Tripps’ appeared to be unaffected by food shortages. There were still tiny sandwiches cut into triangles and circlets, and chocolate roulade and ginger sponge and almond slices. Ceylon or China tea came in big silver-plated pots.
‘Heaven,’ Clio said greedily.
Nathaniel had been eating and looking around the room. The tables were occupied by groups of pink-faced boys, by mature men, usually alone and absorbed in a book, and by young ladies from the women’s halls, always in pairs.
Clio and Grace looked quite old enough to be one of those pairs, he thought, and then remembered that it was only another year or so before Clio would embark on her degree course. He was proud of her. When he finished his inspection of the room and looked back at their two faces he felt proud of both of them, the way they reflected each other, like two bright coins. He felt the same pleasure in their company as he had always done with Eleanor and Blanche. He was glad that the two of them seemed to have become such good friends. He would not have cared to place a bet on it when they were younger.
‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Grace invited.
‘I was thinking,’ Nathaniel teased, ‘that the two of you are almost as beautiful as your mothers.’
He was amused to see that they were both still young enough to look disbelieving, and then to blush fetchingly. Grace put her hands up to her hat, adjusting the fur cloud around her face. There was no echoing gesture from Clio in her old school felt.
‘Only almost?’
Grace had recovered herself. There was something so provocative in the curve of her mouth that Nathaniel was confused now by the dissimilarity between the two of them. Clio was still a little girl, Grace was not.
He was pleased that Jake and Julius had gone on, out of the family circle. And Julius had survived his period of Grace-enchantment admirably well, Nathaniel thought. His music studies would give him enough to think about from now on. ‘As yet,’ Nathaniel answered.
They had finished their tea. Nathaniel began to look forward to reaching home. He wanted to see Eleanor and to play for an hour with Alice. He loved his work, but the centre of his life was his wife and children. ‘Time to go,’ he announced.
Grace and Clio might have hoped for more cake, but they knew Nathaniel better than to argue. When they stood up to leave, Nathaniel noticed how the men’s eyes followed Grace. Clio must have some proper clothes, he decided. He would talk to Eleanor about it.
The three of them came out of the tea-shop into the greenish, fading afternoon light. Clio’s bicycle was propped against the wall nearby.
‘I’ll be home first,’ she called. ‘Lovely tea, pappy.’ She swung away from them towards Cornmarket. Nathaniel took Grace’s arm, and they began to walk.
It was a long way along St Giles and up the Woodstock Road. So it happened that Clio was the first to meet Captain Dennis.
She almost collided with Eleanor negotiating the stairs from the kitchen with a tea-tray. Clio took the tray from her mother automatically and Eleanor leant to kiss her cheek.
‘Hello, my darling. Will you take it up to the turret for me? Nelly and Ida are both so busy, and Grace is at the circulating library. Then come down and have some tea yourself.’
‘We met Pappy. He took Grace and me to Tripps’.’
‘Oh, how lucky.’ Eleanor was truly envious. She would have loved to sit in the tea-shop and gossip with her husband. Clio smiled at her, understanding as much.
‘Tell him to take you. Has someone new arrived?’ She nodded down at the tray.
‘The ambulance brought him this afternoon. His name is Captain Dennis. He was shot in the head, poor boy, but they say now that he will recover completely. Isn’t that marvellous?’ Eleanor was completely happy again, contemplating the good news.
Peter had watched the light fading in the corners of the room, letting himself grow familiar with the opposite contours of square and semicircle, and then he had drifted into sleep. The soft knocking at the door woke him into momentary disorientation.
‘What is it?’ he called.
‘Clio Hirsh. I’ve brought your tea.’
‘Come in,’ he said, not much the wiser.
The door opened and he saw a dark-haired girl with wide eyes and pink cheeks. She came into the room sideways, carrying a tray of tea-things. She was not a nurse, or an orderly, although she was wearing some kind of uniform. Peter blinked, feeling the mists of confusion threatening him. A kind of convalescent home, they had told him before he left the hospital. He longed suddenly for his real home, and the sight of his mother, but they had also told him that Invernessshire was too far for him to travel yet.
The girl set the tray down and then turned shyly to look at him. Peter saw that she was perhaps three years younger than himself.
‘I expect you wish you really could go home,’ she said. It was not a particularly profound insight, but in his weakness Peter was amazed and grateful. He had an uncomfortable moment when he was afraid that he might cry. He made himself smile instead. ‘It’s a very long way.’
Clio was gazing at him. One side of his head had been shaved, and where it was not hidden by the white lint dressing she could see the new growth of hair. It was a kind of fuzz, darker than the old hair.
Apart from the red pucker of a healing scar that ran upwards from his cheekbone and under the pad of bandages, his face seemed undamaged. She wanted to look at his face, but she felt constrained by her shyness. She turned to the teatray instead, and found that her hands were shaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a very pretty sight.’
‘I didn’t mean … It isn’t that.’ She couldn’t say that it was nothing, because he had suffered it, but it wasn’t his wound that she had been thinking about at all. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I stuck my head above a parapet. A sniper got me. The bullet sliced a furrow through the bone. Missed my brain, more or less.’ Economical words, that was all. He wouldn’t tell her about the mud and the noise and the spectre of death, any more than he had told his father and mother when they came to see him in the Oxford hospital. That was past now, and he was alive. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Clio Hirsh.’
She had a wonderful smile, and skin like ivory satin. Her throat was very white where it was swallowed by the collar of her severe blouse. He knew that he wanted to touch it. The strength of his inclination startled him.
Clio felt his eyes on her, and put her hand up. ‘It’s my school uniform. I have to wear it. This, and the tunic.’
She was a schoolgirl. Peter Dennis’s schooldays, only two years behind him, seemed to belong to another lifetime. ‘You look very pretty in it.’ It was an unimaginative compliment, he thought, and Clio’s smile was more of a reward than it deserved.
‘Do you know, that is the second time today I have been told I look pretty?’
Peter tried to sit upright. ‘And who is the other man?’
‘My father.’
It made her happy to see him laughing, and she laughed too.
‘Let me give you some tea,’ she said, when they had finished.
She was going to hand him the cup when she saw that he had slipped down against the pillows. She leant over instead and rearranged them for him. Then she put her arm behind his shoulders.
‘Can you sit up some more?’
She lifted the weight of him, and his head rested against