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under her arm, the other one flickering in and out of the stitches; when the work dragged on the needles, she rubbed them in her hair to make them slip. She smoked, although Vera said it was common; when she hugged the children the tang of cigarettes and the hard outline of the packet of Woodbines in her apron pocket were part of her safe consoling flavor. Day after day, “out in the back of beyond” as she put it, she didn’t bother to change her shapeless print dress. Sometimes Joyce couldn’t help seeing her mother through Aunt Vera’s eyes. Lil didn’t read books, she wasn’t interested in the news or talk programs on the wireless; she liked the dance bands and sang “O for the Wings of a Dove” while she did the housework. She was quite incapable of that effort of self-transformation by which Vera and the girls pulled themselves up every morning to be smart and knowing and braced for Amery-James.
    Sometimes Vera and Lil quarreled. The worst quarrel was something to do with Ivor, Joyce’s father. Lil had had a letter from one of his senior officers describing how he’d died bravely, fired on from a strafing airplane while he was trying to help a wounded comrade in the water. This version of events had become a kind of family piety for the Stevensons, a poignant high truth. Vera was scornful of Lil for believing in that “nonsense.”
    â€”Don’t you think they write the same stuff for every gullible widow? It’s the final insult, sending out these sugar-plum stories nobody in their right mind believes in.
    â€”You always have to know better, don’t you? said Lil passionately. Why can’t you just take someone else’s word for it for once?
    â€”Oh, Lillie! Vera seemed puzzled by the vehemence of her sister’s reaction. I’m not insulting Ivor, I’m honoring his memory. But I won’t swallow that old rubbish about honor and glory.
    â€”Old rubbish! said Lil. You think you can get away with saying anything to me. But there are people you wouldn’t dare say that in front of.
    â€”Do you want a third world war? said Vera. Do you want our sons to die in the next war, because we’ve all swallowed up what we’ve been told like good little children?
    Joyce couldn’t stop herself wondering what it had been like for her father to die, if it hadn’t been high-toned and beautifully sad. When she tested out the two possibilities in her mind she knew intuitively that what was hard and ugly was more likely to be true. And although Aunt Vera could be hateful, with her loud superior voice and her bruising definiteness, Joyce thought that in such a contest it would be safer to be bruising than bruised. She wished she were tall and statuesque like her aunt; she began to adopt some of her mannerisms, her lofty absentmindedness, her tone of superior skepticism toward everyday housework, her passionate responsiveness to the idea of philosophy or classical music. There wasn’t actually all that much room for philosophy or classical music in Aunt Vera’s life, but the idea of them was woven into her conversation like a wafted promise of a superior way of being. Joyce worked hard, poring over her schoolbooks, hoping that if she could somehow master these mountains of facts and processes she might at last penetrate through to being adult and powerful.
    She did very well at school. Her aunt was proud of her. Her uncle brought her home a four-volume set of American encyclopedias called Worldwide Knowledge. Lil was overcome and admiring.
    â€”You ought to be grateful to your uncle, she said. Imagine him taking the trouble to find these for you.
    â€”Something somebody’s given him off one of the ships, her aunt said skeptically.
    *   *   *
    The other serious quarrel the sisters had was not unconnected to the one about the war. One of the few times Lil ever took the trouble to dress up was when she went out