‘I’VE brought you some stamps,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve been collecting them for a week - from everybody. Even Mrs Carter has contributed a magnificent parrakeet - look at it - from somewhere in South America. And here’s a complete set of Liberians surcharged for the American occupation. I got those from the Naval Observer.’

     They were completely at ease: it seemed to both of them for that very reason they were safe.

     ‘Why do you collect stamps?’ he asked. ‘It’s an odd thing to do - after sixteen.’

     ‘I don’t know,’ Helen Rolt said. ‘I don’t really collect. I carry them round. I suppose it’s habit.’ She opened the album and said, ‘No, it’s not just habit. I do love the things. Do you see this green George V halfpenny stamp? It’s the first I ever collected. I was eight. I steamed it off an envelope and stuck it in a notebook. That’s why my father gave me an album. My mother had died, so he gave me a stamp-album.’

     She tried to explain more exactly. ‘They are like snapshots. They are so portable. People who collect china - they can’t carry it around with them. Or books. But you don’t have to tear the pages out like you do with snapshots.

     ‘You’ve never told me about your husband,’ Scobie said.

     ‘No.’

     ‘It’s not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it’s been torn?’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘It’s easier to get over a thing,’ Scobie said, ‘if you talk about it.’

     ‘That’s not the trouble,’ she said. ‘The trouble is - it’s so terribly easy to get over.’ She took him by surprise; he hadn’t believed she was old enough to have reached that stage in her lessons, that particular turn of the screw. She said, ‘He’s been dead - how long - is it eight weeks yet? and he’s so dead, so completely dead. What a little bitch I must be.’

     Scobie said, ‘You needn’t feel that. It’s the same with everybody, I think. When we say to someone, ‘I can’t live without you,’ what we really mean is, ‘I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.’ That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.’

     ‘I didn’t know I was so tough,’ Helen said. ‘Horribly tough.’

     ‘I had a child,’ Scobie said, ‘who died. I was out here. My wife sent me two cables from Bexhill, one at five in the evening and one at six, but they mixed up the order. You see she meant to break the thing gently. I got one cable just after breakfast. It was eight o’clock in the morning - a dead time of day for any news.’ He had never mentioned this before to anyone, not even to Louise. Now he brought out the exact words of each cable, carefully. ‘The cable said, Catherine died this afternoon no pain God bless you. The second cable came at lunch-time. It said, Catherine seriously ill. Doctor has hope my diving. That was the one sent off at five. ‘Diving’ was a mutilation - I suppose for ‘darling’. You see there was nothing more hopeless she could have put to break the news than “doctor has hope”.’

     ‘How terrible for you,’ Helen said.

     ‘No, the terrible thing was that when I got the second telegram, I was so muddled in my head, I thought, there’s been a mistake. She must be still alive. For a moment until I realized what had happened, I was - disappointed. That was the terrible thing. I thought ‘now the anxiety begins, and the pain’, but when I realized what had happened, then it was all right, she was dead, I could begin to forget her.’

     ‘Have you forgotten her?’

     ‘I don’t remember her often. You see, I escaped seeing her die. My wife had that.’

    It was astonishing to him how easily and quickly they had become friends. They came together over two deaths without reserve. She said, ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

     ‘Everybody would have looked after you.’

     ‘I think they are scared of me, she said.

     He laughed.

     ‘They are. Flight-Lieutenant Bagster took me to the beach this afternoon but he was scared. Because I’m not happy and because of my husband. Everybody on the beach was pretending to be happy about something and I sat there grinning and it didn’t work. Do you remember when you went to your first party and coming up the stairs you heard all the voices and you didn’t know how to talk to people? That’s how I felt so I sat and grinned in Mrs Carter’s bathing-dress and Bagster stroked my leg and I wanted to go home.’

     ‘You’ll be going home soon.’

     ‘I don’t mean that home. I mean here where I can shut the door and not answer when they knock. I don’t want to go away yet.’

     ‘But surely you aren’t happy here?’

     ‘I’m so afraid of the sea,’ she said.

     ‘Do you dream about it?’

     ‘No. I dream of John sometimes - that’s worse. Because I’ve always had bad dreams of him and I still have bad dreams of him. I mean we were always quarrelling in the dreams and we still go on quarrelling.’

     ‘Did you quarrel?’

     ‘No. He was sweet to me. We were only married a month you know. It would be easy being sweet as long as that wouldn’t it? When this happened I hadn’t really had time to know my way around.’ It seemed to Scobie that she had never known her way around - at least not since she had left her net-ball team; was it a year ago? Sometimes he saw her lying back in the boat on that oily featureless sea day after day with the other child near death and the sailor going mad and Miss Malcott, and the chief engineer who felt his responsibility to the owners, and sometimes he saw her carried past him on a stretcher grasping her stamp-album, and now he saw her in the borrowed unbecoming bathing-dress grinning at Bagster as he stroked her legs, listening to the laughter and the splashes, not knowing the adult etiquette ... Sadly like an evening tide he felt responsibility bearing him up the shore. ‘You’ve written to your father?’

     ‘Oh yes, of course. He cabled that he’s pulling strings about the passage. I don’t know what strings he can pull from Bury, poor dear. He doesn’t know anybody at all. He cabled too about John, of course.’ She lifted a cushion off the chair and pulled the cable out. ‘Read it. He’s very sweet, but of course he doesn’t know a thing about me.’

     Scobie read. Terribly grieved for you, dear child, but remember his happiness, Your loving father. The date stamp with the Bury mark made him aware of the enormous distance between father and child. He said, ‘How do you mean, he doesn’t know a thing?’

     ‘You see, he believes in God and heaven, all that sort of thing.’

     ‘You don’t?’

     ‘I gave up all that when I left school. John used to pull his leg about it, quite gently you know. Father didn’t mind. But he never knew I felt the way John did. If you are a clergyman’s daughter there are a lot of things you have to pretend about. He would have hated knowing that John and I went together, oh, a fortnight before we married.’

     Again he had that vision of someone who didn’t know her way around: no wonder Bagster was scared of her. Bagster was not a man to accept responsibility, and how could anyone lay the responsibility for any action, he thought, on this stupid bewildered child? He turned over the little pile of stamps he had accumulated for her and said, ‘I wonder what you’ll do when you get home?’

     ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘they’ll conscript me.’

     He thought: If my child had lived, she too would have been conscriptable, flung into some grim dormitory, to find her own way. After the Atlantic, the A.T.S. or the W.A.A.F., the blustering sergeant with the big bust, the cook-house and the potato peelings, the Lesbian officer with the thin lips and the tidy gold hair, and the men waiting on the Common outside the camp, among the gorse bushes ... compared to that surely even the Atlantic was more a home. He said, ‘Haven’t you got any shorthand? any languages?’ Only............