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imagined kind look, an imagined slight, a turning away, a coming towards, from Louise. Louise felt Patricia’s eyes upon her: once or twice she smiled or raised her eyebrows in mock wonder, but she did not speak. School rules forbade conversation between girls of different age groups: exceptions were made for sisters, or family friends. Unnatural friendships were feared, and closely watched for, and flourished.
    Louise sang solo in choir: she had a gentle soprano. Patricia joined the choir, which practised on Tuesday lunchtimes, and lived for Tuesdays. The day itself seemed misty, pierced by blinking light.
    ‘Nymphs and shepherds, come away—
    Let’s sport and play—’
    ‘You have to have a crush on somebody,’ Elaine had instructed Patricia, at the beginning of term. Elaine was a stout, steady, competent girl who came top in everything and took Patricia under her wing. Patricia would come fourth or fifth, occasionally second or third: it amounted to competition, not rivalry, and Elaine could afford to be kind.
    Elaine’s father kept a corner grocery shop. Lucy did not approve of the friendship.
    ‘You’re going too far,’ complained Elaine, at the end of term. Patricia became a source of half-envy, half-disapproval to her classmates. The pretence of crushes was common enough: the real swooning, genuine thing was rare—the pallor, the trembling of the hand, the dizziness of the head, the obsessive dreams at night of a touch, a smile; the lingering in corridors, the watching of doors, and for what? For nothing. For attention from the loved object, which could only make the affliction worse, not better. No other outcome was possible. No touch, no kiss, no declaration.
    Patricia started to bleed, one day. Crimson drops appeared on her legs. A scratch, a nick? No, it came from between her legs, where she never looked, or felt: from some hidden dreadful, internal wound. Patricia ran to her sister, crying.
    ‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Hilda, looking up from her French verbs. ‘It’s very messy, anyway. Go and tell mother.’
    ‘Perhaps it will stop,’ said Patricia, hopefully. But it didn’t.
    Patricia went to her mother.
    ‘I don’t believe it,’ said her mother, aghast. ‘Fifteen is the proper age. Now if it had been Hilda—’ Lucy went to the linen cupboard, chose the most threadbare of the sheets, tore them into ten neat strips, assembled a piece of white tape into a belt, found two safety pins and handed them to Patricia.
    Patricia cried all night. Five-twenty-eights of her life gone, stolen, and for no other reason than that she was a woman.
    ‘Of course men can’t know you when you’re unclean,’ said Hilda. ‘It says so in the Bible. That’s why it’s called the curse. It’s God’s punishment.’
    ‘For what?’
    ‘Giving Adam the apple, I suppose.’
    ‘He didn’t have to eat it’
    ‘Yes he did. If someone offers you food, it’s only manners to take it. Why are you always so argumentative?’
    A war with Germany had started, largely unnoticed by Patricia, who was too busy considering herself to pay the outside world much attention. Barbed wire covered the beaches. She could not swim if she wanted to, even on the twenty-three days allowed every four weeks by the curse. It was all clearly part of life’s plan.
    The signposts were turned the wrong way round to confuse German spies. Lucy stopped defending Hitler and his attitude to the Jews.
    Henry’s photographic studio closed. Holidaymakers no longer thronged the promenade. The sellers of candy-floss and placards departed: the donkeys disappeared. Windows were shuttered, and the waterfront deserted. The pretty waves fell and retreated on barbed wire and blocks of concrete, whose purpose no one could determine. By night, the blackout was total: the streets were thronged with breathing, sighing shapes which might have been human and might not.
    Henry was fortunate to find a job taking photographs of conscripts at the local