” He rubbed his hand over his head, a tidying gesture, although his hair was too short to need it. “I’m on my way to collect a plane from Heliopolis. It’ll be ready tomorrow. So I seized the chance.”

Unlike me, he really did look well. Livelier in the way he moved and more bright-eyed. He had seemed such a somber starched person at the beginning. Of course, the pretense about Alastair had constrained him. Even then he had been kind, and made me laugh. With a soft intimate flash I realized that those were not glimpses of some occasional mood, but how he was essentially.

“Célia’s with the surgeon,” I said. “But we can probably go in.” I pointed toward the corridor that led to the wards.

Together we entered the green-tiled interior of the building. We were properly inside the hospital now, and we both fell silent. I searched for something to say to James.

“So what have you been doing since I last saw you?”

“Some bombing,” he said. “A little strafing.”

My face flamed. “I’m sorry, what a silly question.”

“Not at all. Very few people ask. Apart from that, it’s mainly been anti-tank practice.”

Behind us I heard the rattle of a trolley. We stopped to let it pass, the orderly moving at an efficient trot, the patient curled on his side under a sheeted frame. As they went by a young male voice burst into heavy groans from beneath the sheet. James turned his head away.

I brushed his arm. “Come on. We’re nearly there.”

—