Free The Shell House by Linda Newbery Page B

at him without speaking, and he wondered if they’d overheard his spat with Faith. Across the orchard, the three bags of blackberries lay on the grass; there was no sign of her. He stood for a moment, wondering what to do.
    The grotto. That’s where she’d be. With some difficulty he found the log path where it crept down from the open orchard. He made his descent to the lake shore and stood on the path in the open bowl of sky enclosed by trees, feeling the silence and seclusion. He heard the trickle of the spring that emerged from the grotto’s interior, saw the crystal channel of its decanting into the lake, and a clear fan-shape where it funnelled into sandy water.
    Faith was exactly where he’d found her last week, sitting on the bench inside. She looked up at him and away again quickly.
    ‘Oh. You,’ she sniffed.
    He sat on the bench next to her. ‘Look, I—I’m sorry.’
    ‘Do you mean that?’
    ‘Would I have trekked down here otherwise? I didn’t mean to get at you.’
    ‘But you did.’ She turned her face away. ‘Don’t you like me or something?’
    ‘Yes! I do like you,’ he said uncertainly.
    ‘You don’t think I’m a snotty little St Ursula’s girl?’
    ‘No,’ Greg lied. ‘And you don’t think I’m a vile loudmouthed yob?’
    She looked at him and smiled, wiping a finger along the lower lashes of one eye. ‘ ’Course not. Why would I?’
    ‘Been doing a good imitation.’
    ‘Not really.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m sorry too.’
    ‘For what?’
    ‘For getting at you,’ Faith said. ‘I didn’t really mean to either. We’re all right now, aren’t we?’
    ‘ ’Course we are.’
    And to Greg’s astonishment she turned and hugged him, leaning close. He smelled her hair, felt its silky length fall over his arm. Gingerly he put a hand to her back; at once she pulled away and stood up.
    ‘That’s all right then,’ she said briskly. ‘Shall we go and pick more blackberries?’

    In an orchard in Picardy, Lieutenant Edmund Pearson was lying in uncut grass with his uniform jacket folded under his head as a pillow. Two peaked caps lay on the ground half-filled with damsons; a wasp hovered around the ripe fruit and Edmund raised a hand to swish it away. Beside him, cross-legged, sat Alex Culworth, reading from a small notebook. Edmund waited, watching his expression, and his eyes scanning the lines of handwriting—the lines Edmund had drafted and redrafted and copied out with such care.
    Without comment, Alex turned a page and carried on reading intently. Whatever he did, he gave it the full blaze of his attention. Edmund liked that. Not for Alex the cursory reading, the polite response.
    ‘Well, Lord Byron,’ Alex said at last, ‘never let an idle minute go to waste, I see.’
    ‘If you think they’re dreadful, please say so.’
    ‘No need to raise your hackles. I haven’t said anything yet.’ Alex picked up the first page again. ‘This one—the idea, and the opening—
Last night I saw
the ghost of France / Rise from her grave to mourn
. . . Yes. And I like the last stanza. I’m not sure about
with wide-mouthed gashes torn
. It’s a bit clumsy—not easy to say. And perhaps too obvious a rhyme.’
    Edmund nodded.
    ‘Hmm. The land as victim,’ Alex said, and his voice took on a teasing tone. ‘You would see it that way, as a bloated aristocrat, a member of the land-owning classes.’
    ‘Of course. And the sonnet?’ Edmund’s words came out hoarsened with doubt: Alex had not yet mentioned the second poem, the one addressed to him. He wished he had handed over the poems and left Alex alone to read them, not stayed here to register every eye-flicker, every compression of the lips. To offer his verses was to show Alex his thoughts and, he saw now, to expose himself to the possibility of hurt and rejection.
    ‘The ending, of course. Thank you. I like the way the last two lines bring in something different entirely, something personal.’ Alex looked back at the poem,