children sat cross-legged on the floor, the staff sat on the stage at one end, and a few parents turned up and stood around the walls. I shook hands with all the staff beforehand, so I was introduced to Sam.
The headmaster had asked me not to frighten the children with too much gore and reality, and so I did not dwell on the atrocities I had seen, the bodies blown to smithereens, the unrecognizable lumps of flesh and hair caught up on the barbed wire, the pitiful screams of grown men beyond the pale and beyond rescue in the shapeless darkness of no-man’s-land. I did mention the devastation—I didn’t think I could avoid it altogether—but with luck, I thought, the war would be over well before the young children in that gymnasium were old enough to fight.
They were young children who couldn’t sit still for very long, and would most likely need to go to the lavatory at any moment. So I talked mostly about the Christmas truce, which was popular with the headmaster and the staff. The children were surprisingly upset about the capture of the rabbits; I think that from where they were sitting, they would have preferred it for the men to have gone hungry than for two rabbits to be killed and eaten. Everyone knew “Silent Night,” of course, and could relate to that. I mentioned my meeting with a German officer, and our exchange of gifts—everyone thought the plum-pudding business was very funny—but, and here’s the thing, I didn’t mention Wilhelm by name or the business with the photograph. And I carefully avoided looking in Sam Ross’s direction during that part of my talk. Instead, I moved quickly on to our agreement about the burial of the dead—a suitably uplifting theme for a school environment.
And then it was over. The children gave me three cheers and scampered off. The headmaster invited me and some of the staff back to his office for a sherry, and there I made a point of talking to Sam. I asked her if she lived in the village; she said that she did but she didn’t volunteer where. I asked her if she was married; she blushed and shook her head. I said I was staying at the Lamb, that that was where I had met the headmaster, and asked her if she ever went there. Again she shook her head. I asked her what the highlights of Stratford were but she said that, apart from Shakespeare’s house, she wasn’t sure if there were any.
Wilhelm’s photograph of her had been in black and white, of course, but in the flesh, in the blaze of sunlight that swept in through the open French windows of the headmaster’s study, she was not so much black and white as gold and white. Her hair, the fine down on the lobes of her ears, on the angle of her jawline, on the smooth expanse of her arms, glowed gold, formed a frame of gold dust against the ivories and creams of her flesh and her open-necked shirt.
I can’t say that our first meeting was a resounding success in terms of conversation, but I remember the word that came into my mind to describe her. She was mouthwatering.
I did notice that she seemed a bit cold-shouldered by some of the staff, but I thought nothing of it, not then anyway.
Although our first meeting was not all it might have been, I thought I had time on my side and was not unduly worried. The authorities at Stratford had been a bit miffed when I had told them that I was taking that Tuesday off and most of the time the rules were pretty strict. After all, there was a war on and the government was paying for the course. But when they had found that I was giving a talk at a school, about the war, their attitude softened and I was forgiven.
We worked long hours—nine till six-thirty—but we did get Thursday afternoons off and so the next Thursday I sat in the smoking room of the Lamb, reading. Although the bar was closed, so far as the sale of alcohol was concerned, we residents could use the room to read in, or write in, to talk in, or even doze in. The smoking room had a bay window that enabled you to look along the street. I was thus conveniently placed to keep the school entrance under surveillance and to observe, unnoticed, all comings