Consequences by Penelope Lively

now gone, those not in reserved occupations, and Lorna knew what was in his mind, though they did not talk of it—that he would volunteer before his call-up papers came.
    When at last Germany moved, and the wireless talked every night of Norway, she knew that it was only a matter of time. In the event, his papers came on the day that German forces invaded Belgium, and she realized when she saw him holding the brown envelope that he was relieved.
    He said, “Well, this is it. I’m to go for a soldier.”
    “Right away?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh…”
    “We knew.” He put his arms around her. “It’ll be all right. It’s you I’m worried for. It’ll be hard here. I think you should…”
    “ No, ” she said. “I’m staying. If it’s too hard—well, I’ll think of something.”
    It was high spring. The hedges and woods were full of warblers; there were creamy rivers of may blossom. That night, he made love to her with a kind of desperate passion.
     
    “We are being broken in,” Matt wrote. “It is a tedious process. Much marching about and being shouted at. I hold a gun, for the first time in my life, and believe I understand how the thing works. Then we march about some more, and do physical jerks, and different men shout at us. Initially, we are culled. I had not realized that there are so many people in this country unable to read or write. An illiterate soldier is no good to the army. They whipped them out and took them away; apparently they will come back in due course, miraculously enlightened. I am told that I should apply to be an officer. I don’t see myself as a leader of men, but they say the food is better.
    “Oh, my darling—if I could tell you how I miss you. It has been forty-seven days, and it feels like a thousand years.”
     
    Every night, she listened to the news, alone, Molly upstairs asleep, and the catalog of distress and disaster was spelled out in those crisp tones—unemphatic, unemotional. She found herself going more and more into the village, to sit on a bench in the recreation ground, while Molly played with other children, and to be with other women whose men had gone. In early June, two boys who had been at Dunkirk came home to the village on leave, and their stories ran like wildfire from mouth to mouth. She saw that what you heard each night, that measured account, bleached of everything except facts and figures, was a hollow mockery of what was really happening. Once, she went with the farmer’s wife to Minehead and saw a newsreel: long lines of exhausted, unshaven men, some with bandaged limbs or heads. “And you can be sure they’re not showing us the half of it,” said her companion.
    In August, she watched the skies, as did everyone. From time to time, planes went over, high above, anonymous, and people wondered if they were theirs or ours. But the daily fights of which they heard each night, this terrible maelstrom up above, were far away, over Hampshire and Sussex and the Channel. Except, she thought, that that is not so very far away, not far away at all. And then, in September, everything changed again, and now it was London of which they heard, night after night. The London women and children were back, hundreds of them, scattered all over the landscape, their voices always startling in shops, or on buses, or in school playgrounds.
     
    Lorna puts the leaflet on the dresser, behind the cherished Victorian teapot from a Bring and Buy sale. STAY WHERE YOU ARE, it says. The government is instructing her what to do in the event of invasion. She must not take flight, as people had done in France, Holland, and Belgium, thus preventing soldiers from getting at the enemy, and inviting use as a human shield. If she does this, the enemy may machine-gun her from the air. Her and Molly. She looks out into the lane and sees it filled with people from the village, from the farms around, people she knows, carrying suitcases, pulling carts with mattresses and blankets, and from