Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [612]
“Who is she?” they asked, and when he would not tell them she became Downton 2.30 to the whole station.
Patricia, too, went about in a glow of good health, though for her it was interspersed with periods of anxiety whenever he was away on a raid and she had not heard from him. Often she found herself sleepless at nights and lying with tears on her pillow at dawn.
Forest-Wilson asked her in a kindly, languid way to dinner one evening; but she refused. He said nothing but she suspected from the half-amused, half-compassionate look he gave her that he had guessed the reason. He did not bring up the subject again.
A few days later, Forest-Wilson noticed she was wearing nylon stockings. “He’s an American then,” he deduced.
They were both careful never to mention one subject – their own lives after D-Day. That was taboo. The moment for them was now, in these few brief weeks, to be enjoyed while it lasted. Once, when he began to speak of the possibility of their meeting later in the year, she cut him off quickly.
“Don’t let’s think about it. It’s bad luck.”
But to himself he thought, several times, that when this war was over, he would not mind at all if Patricia Shockley made a trip to Philadelphia – a permanent one.
Yet there were times when she puzzled him.
They talked a lot, in their brief times together. It was one of the things he liked about their relationship most. But she had such strong and unusual opinions on many subjects that at first the things she said baffled and even disturbed him.
The first time he had noticed something strange was in a shop in Fordingbridge, where the elderly woman had addressed her as miss with a deference that he suspected had nothing to do with her uniform.
“Was that the English class system at work?” he asked laughingly. But instead of making light of it, she looked angry.
“I’m afraid so. After the war it will all stop though.” He noticed she was prepared to speak about after the war in a general sense.
“Does it matter so much?”
She pointed to the four initials in brass on the shoulder of her uniform. “You see those initials: F.A.N.Y.? They call us the fannies. We’re the part of the A.T.S. that act as drivers for the officers.”
“So?”
“How do you suppose we’re chosen?”
“By driving skill, I guess.”
“Wrong. By accent – the way we speak. And . . . if someone knows us. Class, in other words. It’s nicer for the officers.”
He shrugged. It was the kind of thing he had always heard.
She grinned. “Actually, I suppose most girls from lower-class backgrounds can’t drive, so I’m exaggerating. But even so, it’s got to change.” She was vehement. “I’m a rebel of course,” she added.
He didn’t mind her being a rebel. But he wondered what form her rebellion meant to take.
On the next occasion they met she said something even stranger. They had seen a G.I. buying an armload of goods in the market place and she had shaken her head disapprovingly.
“It’s terrible, their having so much money,” she remarked, as though it were a statement of fact.
“You mean, it makes the English people jealous.”
She stared at him in complete astonishment.
“Of course I don’t. I mean it’s bad for them, the G.I.s. Nothing to be jealous about.”
This he had not been able to make much sense of; but he had not felt like pursuing the subject at the time.
In fact it was only after that perfect time on the hill above Avonsford, when they had made love, eaten their picnic and made love once again, and then sat on the outer edge of the little circle of trees, gazing out over the ridges that he had decided to find out a little more about her opinions. It would be hard, he thought, to find a more perfect girl to settle down with. But, he grinned to himself, it would be wise to find out a bit more about the strange processes that went on in her mind.
“You say everything’s going to change after the war. What do you