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since she had just joined the ATS, Andrea hoped to find another village girl.
    After tea, Leo and Justin went for a bicycle ride. An hour after their arrival at the house, Andrea found herself alone again. She was expecting Peter to be delivered home by a Wren driver at any time. He had sworn to her that for the rest of the weekhe would be free to be with his family, and she did not believe he would break this promise.
    Waiting for the boys, she walked to the brow of the hill outside the hamlet. Against a sky of penetrating blue the trees on the ridge stood out in silhouette. A large elm reminded her of those on New England village greens – though the English tree was more thickset than the spreading American variety. Hitching up her skirt, she clambered onto the bank. A grey-blue stripe marked the spot where sea met sky. Many times, returning from visiting her parents, she must have steamed by without noticing this coastline, as she wandered among showcases holding jewellery and expensive clothes, while an orchestra played. And now all sailings were suspended.
    Two tiny figures appeared, zigzagging wildly as they pedalled up the long hill towards her. Andrea waved to them.
    They were still wearing their awful pink blazers and she could hear them laughing. The wind was caressing her hair and singing in the phone wires above her head. A bubble of happiness swelled inside her.
    *
    When Andrea made love to Peter, she often closed her eyes and imagined him as he had been before his illness – not just slimmer and more mobile, but more cheerful, too, and less driven. She still found him attractive, although his body had become thicker and stronger above the waist and in the arms. Inevitably perhaps, given the pain he still suffered, he had become more serious and less able to relax.It was Andrea’s dearest hope that, in this remote village, he would manage to become more like the man she had first met.
    Peter’s favourite recreation remained walking. But though most of his friends applauded his ‘guts for not giving in’, Andrea wished he could sometimes be happy to sit quietly with her in the garden, or to admire a country view from an automobile. Secretly, she wished that he would come to terms with his losses, and try to develop new interests to fill the gap: reading novels perhaps, or listening to music.
    But whatever the future might hold, their first full day together in Cornwall was to be devoted to walking. Peter’s mind was made up. He assured Andrea that the day before he had managed to walk a mile without harming his leg. So she bit her tongue when he suggested a more ambitious hike along the cliffs. Everyone at the hospital had told her that he should be encouraged to be enterprising. He had studied the map carefully, Peter told her, so she needn’t worry. If his leg hurt, he would walk through the fields to the nearest road and wait for her to return with the car.
    Peter liked to have definite objectives and today he aimed to reach a Celtic earthwork on a headland near the mouth of the river. He would achieve this, he said, by walking across fields, rather than attempting to follow the lower coastal path. In this way, all steep slopes and streambeds would be avoided.
    Andrea had never forgotten him saying, shortly before leaving hospital, that a man on two crutcheswas a cripple but a man with a single stick was only lame. His success in ridding himself of his crutches had been achieved at the cost of so many falls that his every unaided descent of the stairs had made Andrea fear he would break his neck. And all the time he had been deaf to her pleas for greater caution. Today, as he swung his stiff left leg over a stile, with help from both hands, she experienced the same old mix of admiration and misgiving.
    By the time they came to a gate where adhesive mud lay between the granite posts, he was already breathless and sweating. After negotiating this quagmire , he was obliged to rest, perching on the shooting