Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes

news, but he didn’t reply. Uncle Leslie went silent for the rest of the war. Father’s speculations on the reason were not always well received by Mother.
    When she married, Jean knew the following things:
how to make beds with hospital corners;
how to sew, patch and knit;
how to make three sorts of pudding;
how to lay a fire and blacken a grate;
how to make old pennies bright again by soaking them
   in vinegar;
how to iron a man’s shirt;
how to plait hair;
how to insert a Dutch cap;
how to bottle fruit and make jam;
how to smile when she didn’t feel like smiling.
    She was proud of these accomplishments, though she did not consider them an entirely adequate dowry. She wished, for instance, that she knew the following:
how to dance the waltz, quickstep and polka, for which there had been little call so far in her life;
how to run without automatically folding her arms across her chest;
how to know in advance whether her remarks were stupid or intelligent;
how to predict the weather from a hanging piece of seaweed;
how to tell why a chicken had stopped laying;
how to judge when people were making fun of her;
how to be helped into a coat without getting embarrassed;
how to ask the right questions.
    Michael fiddled some petrol and they spent their honeymoon at a pub in the New Forest which had a few rooms above the bar. They drove down late on the Saturday afternoon. As they neared Basingstoke it began to get dark, and they proceeded on sidelights because of the blackout. Jean wondered how good Michael’s night vision was; he hadn’t been trained like Prosser. She felt frightened: in the first months of the war, she remembered, more people had been killed on the roads than by the enemy. She laid a hand on Michael’s arm at one point; but he seemed to misinterpret this and went faster.
    When they were shown to their room, Jean was daunted by the size of the bed. It looked enormous, threatening, active. It was telling her things, mocking and scaring her at the same time. Sporadic murmurs rose through the floor from the bar beneath. She turned her head into Michael’s shoulder and said, “Can we be friends tonight?”
    There was a pause, and a slight stiffening of his hand on her neck. Then he said, “Of course. It’s been a long drive.”
    He stroked her hair a little, then went off for a wash. Over dinner he was jovial and relaxed; he had telephoned his mother and asked her to pass on news of their arrival to the Serjeants. Jean rather wished she could have talked to her mother—a final briefing before the op—but what Michael had done was obviously for the best. She loved him very much, told him so, and asked if she could get into bed and turn out the light while he was in the bathroom. She lay between the sheets with a laundry smell in her nose and wondered what lay ahead. Outside it was a cloudless night and a full summer moon hung in the sky like a pathfinder’s flare; a bombers’ moon, they called it.
    The next day they went for a walk in the morning, because it wasn’t right to waste petrol even on their honeymoon, came back to the pub for lunch, walked again in the afternoon, washed and changed; and as they were going down for dinner, Jean asked, “Can we be friends tonight?”
    “I’ll have to rape you if this goes on,” he replied with a smile.
    “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
    “Well, you’ll have to let me kiss you tonight. No rolling over.”
    “All right.”
    “And with the lights on.”
    The third evening, Jean said, “Perhaps tomorrow.”
    “ Perhaps? For Christ’s sake, we’re halfway through our bloody honeymoon. We might as well have gone hiking or something.” His face seemed very red as he stared at her. She felt frightened: not just because he was angry, but because she realized he could get angrier. She also thought: hiking, that sounds nice.
    “All right, tomorrow.”
    But the next night she developed a stomach cramp shortly after dinner, and the matter had to be