Pastoral by Nevil Shute Page B

might have come here quite independently.” She paused, and then she added: “It doesn’t matter a bit, anyway, if people do see us.”
    He paid the bill and they left the restaurant and walked towards the market-place, where the bus started. In the dark, crowded street they jostled against people in the black-out; he took her arm to guide her and they walked so to the bus, each thrilling with the contact.
    In the darkness, fifty yards from the dim-lighted oblong of the bus, they paused. “We’d better say good-night here,” he said. “It’s probably full of people from the station.”
    She turned to him; he reached for her hand, and held it. He did not think that she was ready to be kissed. She said: “It’s been a lovely afternoon, Peter. Thank you for bringing me.”
    She had called him by his Christian name. He said thickly: “Thank you for coming, Gervase.” He stood there in the darkness caressing her hand. “You’d better buzz along and get a seat,” he said at last. “I’ll come on in a minute.”
    She left him, and he followed her a little later, and they rode back to Hartley Magna at opposite ends of the bus.
    He did not speak to her again, alone, for several days.
    A string of circumstances prevented them from meeting in the afternoons; one or other of them had duties to perform except for one day, when it rained. For five days Marshall had to watch her without talking to her. It was impossible for himto avoid her even if he had wanted to, and he did not want to; at the same time it was impossible for them to meet and talk without starting gossip all around the station, and he was unwilling to do that.
    He found himself continually seeing things that he wanted to tell her about. He saw a blue tit on a branch one day; he did not know what it was, except that it was blue. Gervase would know; he suffered a sudden mad impulse to go to the signals office and ask her to come out and see it. He saw a Halifax without a front turret and heard from the pilot why it was given up; he wanted to pour out to her this vital and most interesting news. Down by the river, standing very quiet, he saw three tiny water-rats learning to swim; it irked him that she was not there with him to see. Gunnar Franck received a letter from his mother that had come via Switzerland and Spain; he was unable to talk to her about it. He could only catch her eye occasionally across the table or the ante-room and smile.
    He slept badly during that five days; that is to say, instead of sleeping solidly for nine hours as he was accustomed to, he slept for seven and lay awake for two, and got up in the morning stale and tired. After the third such night it seemed to him that they could hardly go on as they were; they would have to work out some means of meeting—if she wanted to. He was not sure of that, however. Gervase might be quite satisfied with their relationship, for all he knew. He was uncertain and upset; in those five days his friends found him sharp and irritable. Even his crew found him to be difficult to please, a novel and unusual trait developed in their captain.
    Gervase saw nothing of this restlessness because she did not meet him. When circumstances allowed, she knew she would go out with him again; the two afternoons that she had spent with him had been happy ones, the happiest she had spent since she had been at Hartley. She was not in any hurry for the third. She knew, with a little glow of wonder and of pride, that this casual, competent, and kind young man was coming to be very much in love with her. She knew that this would raise enormous problems for her in the future that she did not in the least know how to tackle. She was grateful for the respite that prevented them from meeting. Her whole instinct was to take it slowly; when it rained on the one afternoon when they were both free, she was almost glad.
    They did an operation on the fifth day: Essen. It was amassed raid of more than six hundred aircraft,