Free Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

collection.’
    ‘Have you, sweetie? Well, I like you having them.’
    They were all right after that, discussed how they could meet. Diana had found a girl in the village who would look after Jamie for a day sometimes: if he telephoned and got Isla, he would
pretend to be an old friend of her father’s who, since widowed, lived in the Isle of Man with a gigantic clockwork railway apparatus which he played with from morning till night. ‘Well,
not too old a friend,’ Diana said. ‘Daddy’s seventy-two, and you wouldn’t sound like a contemporary of his. You’d better be the
son
of his oldest
friend.’ Edward said he could sound old if he tried, but when challenged to try sounded, as Diana said, exactly like someone of forty-two, which he was. Why would the
son
keep
ringing her up? They invented an ingenious but totally unconvincing fantasy about that, and everything became far more light-hearted. ‘And, of course, we could write to each other,’
Diana eventually said, but Edward made a face, and said writing was not much in his line.
    ‘I did so many lines at school,’ he said, ‘that I invented a system of tying ten pens together, not in a bunch but in a string, so that I could write ten at once. But they
caught me and I had to write more than ever.’
    ‘I can’t imagine you at school.’
    ‘Nor can I. I loathed every minute of it. Never out of hot water.’
    They parted at the gate of Plum Cottage. A hurried embrace in the car.
    ‘Look after yourself,’ he said.
    ‘And you. God bless,’ she added, she was feeling tearful again, but determined not to cry.
    When she was out of the car and had walked round it to the gate, she turned, and he blew her a kiss. This made her want to rush back to the car, but she smiled as brightly as she could, waved,
and walked up the brick path. She heard him start the engine and go, and stood listening until she could no longer hear the car. ‘I
am
in love with him,’ she said to herself.
‘In love. With him.’ It could happen to anyone, but once it did, they had no choice.

    That Saturday evening, all the grown-ups from Pear Tree Cottage – that is to say, Villy and Edward (only he was late), Sybil and Hugh, Jessica and Raymond, and Lady Rydal
– dined at Home Place, as the Brig had decreed that they should. Only Miss Milliment was left there to dine with the older children, some of whom had been swapped from Home Place for the
meal. By the time Edward arrived, the adult party were starting upon their roast veal, with Mrs Cripps’s delicious forcemeat balls and paper-thin slices of lemon, mashed potatoes and French
beans. They were fifteen round the long table that had had its fourth leaf put in for the occasion, and Eileen had got Bertha to help hand round the vegetables. Sid, who realised that she was the
only outsider – a situation in which on different levels she often found herself – looked round at them with an affection that apart from her usual irony had something of awe. Everybody
had worked hard all day in preparation for war, but now they all looked – and talked and behaved – as though it was just another ordinary evening. As they were either talking or eating
or both, she could rove round the dark polished table. The Brig was telling old Lady Rydal some story about India – frequently interrupted by her: both considered themselves to be experts on
that subject; he on the strength of a three-months visit with his wife in the twenties, she for the reason that she had been born there, ‘a baby in the Mutiny’. ‘My ayah carried
me out into the garden and hid me in a gardener’s hut for two days and thereby saved my life. So you see, Mr Cazalet, I cannot consider all Indians to be unreliable, although I know that that
is a view that those less well informed might take. And,’ she added to put the finishing touch to this munificence, ‘I cannot believe that the Indian nature has
changed
. There
was a great deal of loyalty that