Consequences by Penelope Lively Page A

somewhere above Croydon Hill, the enemy planes are coming, swooping down across the fields, their guns primed.
    So she must stay put. She must stay where she is. And anyway, where would I go? she wonders. They will ring the church bells if the invasion comes. People are quite brisk and matter-of-fact about it; the Invasion Committees have everything in hand, they say. There is a deal of defiant talk. But she suspects that there are others who have that knot of fear in the stomach.
     
    She walked the lanes and the fields in the late summer heat. Everything seemed sharper than ever before, more arresting, as though she saw with heightened vision. The hedgerows hinted at autumn: there were tawny hips and haws, red and green blackberries. But there was growth still: the sharp green of young ferns springing up in the wake of the hedge trimmer, canary-yellow flights of toadflax, and the pink flush of young oak leaves—reminders of spring, as though time now and time to come coincided, coexisted, as though the future were subsumed into the present.
     
    The news came from the farmer, stopping by on his pony, his usually dour face lit up: “Telephone message for you. He’s got three days’ leave. Washford station at half-past two tomorrow.”
    She rode down on the bike, Molly in the seat behind her. Standing on the platform, you could hear the train coming, minutes before, the warning whistle, then you saw a plume of steam, then at last there was the busy sound of its approach, and she thought it the most thrilling thing she had ever known, the most exquisite anticipation. And then it was there, hissing alongside the platform, and a door opened and he got out, this khaki-clad figure, infinitely familiar but now also oddly strange.
    They had been apart for nearly four months. All the way back to the cottage they talked, as though each day of separation must be charted. When Molly got tired, Matt carried her on his shoulders, her legs hooked around his neck. Back home, they talked on, wandering the garden path, between the vegetable beds, while Molly ran to and fro.
    Lorna said, “I can’t believe you’re here.” She had to keep touching him, looking at him.
    “Nor me. I’ve lain awake at night, imagining this.”
    “Before, we just took everything for granted.”
    “Yes. One won’t make that mistake again.”
    He had changed out of uniform into his own clothes. “That’s better,” she said. “You looked somehow—older—before. Different, anyway.”
    “The army is a determined leveler. That’s what uniforms are for. Except that of course some are more level than others.”
    “Is it awful?”
    “Some of it. The worst is being away from you. But another side surprises me—the sense of purpose, expectation. The feeling that a great machine is grinding into action, and you are part of it.”
    He was about to go on an officers’ training course. She heard this with relief. “That means you won’t be sent overseas then—not yet?”
    “Not yet. Eventually, I suppose.”
    The hours leaked away. Matt hauled logs from the deposit at the gate, and chopped a great mound of firewood.
    “I do that now, you know,” she said. “I’ve got quite good at it.”
    “Not while I’m here, you don’t.” He fixed a broken window latch, dug a trench and emptied the privy, trimmed the oil lamps.
    She found him reading the STAY WHERE YOU ARE leaflet. “Christ,” he said. “They don’t believe in looking on the bright side, do they?”
    Lorna said, “People make jokes about it. Mrs. Mason says she’s going to defend the Post Office with her father’s Boer War blunderbuss.” She looked at him. “Will it happen?”
    “If it does, that’s why I’m in the army, me and all the other blokes.”
    He read a goodnight story to Molly. “Which one do you want? Red Riding Hood? Goldilocks?”
    Molly turned the pages, pointed. “That one? The Three Little Pigs?” said Matt.
    Lorna went downstairs. From the kitchen she could