Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [611]
After some time she asked:
“What are your plans now?”
He smiled.
“Funny you should ask. I’m staying over until the morning at the White Hart.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I booked the best room they had, just in case my wife turned up.”
“I see. Her name, of course, would be Shockley.”
“I guess it would.”
She put her arm through his.
“Lead me there, Shockley.”
Half an hour later, looking up at the lovely figure who had suddenly rolled over and was now triumphantly astride him, Adam remarked in some surprise:
“You seem to be taking control of this situation here, Shockley.”
“Not at all,” she murmured happily. “I’m just a little hungry.”
It was nine o’clock when John Mason called at the house on Milford Hill to see her.
The girl who had answered the door went in to look for her. He heard voices inside, then one calling from her room:
“She went out with an American airman. Nearly two hours ago.”
He felt a sensation in the pit of his stomach.
“She seems to be out,” the girl said tactfully.
He turned and walked away. The night was warm. He wondered if she would be out late. Perhaps if she came back soon, he could speak to her.
John Mason paused at the bottom of the hill and waited.
At ten o’clock he decided to go: except that since she was bound to return soon, it seemed foolish not to wait a few minutes more. At ten thirty, a drunken G.I, came by. He wondered whether to do anything about him; the drunken man was waiting near the A.T.S. house. After a few minutes Mason walked back up the hill and told him to leave.
“Why?”
“I’m a lawyer and if you don’t I’ll call the Snowballs.”
The man cursed him, but the white-hatted military police that the locals now called Snowballs could be rough, and the English lawyer was bigger than him. He went away. John Mason felt better.
At midnight, he knew in his heart that he was wasting his time.
A little after one in the morning, he walked sadly home.
The affair of Adam Shockley and Patricia Shockley was conducted in a series of meetings, usually in the afternoon, in the month of May.
They were never easy to arrange. Once they met at Fordingbridge; another time at Downton; for both lay between his base and Salisbury. But one beautiful afternoon, he rode into Salisbury on the bus and she took him in the car up to Old Sarum and the high ground.
“I’m going to show you the rest of Sarum,” she told him.
“But what if we want to . . . ?”
“Don’t worry,” she cut in. “We’ll find somewhere.” And after they had viewed the ruins of Old Sarum and gazed out over the plain, with its huge cargo of camouflaged vehicles, she drove him up the little Avon valley and parked at Avonsford. “Come on,” she cried, “we’re going to have a picnic.” While he carried the small basket she had provided and she brought a rug, she led him up a track to the top of the ridge. “There,” she said in triumph as the wonderful view opened up before them. “I discovered this place last autumn; isn’t it divine?”
There was a cluster of trees at the top of a little mound nearby.
“What’s that?” he asked. And since she did not know, they made their way across a fallow field towards it, only to be surprised as a huge host of blue butterflies rose like a cloud all around them.
At the top they found a circle of trees, mostly yews, with a glade of grass in the centre.
“It’s a strange place,” he remarked.
“It’s also completely deserted,” she said. The grass was warm and dry, and bathed in the afternoon sunlight.
With a chuckling laugh, she spread the rug and lay down upon it, loosening her jacket as she did so.
“Picnic?” she asked.
Adam Shockley had never known greater happiness than in these brief interludes with Patricia. It was not long before his fellow pilots realised