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By Root 3007 0

the drawing-room curtains) if my father, Albert or Bracey happened to be in the room. She always took care to explain afterwards that modesty – risk of exposing to a male eye even a minute area of female leg – was her reason for avoiding this physical elevation. I never learnt the precise form taken by her ‘chasing after’ Albert, about which even Edith – on the whole pretty discreet – was at times prepared to joke, nor, for that matter, the method – equally accepted by Edith – by which Bracey courted Billson. Bracey, it is true, would sometimes offer to clean the silver for her, a job he certainly performed better than she did. It was also true that Billson would sometimes tease Albert by subjecting him to her invariable, her all-embracing pessimism. She could also, of course, show pessimism about Bracey’s affairs, but in a far less interested tone.

‘Pity it’s going to rain now your afternoon off’s come round, Albert,’ she would say. ‘Not that you can want to go into Aldershot much after losing the money on that horse. Why, you must be stony broke. If you’re not quick you’ll miss the carrier again.’

To Bracey she would be more formal.

‘I expect you’ll have to go on one of those route-marches, Private Bracey, now the hot weather’s come on.’

Billson would upset Albert fairly regularly every few weeks by her fearful forebodings of ill. Once, when she saw the local constable plodding up the drive, she had rushed into the kitchen in a state of uncontrolled agitation.

‘Albert!’ she had cried, ‘what have you done? There’s a policeman coming to the door.’

Albert, as I have said, was easily frightened himself. On this occasion, so Edith reported, he ‘went as white as a sheet’. It was a relief to everyone when the subject of inquiry turned out to be nothing worse than a dog-licence. I did not, of course, know all these things at the time, certainly not the relative strength of the emotions imprisoned under the surface of passing events at Stonehurst. Even now, much remains conjectural. Edith and I, naturally, enjoyed a rather separate existence, segregated within the confines of night- and day-nursery. There was also, to take up one’s time, Miss Orchard, who – teaching all children of the neighbourhood – visited the house regularly. Edith, reasonably enough, felt the boundaries of her own domain were not to be too far exceeded by intrusion on my part into kitchen routine; while Miss Orchard’s ‘lessons’ occupied important expanses of the day. All the same, I did not propose to allow myself to be excluded utterly from a society in which life was lived with such intensity. Edith used to suffer from terrible ‘sick headaches’ every three or four weeks (not unlike Billson’s bouts of nausea), and from what she herself called ‘small aches and pains few people die of’, so that, with Edith laid low in this manner, my parents away from home, Miss Orchard teaching elsewhere, the veil would be lifted for a short space from many things usually hidden. As a child you are in some ways more acutely aware of what people feel about one another than you are when childhood has come to an end.

For that reason, I always suspected that Billson would – to use her favourite phrase – ‘get her own back’ on Albert for calling her ‘Silly Suffolk’, even though I was at the same time unaware, of course, that her aggressiveness had its roots in love. Indeed, so far was I from guessing the true situation that, with some idea of arranging the world, as then known to me, in a neat pattern, I once suggested to Billson that she should marry Bracey. She laughed so heartily (like the maid damping the Insurance stamp on Mr Lloyd George’s tongue) at this certainly very presumptuous suggestion, while assuring me with such absolute candour of her own determination to remain for ever single, that – not for the last time within similar terms of reference – I was completely taken in.

‘Anyway,’ said Billson, ‘I wouldn’t have a soldier. None of my family would ever look at a soldier. Why, they’d disown me.’

This absolute disallowance of the profession of arms as the calling