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a different complexion on things but decided that it didn’t. ‘She was your missus,’ he repeated, obstinately, ‘and they’ll all expect you to go.’ A note of irritation entered Rawlinson’s voice. ‘Dammit, you don’t want to go, do you? You just don’t want to go! Now why not?’
    It wasn’t an easy question. He felt about Rachel the way he felt about Rawlinson. They were partners in an expanding business that had gone through some very bad times in the ’twenties and ’thirties but was now on the mend. They thought of that business as progress, social justice, self-determination for minorities and equality of opportunity but now all the old battle-cries had been amalgamated into one and was on the lips of many former enemies, including Big Business, the Conservative Party, and that old whipping boy the Bourgeoisie. Rachel had dropped out and he was surprised, even a little ashamed, at his lack of reaction to news of her death. Just that one stab under the ribs and then nothing but a kind of nostalgia for the early years of their marriage when they had shared platforms at so many ill-attended meetings in so many hopeless campaigns, when they went calling on indifferent electors with their leaflets and torrents of words, and then home to bed to furnished rooms where the beds were lumpy, wardrobe drawers stuck half-way out, and the linoleum was cold to bare feet. Had there ever been any ecstasy? He couldn’t be sure after all this time. All he remembered was the clip clop of her sensible brogues on cobbles, rain streaming down her unpowdered cheeks and stray tendrils of hair hanging limply over the collar of a cheap, off-the-peg coat. In a way he was glad she was out of it. Her spirit, mortally injured by the assaults of the First War, had been too sickly to challenge its successor. She was worn out and used up, not physically perhaps but mentally. Too many doors had been slammed in her face. Too many of her leaflets had found their way to the lavatory and on September 3rd, 1939, she had turned her face to the wall.
    He made his decision as he swallowed the rest of his tea. ‘I’m going to put a call through,’ he said briefly and Rawley watched him hunch his shoulders against the rain and recross the parade ground to the sergeants’ mess. ‘Queer bugger, Crad!’ he murmured aloud. ‘Queer, but Christ Almighty, tough! Tougher than anyone in this bloody outfit!’
    II
    T he telephone rang in the hall an hour or so after they had returned to the Big House from the funeral. Claire Craddock, answering it, told herself that it was Simon ringing to ask who had been there, how many wreaths had been sent and from whom. She had been as shocked as Rawlinson by his refusal to ask for compassionate leave to attend but when she received his letter on the morning of the funeral, and had had time to think about it, she understood better than any of them. The relationship between them had always been easy and comfortable, perhaps because, in the days after his mother had abandoned him and Claire had taken her place at Shallowford, she had always made very certain that he wasn’t left out in the cold. Simon, a sensitive child, had recognised and appreciated her good intentions, and as he grew from a lonely child into a lonely young man it was Claire who had more of his confidence than his father, or his noisy half-brothers. She had never taken his marriage to that Eveleigh girl very seriously, recognising it for what it was, an attempt on the part of a young war widow to find her way back into the mainstream of life, but she had always respected the woman they had just laid in the Eveleigh patch at Coombe Bay churchyard. If she had little capacity for love, as Claire had practised it all her life, she had plenty of loyalty and had helped Simon through some difficult times, particularly when he returned from Franco’s prison weighing six stones.
    The call, however, was not a conventional enquiry from Simon but a terse