Pastoral by Nevil Shute

knew was that these crews were lucky, and went on and on.
    They met for the next time at Carfax in the middle of Oxford, under the shadow of an old church at the intersectionof two shopping streets. He was there first by ten minutes; she came to him as the clock above his head struck four, carrying a little attaché-case that held her purchases. She smiled at him. “Have you been waiting long?”
    “Not long,” he said. “I went and had my hair cut.”
    She said: “What’ll we do now? Have you had tea?”
    “No—I was waiting for you. What about Fuller’s?”
    She said: “That’s all right.” So they walked together through the crowded streets towards the café, each wondering whether they would find it full of officers, W.A.A.F.s, and airmen from Hartley Magna. Marshall for his own sake was unconcerned; it would not have worried him if the whole air station had seen him taking tea with the bearded lady from the circus, but he knew that Gervase was sensitive to station gossip. Gervase, however, was taking it phlegmatically. There was no earthly reason why she should not spend an afternoon in Oxford with a pilot. She did not want the buzz to get around the station much, but if it did—well, that was just too bad. Whatever you did caused gossip at a place like Hartley, where there was nothing else to talk about except the work.
    They took a table in the window overlooking the Cornmarket and ordered tea and what passed for sweet cakes and pastries, a thin shadow of the peace-time days. At the beginning of the little meal they talked about the picture they were going to see together; by the end of it they had thawed out and were talking about themselves.
    He said presently: “I say, what’s your name?” He knew that perfectly well, but was afraid to tell her so. “I mean, it’s silly to go on calling you Miss Robertson.”
    She said: “You could call me Section Officer.”
    He said: “If you aren’t damn careful, I will. Look, I’ll do a deal over this. I’ll tell you my name if you tell me yours.” They were immensely young.
    “I know yours,” she said equably. She bit into a bun. “It’s Peter.”
    He stared at her. “You’ve been peeping! That’s not fair.”
    She laughed, and choked. “I’ve not been peeping,” she said when she got her breath. “Mrs. Stevens always calls you Peter Marshall.”
    He nodded. “They all fall for me,” he said. “It’s my fatal attraction.”
    She laughed again. “I wouldn’t bank too much on that.”
    Their eyes met, and he smiled at her. “What is it, anyway?”
    “Gervase,” she said, and wondered why she had given in so easily.
    “That’s rather pretty,” he said. “What’s the L?”
    She told him, and he offered her a cigarette, and they sat by the window over the remnants of their tea, smoking and telling each other about their brothers and sisters and their homes. And as they sat a half-hour passed unnoticed; they would have sat there indefinitely together, learning about each other, but for sheer decency that made them get up at the time the programme started at their picture-house.
    They walked together through the crowded shopping streets to the cinema, not now caring whether anybody saw them or not. In the large dimness of the hall they sat together for three hours, very conscious of each other. They sat through the news, and shook with laughter at Donald Duck, and wondered at a picture about Russia, and thrilled with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. And at the end they stumbled out into the black-out, and he took her up the street to the George restaurant for supper and gave her a gimlet to drink before the meal.
    They talked about Oxford across the table. It meant nothing to them academically and they did not clearly understand what went on there in peace-time. Now it was stuffed full of Americans from the Army and the Army Air Corps.
    Marshall said: “There was some talk of my brother coming here to one of the colleges. But now he’s been