ambulance brought him this afternoon. His name is Captain Dennis. He was shot in the head, poor boy, but they say now that he will recover completely. Isn’t that marvellous?’ Eleanor was completely happy again, contemplating the good news.
Peter had watched the light fading in the corners of the room, letting himself grow familiar with the opposite contours of square and semicircle, and then he had drifted into sleep. The soft knocking at the door woke him into momentary disorientation.
‘What is it?’ he called.
‘Clio Hirsh. I’ve brought your tea.’
‘Come in,’ he said, not much the wiser.
The door opened and he saw a dark-haired girl with wide eyes and pink cheeks. She came into the room sideways, carrying a tray of tea-things. She was not a nurse, or an orderly, although she was wearing some kind of uniform. Peter blinked, feeling the mists of confusion threatening him. A kind of convalescent home, they had told him before he left the hospital. He longed suddenly for his real home, and the sight of his mother, but they had also told him that Invernessshire was too far for him to travel yet.
The girl set the tray down and then turned shyly to look at him. Peter saw that she was perhaps three years younger than himself.
‘I expect you wish you really could go home,’ she said. It was not a particularly profound insight, but in his weakness Peter was amazed and grateful. He had an uncomfortable moment when he was afraid that he might cry. He made himself smile instead. ‘It’s a very long way.’
Clio was gazing at him. One side of his head had been shaved, and where it was not hidden by the white lint dressing she could see the new growth of hair. It was a kind of fuzz, darker than the old hair.
Apart from the red pucker of a healing scar that ran upwards from his cheekbone and under the pad of bandages, his face seemed undamaged. She wanted to look at his face, but she felt constrained by her shyness. She turned to the teatray instead, and found that her hands were shaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It isn’t a very pretty sight.’
‘I didn’t mean … It isn’t that.’ She couldn’t say that it was nothing, because he had suffered it, but it wasn’t his wound that she had been thinking about at all. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I stuck my head above a parapet. A sniper got me. The bullet sliced a furrow through the bone. Missed my brain, more or less.’ Economical words, that was all. He wouldn’t tell her about the mud and the noise and the spectre of death, any more than he had told his father and mother when they came to see him in the Oxford hospital. That was past now, and he was alive. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Clio Hirsh.’
She had a wonderful smile, and skin like ivory satin. Her throat was very white where it was swallowed by the collar of her severe blouse. He knew that he wanted to touch it. The strength of his inclination startled him.
Clio felt his eyes on her, and put her hand up. ‘It’s my school uniform. I have to wear it. This, and the tunic.’
She was a schoolgirl. Peter Dennis’s schooldays, only two years behind him, seemed to belong to another lifetime. ‘You look very pretty in it.’ It was an unimaginative compliment, he thought, and Clio’s smile was more of a reward than it deserved.
‘Do you know, that is the second time today I have been told I look pretty?’
Peter tried to sit upright. ‘And who is the other man?’
‘My father.’
It made her happy to see him laughing, and she laughed too.
‘Let me give you some tea,’ she said, when they had finished.
She was going to hand him the cup when she saw that he had slipped down against the pillows. She leant over instead and rearranged them for him. Then she put her arm behind his shoulders.
‘Can you sit up some more?’
She lifted the weight of him, and his head rested against her for an instant. Looking down, she saw the line where his natural hair met the fuzzy new growth. She was suddenly aware of the eggshell vulnerability of the naked skull. It was terrible to think of the bullet smashing into it, the hairsbreadth distance from the soft brain. She felt a shiver of horror travelling through her limbs. Her awareness of her own body was immediately heightened. The business of muscles and tendons and blood vessels instantly struck her as precious and miraculous, all the more so for never having been considered before.
She withdrew her arm, very carefully, aware of the infinitesimal warmth of their contact.
Peter’s head flopped back against the plump pillows. ‘I’m so damned weak.’
‘You will get strong again,’ she made herself say, with composure. She handed him the white and gold teacup. The mundane gesture was invested with importance.
There was another knock at the door, and the day nurse came in. She was a square-jawed, middle-aged woman who wore a long starched apron and a cap of starched and folded linen. She was carrying the dressings box, and a tin jug of hot water.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Hirsh. How are you, Captain Dennis? It’s time for your dressing.’
Clio knew that she was dismissed. She was disappointed, but she nodded meekly. ‘Goodbye, Captain.’
He ignored the nurse. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Will you come back tomorrow?’
Clio gave him her smile once more. ‘Of course I will.’
Only when the door had closed behind her did he lean back, ready to submit. The nurse bent over him, crackling, and began to peel the old dressing away from the weeping furrow in the side of his skull.
Nathaniel and Grace were home. Clio could hear Tabby and Alice clamouring for their father’s attention. Grace was coming swiftly up the stairs. She glanced up and saw Clio hovering at the top, as if she had a secret. ‘What is it?’ Grace called.
Clio had been thinking dazedly that here was a man, a man who was neither a brother or a cousin. She had met hardly any men except the other patients, and she knew with certainty that Peter Dennis was absolutely unlike any of those.
‘Nothing,’ Clio answered innocently.
Grace came up the stairs, and stopped on the stair level with her. ‘What’s the new patient like?’
‘Quite nice, I think.’ She went on down, with every appearance of calm, and left Grace on the landing.
It was the next afternoon, when Clio was at school, before Grace met Peter Dennis. She was making a visit to each of the patients, distributing the new books she had brought home in her basket. The turret room was the highest in the house and the last one she came to.
When she came in Peter saw her dark hair and eyes, and remembered the colour of her skin. There was a faint blur of light around her silhouette, but he knew that was a trick played by his own damaged eyesight. He smiled at her. ‘Clio? I hoped you’d come today.’
Grace saw that he moved
