The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

looked up, smiled, and she saw how his eyes were dark blue, almost navy. He was a big man, bigger than Geoff, but his touch on the baby’s cheek was so light that William didn’t stir. She had to drop her eyes.
    She put the heavy teapot on the table, and began to slice the loaf. She could sense him watching her. She poured the tea.
    ‘I suppose you’ll go home, when you get leave,’ she said, for she wasn’t going to ask him if he was married. Most of them weren’t, she knew; they were too young. How old would he be – twenty-two, twenty-three? But they always looked older than they were.
    ‘That’s reet, canny lass,’ he’d answered softly, teasing her. She’d given a little gasp, as if she had a stitch. Geoff was supping his tea noisily, and didn’t hear.
    Isabel caught her breath. What she was remembering did not belong to her. I am Isabel Carey, she told herself. I live in Kirby Minster. My husband is a doctor and his name is Philip Carey. She muttered the words to herself like a spell, and Alec, the Alec of now, heard her. He glanced at her, she shook her head, deprecating herself, and he turned back to doing up his bootlaces. Now he was whistling under his breath. It caught at her, how content he looked, and she found she was smiling too. He looked up.
    ‘What is it?’ he asked.
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘You were smiling.’
    ‘I like watching you when you’re doing something like tying your laces. You know how you can be quite close to someone – and yet there are expressions of his that you’ll never see? When he’s working, or on his own in a train compartment.’ She was thinking of Philip. He was sharp in her mind again. She saw him tracking across the countryside, uncovering it lane by lane, on his own and not even thinking of her.
    ‘Only quite close?’ Alec asked teasingly, but she had Philip in her mind and she stared without understanding. ‘I’d have said we were closer than that.’ He looked into her eyes boldly. Philip would never do that. For him, what they did in bed was a world apart from their daytime selves.
    ‘
Very
close,’ she said, with a swagger to match Alec’s, letting her naked self appear in her face. Why had she let herself think of Philip now? She must push him away. It wasn’t safe to have the two of them together in her mind: Philip and Alec.
    Suddenly Alec’s smile disappeared. His attention switched from her. He was frowning, preoccupied. ‘It can’t be late,’ he said, as if to convince himself.
    ‘It might be. It’s ridiculous, neither of us wearing a watch.’
    She could hardly believe he’d been so careless. He had to have his watch with him. It had to be accurate to the minute. He was the Skipper. A minute – a second, even – might be a life. He’d told her that they all synchronised their watches at the end of the briefing.
    Alec was looking at his wrist, where the watch should be. There was a paler strip of skin where the strap usually covered it. She looked at the beauty of his wrist, the way it turned, the springing hairs that were darker than the fair hair on his head. She felt as if the blood were leaving her face, a backwards tide taking her life with it. She had got to touch him, have him—
    ‘Can’t think what happened to it,’ he said. ‘Must be in the hut.’
    He meant the long Nissen hut where they slept, with one iron stove to heat it. He had his slip of a single room, because he was an officer. He had his iron bed, his locker, his table, the muddy walk to ablutions. It was one hell of a way. You’d spend half the day walking if you didn’t have a pushbike. These hostilities-only bomber stations were all the same. Nothing but mud, barbed wire, concrete and corrugated iron. Temporary cities thrown up in the middle of cabbage fields.
    ‘It’d better ruddy well be there. If I’ve dropped it in the mud—’
    ‘It’ll be by your bed,’ said Isabel.
    He glanced uneasily over his shoulder, at the white glare of the winter