Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [610]
“Don’t they have any that matches?” he asked, “any sets?”
“Not nowadays,” she answered. “This is wartime. People are glad to pick up any old cup and saucer they can.”
He nodded. It was foolish of him to have forgotten the terrible shortages over here.
“What do you miss most?”
“Nylon stockings,” she told him at once.
They had tea at the Bay Tree, where they had one more attempt at establishing their family connection. It did not get far, but they cheerfully swapped information about their respective families. His father was a successful lawyer, she learned, living in that large, comfortable and endless suburb, the Philadelphia Main Line. She told him something of her own family: about their rambling house with its two paddocks in the New Forest, a few miles from Christchurch; her father, a retired colonel, “Who organises anything that moves within a five-mile radius,” she explained; her brother in the navy.
“When this is all over, you should come and see us, Cousin Adam,” she laughed.
How delightful she was. She seemed to find everything so amusing. He wondered how one asked for a date in the ancient city and concluded there was only one way to find out. He asked.
“That sounds very nice. When did you have in mind?”
“I’m flying tonight. But tomorrow I’m not.”
“Tomorrow then. But you must let me pick the restaurant. I know the territory.”
When he asked himself, towards the end of that extraordinary and frantic period before June 1944, exactly when he had known – known with absolute certainty that they were going to have an affair – he concluded that it was at the precise moment when she had opened the door of that dark, Victorian house she shared with a dozen other A.T.S. drivers on Milford Hill.
He had been thinking about her – except for the harrowing moments just before he had released two 1,000-pound bombs at a target spitting a fury of fire at him the previous night – he had been thinking of her almost continuously. Her golden hair and her laughing eyes were before him, like a lighted beacon that makes a great halo in the cloud, through that night all the way home.
It was a time of high excitement: for those who flew the P-47s from the bases at Ibsley and Truxton, or the P-38s from Stony Cross in the New Forest. They were either relaxing and bored at the base, or caught up in the heady game of sweeping over northern France, often face to face with death, as they pounded the enemy in preparation for Operation Overlord.
Was it really possible that during this existence, when life was being lived at the edge, Patricia Shockley was also going to happen?
She would know what it must mean. A few, snatched moments – passion caught and taken when you can, in the knowledge that each time may be the last.
All day he had wondered about her, and asked himself: was she, also, thinking of him? He had made arrangements in the hope that she was.
It was when she opened the door, and gave him a shy smile, that he knew in a flash that she had been.
“I brought you a present,” he said.
It was two pairs of nylon stockings.
“Oh, you lovely man.”
They did not dine in the city, but just outside, across the meadows in the place used by the cognoscenti of the area: the Old Mill at Harnham.
“It really is a mill,” he said delightedly, as they mounted the rickety oak staircase with its wide treads to the upper room. It had window seats, dormer windows, and a grand piano.
“It was a flour mill – and probably a fulling mill before that,” she told him. And she explained the significance of the term. “You’d never think this sleepy old place had once been one of the foremost cloth towns in England, would you?”
“What else?” he grinned.
“Constable painted some of his best known pictures, of the cathedral, from here.”
“It’ll do then.” He smiled. “Every damn thing around here has some piece of history attached to it.”
“It does,” she agreed.
It was an excellent