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the tire inner tubes that had been bought from bicycle shops in Dover, and which he was meant to inflate by mouth if he ditched in the sea.
    By the time that they crossed land, his teeth had been chattering and his face felt frozen, wind whipped; his lips were sticking to his teeth, his throat was closing up. Seeing the first piece of shoreline, he felt triumphant, as if he had won the war all by himself.
    They had got to the aerodrome at Amiens and he had seen, to his astonishment, fifty planes all lined up as if they were at a show, and crowds cheering them. To his embarrassment, his passenger, the surly mechanic, had waved. When he had got the Farman down, he had grabbed the man as they had walked away from the machine. “Don’t do that showboating business ever again,” he’d told him, “Or I shall box your bloody ears.”
    Oh, the dark, dark water of the Channel and the drizzling rain of Amiens, and the feeling of being an avenging angel ready to fly out over northern France and watch the BEF hound the Germans back over the Belgian frontier; oh the delight of it. He would have rather been in his aircraft, whatever they gave him, than be on the ground. The minute that he was in the air he was more alive than he had ever been in his life; even the controls in his hands felt surreal, brightly lit, more than three-dimensional. He would walk to his plane as if he were going on a morning stroll, jingling the change in his pockets. He liked to think he could make any plane dance; it was freedom itself.
    He was knocked back, of course, by older men. “The callow carelessness of youth,” he had heard one say of an eighteen-year-old boy, newly qualified like himself, who had managed to crash his machine on the South Downs before ever reaching the Channel. “Brief candlelight.”
    Harry had asked the man what he meant. “Sir, ‘brief candlelight’ . . . ?” He was wondering if it was some sort of jargon for a technical term. The man had downed the whisky in his glass; they were standing at a makeshift mess in the aerodrome. “There’s husbandry in heaven; its candles are all out. Or some such thing,” the man had replied. And he had eyed Harry, smiling. “You don’t know the play?”
    “No sir.” The officer had laughed.
    “Just as well, perhaps. Supposed to be bad luck.”
    Harry had come to the conclusion that the officer had been one over the odds, drunk. But the phrase remained. The snuffing out of candles; and they were all candles. Particularly the young ones. Brief candles flickering in the dark. He understood that, finally.
    It was true that the young ones died. But then, they all did, whatever age they were. He’d known so many go the reckless maddening way of the boy who had smashed into the Sussex soil, including poor Allentyne getting shot in a place that guaranteed no little Allentynes would ever emerge—“right through one fuselage to mine own,” the man had joked as he was taken from the wreckage. Wreckage of a reconnaissance flight only four days after they got to France.
    The motor taxi suddenly slowed, and made a sharp right-hand turn.
    Harry woke up, shuddering briefly: Allentyne’s face had been so absolutely clear that he was convinced for a moment that the poor devil was right here next to him. Harry shot upright, and the driver noticed the movement.
    “Just coming up to the house, sir,” he said.
    And so it was. There, in the sweet evening air, Rutherford. To Harry’s absolute chagrin, he felt like crying; he ran his right hand rapidly over his face.
    As he watched the view of the house steps ahead of him on the drive, he saw the great door suddenly swing open, and his youngest sister Charlotte stepped out. She clapped her hand, and ran back the way she had come, and suddenly his parents were there: his mother looking radiantly happy, his father smiling, one hand in his pocket and the other on his hip.
My God
, Harry thought.
The old man looks tir
ed.
    The taxi came to a halt;