Pritchard tapped his teeth with the stem of his pipe.
The rest of us waited.
“No. Not this time, Hal. I’m not convinced, not until we have something else. I’ll keep the documentation here, in a file. But I’ll not send it upstairs, not yet.” He drew on his pipe. “That’s all.”
Sheila rolled her eyes at me and we trooped out of Pritchard’s office.
Dear Hal,
Short note. You are in my thoughts because we have just treated a man who had been shot in the pelvis. He lost blood but we mended him.
You are also in my thoughts because, a few days ago, we received a batch of old, out-of-date newspapers. Among these were some copies of the Times. I was delighted to see that page 5 is still going strong. One paragraph, three lines long, said: “The Hampton Court crocuses are in perfect bloom. Now is the time to go and see them.” Who writes this? What sort of subeditor chooses to put something like this in among the casualty lists, the battle reports, the new laws about rationing? Don’t get me wrong—I think it’s wonderful. Very few Times readers will live anywhere near Hampton Court, to be able actually to visit the flowers, but it’s a paragraph of warmth, of sanity, in among all the darker events. Some anonymous journalist on the Times is doing us all a service. Reading those few words is the best thing that has happened to me all day.
Lucky you, getting a newspaper every morning.
Have to stop. Must write letters for some of the wounded.
Huge love,
Izzy
On nights when Sam and I weren’t going to the theater, or to a concert, or to a lecture, and Faye wasn’t going out with Cyril, we devised our own entertainment. Some evenings were devoted to hair washing, when Sam, Faye, and Lottie would all wander around the flat with their hair in towel turbans and I would read to them for an hour, sometimes recent novels I liked, sometimes poetry Sam had spotted, and sometimes from Lottie’s magazines about the party life of the smart set in London. Sometimes we made respirators. These were pads of absorbent cotton wool between layers of gauze, about six inches long and three inches deep, to fit over the mouth and nostrils and fastened around the head by tapes. They were designed to help cope with a gas attack, should one occur, and we took any spares we made—over and above what we needed—to the local army barracks, for distribution.
And sometimes, when we really wanted to relax, we played charades.
Lottie, being a theater type, was the organizing genius here. She loved acting herself, though she had never dared try it on the professional stage. She would think up hilarious and often very clever phrases for us all to act out and, as the evenings wore on and the whisky began to take over, some of her ideas turned decidedly risqué.
I was by far the worst actor of the four of us. The sisters, of course, were used to the intimacy of large family life, their shared childhood, and had a string of in-jokes and in-talk that I simply didn’t understand. They had borrowed one another’s clothes and stolen one another’s makeup for as long as they could remember, and their great triumphs and disasters, in the “men department,” as they called it, were revisited every so often, accompanied by gales of laughter.
I loved the sisters’ frankness and complete lack of embarrassment in front of one another.
“You’re such a cow, Lottie,” Sam would say after Lottie had made some cutting remark or other.
“I know,” Lottie would agree eagerly, “but I can’t help it.” They would rib each other about the shape of their breasts, the ugliness of someone’s ankles, or speculate freely about what they thought this or that politician was like in bed.
On one evening of charades, Lottie and Sam were playing against Faye and me. It was late, and Lottie and Sam were a game ahead, when Lottie set me to act out one final phrase. She took me to the edge of the room, so Faye couldn’t hear, and whispered, “Premature ejaculation.”
I laughed nervously. This was going to take some doing.
Lottie was already smiling, ready to laugh at whatever moves I might make.
It was hardly the most suitable phrase, given my predicament, but Lottie didn’t know about that.
Or did she?
A horrible thought struck me: that Sam had shared this intimacy with her sister.