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Margaret in a low tone that barely concealed her agony of shame. ‘I don’t think he did understand. He seemed surprised that I took it all so seriously. He made a kind of joke out of it too – not unkindly, of course – he was two years older than I was and much more sensible. And he explained – he said – he told me – that he didn’t love me …’
    ‘But that was all right, because you didn’t love him,’ interrupted Hilda, ‘so you needn’t feel bad about that.’
    ‘No, I didn’t love him when I told him. But afterwards when I’d had a frightful scene with Mother and she’d told me I’d messed up my chance and I’d probably never have another, then I got thinking about how kind and quiet and sensible he was and how we liked all the same things, and I – I thought I did love him and that made it worse than ever. I was so miserable I wanted to die.’
    ‘You take things to heart so,’ said Hilda at last, in what was for her a depressed tone.
    ‘I know. I always have. I can’t help it.’
    ‘What will you be like when you’re old?’
    ‘Perhaps I shan’t live to be old.’
    ‘Go on, that’s right, be really cheerful.’
    ‘Well, I don’t want to be.’
    ‘Yes you do; we’ll live together in that little house when I’m old too and all my boys have deserted me.’
    ‘You’ll be married.’
    ‘Well, so will you.’
    Margaret shook her head. ‘No, I shan’t. I’m not the type.’
    ‘You aren’t’ – Hilda hesitated – ‘you don’t still care about him, do you?’
    ‘I’m not still in love with him, if that’s what you mean. I still like to remember what friends we were. You see, I think of him as two people really; the real person who was so easy to get on with, and kind and sensible, and the person I was in love with, who was all romantic and marvellous because he was unattainable.’
    Hilda could only shake her head.
    ‘Did you see him again after you’d told him about your mother?’ she asked presently.
    ‘No. He did want to, but I said not. We wrote to each other once or twice, at Christmas; just ordinary letters, not long ones. After I’d got over being in love with him I didn’t want to see him again.’
    ‘Wouldn’t you like to see him again now?’ suggested Hilda.
    Margaret did not answer for a little while. Then, when they were nearly at the gate of Hilda’s house, where she was staying, she said:
    ‘No. I still feel too bad about it. It absolutely did something to me, Hilda. That’s what’s made me “different,” as you say. It was such a shock to me, telling him like that – and then falling in love with him after he’d told me he wasn’t in love with me – and feeling so despairing. I’ve got such frighteningly strong feelings – you don’t know.’
    ‘I think you imagine a lot of it,’ said Hilda firmly, pushing open the gate of a tiny house whose wintry garden had not a dead leaf in sight or a grass blade out of place, and whose blackout showed not a cranny or chink. The front doorstep was snowy in the moonlight and the metal letter-box glittered.
    ‘No, I don’t. I wish I did.’
    ‘Well, never mind now. You’re quite bats but I love you,’ and she gave her a quick hug and tapped out the Victory tattoo on the knocker, ‘and it’s lovely that you’re coming to live in London.’

2
     
    The town of Lukeborough, to which Margaret returned in a few days, was in Bedfordshire.
    Before the Second World War Lukeborough had a population of some seventy thousand, being smaller than Northampton and larger than Luton, its nearest comparable neighbours to the northand south. Evacuees from London and war-workers drafted into its new factories from the Midlands and the North had increased its numbers to nearly eighty thousand by the fourth year of the War, and its natural ugliness and dullness were enhanced by overcrowding in its streets and shops and cinemas, and a chronic shortage of those small delicacies that make life in war-time a little