Free When Blackbirds Sing by Martin Boyd

wanted to get rid of him, she had cancelled all her engagements for the remaining days of his leave, but she was not prepared to let him treat her casually. No man might do that. To awaken some kind of response she said “I may have to go down to Dilton tomorrow. Mother’s not very well.”
    Dominic looked a little surprised, but he only said: “Oh, I’m sorry,” and she did not know whether he was sorry because she was going or because her mother was unwell. She said with a touch of contempt, to point out that if she went away he would have only elderly relatives to entertain him: “Did you enjoy your lunch with Lady Langton?”
    “Yes. She was awfully kind,” he answered, not seeing her intention, but thinking she was trying to bring herself, also with kind motives, into the picture which filled his mind. He smiled for the first time since he had come in, and said: “She’s going to send me a plum cake from Harrods.”
    The atmosphere eased. The mutual repudiation evaporated and they began to talk again with their easy, amused bickering, and to Dominic their relationship immediately became innocent. As long as he behaved instinctively he felt that he was innocent. When he was made to think ofwhat he was doing, especially by something like the squalid play, he fell back on the Calvinism imposed on him in his childhood. With his ever ready generosity he was anxious to make up for his unfairness to Sylvia, while she, relieved to find that he had only been in “one of his moods”, wanted to pretend that nothing had happened. Outwardly this was so, as their quarrel had consisted entirely of telepathic waves of reconciliation, and a new degree of intimacy was achieved. They felt safer with each other.
    For the next three days they spent their whole time together. Dominic felt more strongly that something of his own was being restored to him. In the evening, if they stayed in, she showed him before dinner into the bathroom which opened off her own room, and she lent him Maurice’s spare hair brushes. He waited alone in the drawing-room while she changed, and examining at his leisure its toy palatial perfection, he thought that if he had wanted to he could be living here as her husband. For the house was not Maurice’s, but, like everything in it, given to her by her father. Vaguely he felt that he had a prior right to it
    They no longer bothered to go to places of amusement. On the Saturday afternoon they walked through the parks and had tea at a shop at Notting Hill Gate. Dominic wanted to return on the top of a 52 bus, but Sylvia never travelled in buses. She gave the reason that it would be too cold, but her real one, apart from her prejudice against them, was that it would be too conspicuous.
    Dominic was to leave for France by a train leaving Victoria at seven o’clock on Monday morning. When they returned from Notting Hill Gate he told Sylvia thathe would like to go to church the next morning, Sunday. Conventional people, whatever their belief, still went regularly to church. Dominic had the idea that the eve of his departure to fight for his country was an occasion that required a form of knightly dedication. He asked Sylvia to go with him.
    “To church?” she asked, surprised. “Very well, but where can we go?”
    “There are plenty of churches. Where do you go?”
    Sylvia went to St Mark’s, North Audley Street, which had the richest and smartest congregation in London. In the porch on the Sunday before Ascot one could hear them discussing the form of racehorses. She did not want to go there with Dominic, and be seen by her friends. At first she had been pleased at the quick glances or frank stares of admiration which they attracted, but since the afternoon at Hampton Court she had kept away from places where they might be known.
    “There’s a church by Brompton Square,” she said. “People are married there sometimes.”
    “Yes. It’s behind Cousin Emma’s house,” said Dominic.
    “Does she go