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imposing woman, as tall as Mrs Birmingham, though it was obvious at first glance that she had never been pretty. Her great shyness manifested itself in a formality that kept everyone - girls and parents - at a distance. She seldom smiled; she had never been given a nickname. Yet she conveyed an underlying kindness and sensitivity which made Old Girls single her out at reunions, feeling that somehow they should try and make amends. On these occasions they would find conversation as difficult as ever.
    For both women, the school was the hub and purpose of their lives. Despite this, and the fact that they had been born only a few months apart, their intimacy was mostly silent. Each was content to spend time in the other’s company, but they did not gossip and rarelydiscussed the school. They watched
What’s My Line?
and nature programmes on a flickering black-and-white television; they read; Miss Roberts embroidered tapestry cushions or kneelers and read travel books, especially about Italy. After the news ended at quarter past nine, Miss Roberts would usually go up to her bedroom above the drawing-room, and shortly afterwards Mrs Birmingham would take the car up the long school drive, back to her querulous husband.
    That first evening of the summer term Henrietta Birmingham had sat on the window-seat beside the bay windows that overlooked the lawns and the rhododendrons. From this vantage point she could watch the girls who strolled under the cedars, gossiping about their holidays. Under one tree stood the heavy iron roller with wooden handles which the gardener and his lad would drag over the freshly mown grass. Nearby, curving amply like a duck’s breast, was the bin into which the grass mowings flew in a twinkling green spray. The Head had watched the sunset streaks against the deep slate-blue of the sky glowing purple as they gradually intensified into darkness like the last embers of a fire, and listened to the seniors chattering and laughing on the bank below the bay window, unaware that their voices drifted up to her in the still evening.
    How untrammelled they were by the restrictions that had hedged about her girlhood - the strait-jacket of class and gender, the imminence of war - she thought. Their world was carefree; they picked their self-absorbed way through adolescence, listening only to the beat of their own hearts, careless of death. Even at fourteen she had not been carefree. Her two older brothers, trained in the Eton Officers’ Training Corps, had volunteered as soon as war was declared. Her nearest brother, seventeen-year-old Jamie, chafed to beallowed to join them at the front. ‘Don’t you see, Hetta,’ he’d said to her, almost crying with the urgency of it, ‘the war’ll be over by Christmas and if they don’t let me go now, I’ll miss it. If they make me wait till I’m eighteen, it’s going to be too late. And then how shall I ever face Alistair and Hugo?’ The war hadn’t been over by Christmas, nor yet by his birthday, but Jamie had worried away at his parents, sworn he wouldn’t take up his place at Oxford, until in the end they’d given way.
    The afternoon before he left the two of them had walked over the moors and hills. They hadn’t talked much. They were very close; each had always known what the other was thinking. As the heather scratched her feet and fronds of bracken snapped off against her skirt, she had thought, All the joy is fading from my life, all the happy hours have passed, and now I shall never be anything but wretched. Poor Henrietta! she reflected now, as though that girl had been some other person, not herself. How she had longed to do her bit. To be allowed to nurse, or even - imagination strained to devise what might be needed - even just to gather up blood-stained bandages and dressings and throw them in the incinerator. But at her age she was not allowed to do anything except pray. She had prayed with