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tidying her hair. Joyce saw she was defiantly aware, as she hadn’t been in the heat of the argument, of people watching: the children who’d stopped playing in the street and invisible others from behind the curtained windows of the inhabited houses. Joyce felt a pang of sympathy for how she was exposed.
    â€”Oh, dear, said Uncle Dick in a wryly amused voice as they left her behind. Someone’s upset.
    This tone of light comedy in relation to what had just happened was so unexpected that Joyce forgot to be afraid of him.
    â€”Who was that? she asked.
    Uncle Dick even turned his attention from the road and smiled at her inquiring eyes.—Never you mind, he said. Someone who’d better be our little secret.
    â€”Is it her parcel?
    â€”Oh, no. It’s just something she thinks she ought to have.
    It was almost as though he was pleased that Joyce had been there to see. Perhaps he had taken her deliberately. On the way home he was expansive and genial with her as he’d never been before. When they had driven past the smelting works and left Farmouth and the docks behind, she was able to notice that it was a lovely evening. The grass was long and a tender green in the fields; the hedges were laden with pink and white May blossom.
    â€”You’ve no idea what it’s like, Uncle Dick said. All the responsibilities of a wife and family to support. Especially after the war, which gave a man a taste for independence.
    Uncle Dick had been in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves (the “wavy navy,” because they had wavy white lines around their cuffs). He was lieutenant commander of an aircraft carrier, an American lend-lease. While his ship was in New York for repairs, he had had apartments in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel; this name was always uttered with reverence in the family, as if it were the epitome of luxury. He had met Mrs. Rothschild, who organized Bundles for Britain for the sailors, and he had been given membership in the New York Athletic Club. Perhaps it was there he’d got his taste for independence.
    â€”You get tangled up with a family, he said, before you know what opportunities are out there. Take my advice and don’t be in any hurry to be tied down with kids.
    â€”I’m staying on at school, Joyce said, wondering if that was what he meant.
    â€”Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. Although I should think you’d want some fun too.
    Uncle Dick looked assessingly sideways at Joyce for a moment.
    â€”That’s the trouble with your aunt. She takes everything too seriously.
    Joyce had never heard him say as much as this at home; she guessed it was the way he talked with his men friends. She could imagine why he’d rather sit in a bar with these friends than be at home amid all the steam of cooking and the smoke from the stove and the noisy children and wet washing draped everywhere (although she’d never seen inside a bar except in films). She felt shyly privileged that he shared his thoughts with her, as they sped through the fields in the summer evening.
    â€”What was her name? Joyce asked him at the last minute, as he turned into the lane that led to the old gray house.
    â€”Whose name?
    â€”The lady you visited, in the beige dress.
    â€”Betty Grable, he said.
    Joyce protested; she wasn’t a child, to be fooled.
    â€”If you don’t want to tell me, I don’t mind.
    Uncle Dick laughed at her hurt face.
    â€”No, it really is Betty. Not Betty Grable, just Betty. On my honor. But don’t tell. On yours?
    She nodded.
    Then, managing the bucking car with one hand down the rutted stony lane, he laid his other hand on her bare arm and said something strange.
    â€”I told her you were my daughter. Just so she wouldn’t start imagining anything. You know what these women are like.
    *   *   *
    Joyce was sometimes allowed to hover on the edge of conversations Lil and Vera had in the kitchen when the other