Deep Water Read Free

Families all over Europe were being torn apart. So what could be so bad about a few terms in a well-run preparatory school? The war had weakened her position; and guilt about Peter’s disability completed her defeat. Andrea could not save Leo if, by doing so, she made Peter refuse the only kind of job likely to ease his misery at being unable to fight for his country.
    She looked ahead stiffly and sighed, ‘Okay, he can go.’ Her voice seemed to come from a cold and immensely distant place, and Peter shivered as he heard it.
    ‘Will you ever forgive me?’ he asked, scared by her expression. Cripples are not wise – ran one of his new unwritten maxims – to push attractive spouses toofar. But despite his unease, tears of gratitude filled his eyes.
    ‘I need to go,’ she murmured, pushing back her chair, terrified she might sob if she stayed. She squeezed past the refugees to a muted cheer from the aesthetes.
    Only when Andrea was collecting her bicycle from the alley beside St Mary’s did the reality of what had happened hit her. In a few months Peter and Leo would have gone, and she would be living alone. A tinny gramophone was bleating jazz from an upper room in Brasenose. An ache of bereavement filled her chest. She had to sit on the steps of the Radcliffe Camera until she felt strong enough to return to school.

C HAPTER 2
    Andrea thought it mildly comical that she should not be allowed to enter Peter’s office in Archway Block South by the Mall; for how could she, or any other non-scientist, learn anything from the nameless fragments of metal littering his table? But regulations had to be obeyed, and as always she was obliged to meet him at the sandbagged main entrance where soldiers stood guard in their tin hats.
    As they walked the short distance to St James’s Park in the October sunshine, Peter told Andrea her wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses made her look elegantly Gallic. He himself was wearing a baggy flannel suit, its pockets bulging with detonators and copper wire. On all her visits to town, Andrea was touched by his obvious pleasure in seeing her, though it couldn’t make up for the infrequency of their meetings. Soldiers of shattered continental armies – French, Norwegian, Dutch – walked in the park, chatting with office girls, who broke into fits of giggles on finding themselves lusted after.
    Tiring, Peter pointed to a couple of unoccupied deck chairs by the lake. He and Andrea reached them just ahead of an elderly civil servant.
    ‘I’m told the Luftwaffe hit St Giles’s, Cripplegate, last night,’ Peter said, sinking down into one of the chairs. ‘Milton’s statue was blown off its plinth.’
    ‘The fall of Milton, not the fall of Man,’ she replied smiling, surprised he had preserved this literary plum for her.
    Andrea had been upset by Leo’s latest letter and handed the envelope to Peter before unwrapping their sandwiches. Ever since her son’s departure she had longed for his half-term. Now, only days before he was due home, he had written to say he wouldn’t be returning alone. Peter was soon beaming as he read.
    ‘What did I tell you? He’s settled in marvellously .’
    Andrea hated these formulaic letters that gave no sense at all of her living, breathing son. ‘Why can’t he ever write anything remotely personal?’
    ‘He doesn’t want to worry us by letting on he’s homesick. Of course he is , like everyone else, but that’s just a fact of life one needn’t spell out.’
    ‘But one does spell out that one’s making a towel rail in carpentry, and that the stupid soccer team beat Half-wit Hall 3–2, and a boy called Cunningham Minor gave one a slice of stupid birthday cake. For Christ’s sake!’
    ‘Food’s very important in boarding schools. Cunningham’s parents probably saved coupons for months to have enough butter and sugar for thatcake. It was a gesture of real friendship to offer Leo some. One has to read between the lines, my sweet.’ Peter