R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield by To Serve Them All My Days

make it sound as if you were in your dotage,' she said cheerfully. 'How old are you, Mr Powlett-Jones?'
    'Twenty-two. And you?'
    She blushed and then threw her head up, smiling. He noticed her white, even teeth, and her elfin prettiness touched him again, so that he was aware of the sense of renewal he derived from the juniors at Bamfylde. 'I'm nineteen today,' she said, and for some reason the news disposed of the last of his reserve.
    'You are? Well, we can't celebrate on coffee. Wouldn't you like an ice or something?'
    'No, thank you,' she said, laughing, 'but if you're free and on your own we might… well, we could have lunch. Not here. I know a cafe in the town where the food isn't at all bad,' but then her irrepressible high spirits hitched on a small snag of modesty and she said, 'I say, this is awful! I'm absolutely throwing myself at you. First the beret, then asking myself out to lunch. For all I know you've got a girl somewhere. You might even be married!'
    'I'd be lucky where I work. There's four hundred boys, twenty-odd masters, most of them bald and grey, and two women. One is like your matron, the other a middle-aged widow. How's that for credentials?'
    'Couldn't be better. Tell me about it. Is it a boarding school, one of those famous ones? And what do you teach? No, let me guess.' She put a finger in her mouth. 'French or Latin, isn't it?'
    'You're not much good at guessing, Miss Marwood. History. And a little English to the juniors.'
    'You don't look like a schoolmaster.'
    'I'm very glad to hear it, especially from someone nineteen today. All right, I'll tell you about it if you like, but let's go out along the prom so far as Rhos. Then we'll have lunch, as you suggest, and after that… well, I was thinking of taking one of those afternoon charabanc trips to Conway Castle. I haven't been there since I was a kid. You'd be very welcome if you'd like to come along, but I'll almost certainly bore you if you do. Edward the First is one of my favourites. And me a good Welshman! How's that for heresy?'
     
    That was how it began, effortlessly and casually, yet the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, beginning with the drop of a beret from the head of a saucy girl, leaning over the rail of the pier at Colwyn Bay and ending in an involvement that was to shape the course of his life as surely and permanently as his arrival at Bamfylde, when he was still in a state of shock and nervous and physical exhaustion. Bamfylde had been a kind of staircase that he was obliged to ascend falteringly, grabbing at handholds and footholds represented by individuals like Algy Herries and Howarth, and by experiences like the first confrontation with the Lower Fourth and his attempt to console Briarley. Elizabeth Marwood offered herself as a smooth, level stretch, one he could pass without stress of any kind, someone who, in herself, was the very essence of hope, sanity, sweetness and promise, someone of his own generation who was able to convince him that, despite all that had happened out there under the growling bombardments, innocence survived, and was already throwing up new, green shoots. He sensed this much that first day and within a week he was gloriously certain of it. But by then, of course, he was hopelessly in love.
    2
    He never forgot the smallest particular of their first day together, their encounter on the pier, the walk along the promenade, lunch at a cafe called The Lantern, the chara trip to Conway and the almost comic deference she had shown him when he linked the valerian-sown ruins with events that had occurred there. And after that there was the visit to the churchyard to see the seven-spiked grave, featured in Wordsworth's poem, the row up the river, tea at a cottage on the quay next door to the Smallest House in the World, and then back to Colwyn Bay to meet her dairyman brother-in-law, Griff, and hersister Esther, who welcomed him into their flat over the shop as though he had been an old