Camomile Lawn Read Free Page A

towel.
    ‘I’ve developed new habits, Aunt. Not all of them good. I’ve been swimming in the cove with the twins. Is there any coffee left for us?’
    ‘Come in, twins, we were talking about you. We were going to ask you to lunch.’ Polly went to pour coffee. ‘Don’t just stand there.’
    David and Paul came in shyly, muttering ‘good morning’, ‘thank you’ and ‘hullo’. Tall, with startling yellow hair and brown eyes, indistinguishable, they sat down, their eyes fixed on Calypso, by whom they were fascinated.
    ‘Uncle was suggesting you will be conchies if there’s a war.’ Polly handed them coffee.
    ‘No, no,’ they said. ‘Not this war. One should fight for the Jews.’
    ‘Two should.’ Calypso, aware of their eyes, mocked them.
    ‘Two will,’ said David.
    ‘Two are joining up at the end of the holidays,’ added Paul.
    ‘Oh,’ said Walter eagerly, ‘what in?’
    ‘Air Force,’ they said.
    ‘Long distance killing.’ Oliver looked at them. ‘Heard of Guernica?’
    ‘Of course we have. Picasso.’
    ‘Just as awful as close to. I shall go into the Navy as soon as they will take me.’ Walter spoke eagerly.
    ‘Oh!’ cried Helena, rising from the table. ‘Do stop, children. There may not be a war. It may not happen. All that over again. I can’t bear it.’ She left the room, closing the door.
    ‘Poor Aunt Helena.’ Oliver buttered his toast. ‘She will not face the fact that in all of us, even in her, there is the person who is capable of killing, you, you and you.’ He pointed round the table with his knife. ‘Every one of us is capable of killing other human beings. Let’s have that game for this year. As well as the Terror Run we will have the Killing. What do you say? Draw straws? Not afraid, are you? Let’s have a killing, to take any form you choose. We’ll include Sophy. That makes seven of us.’
    ‘You are mad, Oliver.’ Calypso was looking excited.
    ‘It’s a mad world. Are you on?’
    ‘I’m on.’ Calypso smiled across the table at Oliver. ‘I’m on.’
    Nobody else spoke until Sophy, who had followed Oliver and the twins into the room, said: ‘What does it matter if there’s going to be a war, anyway?’
    ‘Out of the mouths—’ said the Floyer boys in a tone of relief and Walter said: ‘All right, let’s make it that the killers kill within a time limit of five years. That should include us all. Sophy doesn’t really count.’
    ‘But I do. I do count, don’t I, Oliver?’ Sophy screamed suddenly at Oliver.
    ‘Yes, yes, you count,’ Oliver said soothingly, not taking his eyes off Calypso. Calypso stared back, remembering the coarseness of his words the night before, her hasty refusal more from habit than inclination. Oliver back from Spain had a new dimension.

Four
    R ICHARD CUTHBERTSON SMOOTHED HIS hair with the ivory brushes Helena had given him when they married, brushing the grey hair along the sides of his head. He laid the brushes in exact alignment with the bottle of hair oil in symmetry with the matching clothes brushes, and glanced as he always did at the photograph of his first wife Diana, posed looking away from him, her arm round her dog, a sensible smooth fox terrier, not one of those rough-haired things one saw nowadays with oblong snouts and trembling legs. He had no dog now that his retriever had died. Helena had objected to the smells when it farted and the hair shed on the carpets. She was happier without a dog. She would not prevent him replacing his old companion but difficulties would be made, hints dropped. Two can play at that game, he thought. ‘It would be good for Sophy.’ His eyes travelled past his first wife’s photograph—had she really looked like that?—to the group photographs of his fellow officers, a splendid lot, mostly dead. He ran over their names, a familiar litany. They looked so young. Peter a stockbroker now, Hugh a brewer, Bunty secretary to a golf club, Andrew farming, their commanding officer now