Home, she thought. Exactly what she had dreamed of all those bleak and lonely nights in Hut 3. And yet, now that she was here, she couldn’t shake off the uneasiness. A nagging thought inside her head whispered that she was needed at Bletchley. If they were one person short on her shift, maybe something critical would be missed. Would the gamekeeper’s son still be alive if a submarine message had been intercepted and decoded? She was not part of the naval section, but maybe someone else’s son might have survived because of a message she translated. She told herself that she was giving herself too much importance, but she also knew that every small cog in the great war machine was needed to make it run smoothly.
Her gaze fell on a small china dog on the mantelpiece. He sat up, begging, with ridiculously long ears and a sad face. Jeremy had given it to her when he went into the RAF because she had seen it in an antique shop in Tonbridge and it had made her laugh. He had told her to look at it once a day so that she remembered how to smile. Smiling had been hard when the news came that he had been shot down, and then that he was in a prisoner-of-war camp. And now, against all odds, he was safely home, half a mile away, and she should be bursting with joy. So why wasn’t she?
“I am,” she said out loud. “I just need a little time to get used to things.”
She sank down onto her bed, her hand unconsciously going to her blouse front, feeling the place where the missing button had been. And that mixture of fear and arousal shot through her again. Of course, he had wanted to make love to her. He was, after all, a red-blooded male, deprived of female company for the longest time. He must have dreamed of this moment all those months he was shut away in a prison cell. No wonder he got carried away and couldn’t control himself. Normal behaviour, only to be expected, she told herself. In the time he had been gone, they had both turned from adolescents to adults, and adults took sex for granted—at least her class of adult did. From what she had heard, bed-hopping was an accepted sport among her kind. Apart from her prudish parents, that is. Her mother seemed to have only the vaguest idea about the facts of life, and her father went bright red and started talking about the weather if anyone mentioned an unwanted pregnancy. But they were not the norm. Her roommate Trixie certainly wasn’t a virgin and didn’t mind sharing details of her many rolls in the hay. Pamela didn’t think she’d be averse to it. In fact, now that she had time to examine her feelings, she was rather surprised to find that she had been excited as well as scared. But she was also uncomfortable—it was just the shock of hearing Jeremy’s candid admission that he couldn’t think of getting married to anyone with a war going on. Which made Pamma wonder if she was just one of many girls, if Jeremy really did care about her the way she had always loved him.
Over at the vicarage, Ben stood looking around the back garden. There was an Anderson shelter in the middle of the back lawn, and beyond it beanpoles showing the promise of a good crop of runner beans. Ben pushed the hair back from his forehead, as if this gesture would wipe away the image that still haunted him: Jeremy’s face lighting up when he saw Pamma, and hers equally alight with joy. True, she had been pleased to see him when he had boarded the train, but her eyes hadn’t sparkled in the way they had when she looked at Jeremy. “Damn Jeremy,” he muttered out loud. Trust him to be the one to escape from a German prison camp. And he felt guilty for wishing that Jeremy hadn’t come home. Jeremy was, after all, Ben’s closest friend. They had shared a childhood. And it wasn’t his fault that Pamela had fallen in love with him.
Ben told himself to get over it. There was a war on, and he had a job to do. He stomped down the garden path to the shed where he rescued his old bicycle from among the flowerpots and deck chairs. He sighed as he examined it in the bright sunlight. It had been far from new when it was donated to him by a parishioner, and now looked decidedly the worse for wear. Rusty in places, leather cracking on the saddle. He cleaned it up the best he could, oiled it, and took a tentative loop around the forecourt between church and rectory, wobbling a little as he got the hang of riding again. It was still operational, although he realised that riding a bike wasn’t going to be easy with a knee that didn’t want to bend. He felt a moment’s irritation that someone like Maxwell Knight should expect him to scour the neighbourhood without giving him the means to do so. Perhaps people like Knight thought that everybody owned a motorcar. Although he realised that these days, many people might have cars but no petrol allowance to drive them.
He left the bike for longer explorations and set off on foot around the village. He didn’t quite know what he was looking for. He passed Colonel Huntley’s house, named “Simla,” after his time in India. He paused to admire its neatly trimmed bushes and spotted the colonel’s wife in the immaculate garden pruning the roses. She looked up as she heard Ben’s approaching footsteps and waved to him. “Hello, Ben. Welcome home. Are you here for long? My husband would love to get a cricket team together. He complains he has nothing but schoolboys and old fogies these days.”
She came toward him, wiping her hands on her gardening apron, a pair of secateurs in one hand.
“I’m afraid I’m just taking a few days’ leave,” he said, not about to tell her that he’d been ordered to take things easy for a while. He didn’t want it all around the village that Ben Cresswell had cracked up, even though he hadn’t done a day’s fighting. They already looked down on him for not wearing a uniform.
Mrs. Huntley nodded and smiled. “I expect it’s good to be home after London,” she said. “Is it ghastly up there with all the bombing?”
“One gets used to it,” he said.
“I sometimes feel that we are living in our own little world here,” she said. “We have enough to eat, nobody drops bombs on us, and when we look out of our windows, we still see this—a little plot of paradise, wouldn’t you say?”
Ben nodded. “Your garden is looking lovely,” he said politely.
“We had some chap round the other day telling us we should turn it all over to growing cabbages or potatoes,” she said. “You can imagine how my husband replied to him. Told him one of the advantages of being British as opposed to being German was that we were free to do what we wanted with our own little plots. We already had a kitchen garden that grew enough for our needs, and if his wife gained solace from growing flowers, he wasn’t going to deprive her of that pleasure.” She smiled now at the memory of it.
Ben looked around. “It’s hard to believe that we’re only an hour from London,” he said. “Quite a shock to the senses to come back to a place where life is going on as it always has.”
A frown crossed her face. “I suppose we can’t escape completely here. We’ve all those soldiers at Farleigh. Dashed great lorries rumbling past at all hours and men coming out of the pub drunk and picking fights with local boys. And we’ve had our share of excitement recently. Have you heard that a body was found on the Farleigh estate?”