A Kiss for the Enemy Read Free Page A

a very private man, always felt awkward at the ritual gatherings, the bemedalled parades at which, as a wartime ex-officer, he was invited to appear. Latterly, he had excused himself –
    â€˜Mrs Marvell, you know – really we like to be quiet…’
    His absence was regretted and by no means comprehended, but he was a respected figure in the county of Sussex, a well-liked, dutiful man and this apparent and atypical lapse in proper sentiment came to be accepted. It was now an acknowledged thing that ‘Mr Marvell doesn’t come’. His presence in Flintdown High Street anyway caused no remark, for his own parish church with its war memorial was several miles away.
    Marvell generally tried to be at home on the morning of Armistice Day. It was inevitable that his wife Hilda, without morbidity, thought particularly at that time of her elder andbeloved brother, killed on the last day of March, 1918 during the final great German offensive which had seemed destined to crack the British front in Picardy. John Marvell liked being with Hilda on the morning of 11th November. She was a practical, unsentimental woman; they gave each other tranquil, undemonstrative support. And John, too, had lost an elder brother. He moved his mind away. That was a corridor off which were too many locked doors and he never walked down it far.
    On this occasion, however, he had needed to go to Flint-down. A meeting with a local solicitor, a matter of some urgency concerning one of the farms, had been postponed from the previous week by the solicitor’s, Christie’s, attack of influenza, just over. And Christie’s business had taken twice as long as forecast. Hilda was not alone – not, he thought, that it would have bothered her whether she were or not. He simply liked to be there, liked her to feel his presence, unobtrusive, comprehending, not only husband but contemporary. Their generation had shared an experience at which their youngers could only guess, and sometimes, John knew, impatiently resented with a sense of exclusion. But Hilda was not alone at Bargate. Anthony was at home, down from Oxford for three weeks’ convalescence after a disagreeable bout of jaundice.
    John drove homeward through the lanes to Bargate, seven miles from Flintdown. As he turned in at the white painted gates, up the long drive of Bargate Manor, his heart returned to the scenes evoked by the silence in Flintdown High Street – to that morning nineteen years before, when an orderly had brought to Company Headquarters a pencilled message from the Adjutant, confirming what had been rumoured for forty-eight hours. German emissaries had accepted unconditionally the terms dictated to them by Marshal Foch. All fighting was to cease at eleven o’clock. Thereafter, no guns would fire.
    It had made little immediate difference to John’s battalion, ‘resting’ as they were behind the lines. But it meant that no more friends – there weren’t many left – would be killed. There would be no more letters to write to mothers and wives.
    â€˜Your son was an excellent soldier, a gallant man who will be sadly missed by all his comrades in this Company. No words of mine etc. etc.’
    No more of that. Was it really nineteen years ago, that extraordinary sense of light, of quiet, of anti-climax, no appropriate words to speak nor thoughts to think? ‘It seems yesterday,’ John said to himself. ‘It has dominated these years so heavily.’ Soon, he supposed, it would be a distant memory, a gradual emergence from a fear and a pain which later generations would be unable to imagine and would blame their elders for permitting, however young they were. He left the car by the front door and went into the house in search of Hilda.
    Every house has a centre, a point where the most significant developments occur, where opinions and affections are most often formed, where the heart most memorably beats. At