this emotion surprised her.
After dinner she’d gone into the garden. The last puffs of smoke from a bonfire of leaves rose and drifted above the tall branches of the cedar tree. It had been a cold but perfect day, with the sky clear as polished glass and frost on the trees in the early morning. The garden, stripped of its summer finery, but still with the skeletons of summer roses among the Virginia creepers and bright, fresh rose hips, had never looked more beautiful.
She walked past the orchard where her ponies, Smiler and Bertie, had been buried under the apple tree and where she and Tor, dressed in solemn robes and holding candles, had buried all the rabbits and dogs. Her feet flattened the rougher grass as she took the shortcut from the orchard to the stables.
She was going, and now that the light had changed, what was usually taken for granted felt almost unbearably painful and precious: the crunch of gravel, the smell of the bonfire as it rose into the darkening sky, the silky slither of the stream disappearing beneath the drive.
She looked back at the house and thought of all the life that had gone on there: the laughter and the rows, and shouts of “Bedtime, darlings,” the blissful sound of the supper gong when she and Tor and her big brother Simon, whom they’d idolized, had been racing around in the garden building dens, or playing cricket or pretending to be Germans, or playing pirates in the stream. Big brother Simon baring his teeth and threatening the plank to all dissenters.
Her last pony, Copper, had his head over the stable gate. She gave him his bedtime apple, and then, looking furtively to the left and to the right, let herself into his stable and collapsed over him weeping. Nothing in her life had ever made her feel this sad before, and at a time when she was supposed to feel so happy.
Copper pushed her gently with his head, and let her tears fall into his mane. She knew she wouldn’t see him again, or the dogs, Rollo and Mops, who were getting on. Maybe not even her parents. Her father’s wretched bout of pneumonia only last winter had left him with what he called a dicky motor and the doctor called a serious heart condition. He had not recovered. They talked about her wedding as if he was bound to make it, although both of them knew he probably wouldn’t.
She was aware, too, of all the painful thoughts tonight would bring to all of them about Simon. Darling Simon, so tall and gangling and blond and half grown, had had all her father’s goodness and gallantry as well as his steelier qualities. He was killed in France in the last month of the war. It was ten days before his twenty-first birthday. Her parents rarely spoke of it, but it was always lurking there, like an iceberg under the sunny surface of things.
Now she was sitting in the garden shed, on a stack of piled-up chairs surrounded by the neat boxes of apples twisted into tissue that her mother had put away for winter, and a dusty collection of wicker chairs and croquet mallets and old cricket bats. Across the lawn, a light went on in her father’s study, casting a dark square shape onto the grass. She pictured him bending over his books with that look of desperate calm he wore when he was trying not to think of upsetting things, knocking ash from his pipe into the brass ashtray he’d bought in Egypt, or winding up his gramophone to hear his beloved Mozart. Her fixed point, her magnetic north—but now everything was being moved. She wished she smoked, like Tor did. Tor said it really did help when one was in a state.
She stayed for a while, desperately trying to calm herself. Soldiers’ daughters don’t cry.
Going up the backstairs to her room, her mother called out from her own bedroom, “Are you all right, darling?”
“Yes, Mummy,” she said. “Absolutely fine, I’ll be in in a minute to say good night.”
Inside her room, all her new clothes had been hung outside her wardrobe like ghosts waiting for their new life to begin. They’d had such a lovely day up in London with Tor and her mother, Jonti. They’d bought such pretty things—a floaty dress with pink tea roses on it from Harrods; new pink suede shoes to go with it; a tennis dress that Mother