All in a rush, James took his hands out of mine and put his arms around me.

—

Célia appeared in the doorway of the room and looked at us.

I let go of James and sat up straight. “Oh, Célia,” I said, “there are three eggs.”

She burst out laughing.

I met Sébastien at a café by the beach. Explained why we had to stop.

“I shall miss you.” He sighed. “I shall be sad for days.”

“Days.” I laughed. “Goodbye, Sébastien, darling.”

He said, “Au revoir, ma chérie, et bonne chance.”

Goodbye, darling, and good luck. We parted without rancor. We had driven hundreds of miles together. We were comrades.

—

Out of the two nurses on the houseboat, it was the smoking nurse, not the nunlike one, who attended to Peter. The smoking nurse was a genius with dressings, unfailingly deft and gentle with him. It was she who fitted the eyepatch, the black, rakish eyepatch, when he was healed and when his good eye glowed a bright light blue again even in the strongest sunlight.

“Dear Yvette,” he said, “you don’t have to,” when I told him of my intention to join the WAAF.

Célia said, “James won’t think less of you if you don’t.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m doing it for me.”

The uniform came crumpled it seemed, so there was no shame in looking like a bag of laundry. On my first day they ordered us to dress up a line!, which, I speedily learned, was to stand in a row and shuffle until our extended right arms barely touched our neighbor’s shoulder. I formed a rank under the beating sun alongside girls called Nadia and Ginette and Miriam with heads turned smartly to the right. Serious girls with serious eyes narrowed in the sun in spite of our peaked caps because the light glared so hard off the desert. I turned my head to the right with all the others as the light nearly blinded me, and I almost fainted there from the apprehension, from the heat, from suddenly being this close to the war.

Last week James and I went for our walk down the lane past the playground. This week, no.

“Why not?” asked Tom. “The primroses are still there.”

James heard him and after a murmured conversation, Tom left the house on his bicycle, returning flushed a quarter of an hour later with a straggling bunch of primroses. He put them in a water glass on my bedside table. So I look at them and think of the hat that left behind nothing but its color in their petals. Remembering how they moved under the patches of low spring sun, as if it were the light and not the breeze that fluttered them.

SEVEN