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On the evening of D-Day, the pub is packed. It’s a close June night in the Welsh hills, with the threat of thunder. The radios of the village cough with static. The Quarryman’s Arms, with the tallest aerial for miles around, is a scrum of bodies, all waiting to hear the prime minister’s broadcast.

There’s a flurry of shouted orders leading up to the news at six. Sarah, behind the lounge bar, pulls pint after pint, leaning back against the pumps so that the beer froths in the glass. She sets the shaker out for those who want to sprinkle salt on their drinks to melt the foam. Behind her, down the short connecting passage to the right, her boss, Jack Jones, has his hands full with the regulars in the public bar. At five to six by the battered grandfather clock in the corner, he calls back to the lounge for Sarah to “warm ‘er up.” She tops off the pint she’s pouring, steps back from the counter and up onto the old pop crate beneath the till. She has to stretch for the Bakelite knob on the wireless, one foot lifting off the crate. Behind her, over the calls for service, she hears a few low whistles. The machine clicks into life, first a low hum, then a whistle of its own, finally, as if from afar, the signature tune of the show. The dial lights up like a distant sunset. The noise around her subsides at once, and it’s as if she has stilled it. She turns round and for a second looks down into the crowd of faces staring up at the glowing radio.

The men, soldiers mostly in the lounge, sip their beers slowly during the broadcast, making them last. She looks from face to face, but they’re all gazing off, concentrating on Churchill’s shuffling growl. The only ones to catch her eyes are Harry Hitch, who’s mouthing something over and over — “my usual,” she finally understands — and Colin, who winks broadly from across the room. Colin’s one of the sappers who’ve been working on the new base they’re building near the old holiday camp in the valley. They’ve been bringing some much-needed business to the Arms for the last month, and for the last week Sarah and Colin have been sweethearts. Tonight she’s agreed to slip off with him after work, a date made before D-Day, which somehow feels destined now. She hears the English word in her mind, “sweethearts,” likes the way it sounds. She listens to Churchill, the voice of England, imagines him saying it gravely — “Sweetheart” — swallows a smile. She concentrates on the speech, thinks of the men on the beaches, and feels herself fill with emotion for her soldier, like a slow glass of Guinness. There’s a thickening in her throat, a brimming pressure behind her eyes. It’s gratitude, she feels, mixed with pride and hope, and she wonders if together this blend amounts to love.

The broadcast ends, and the noise builds again in the pub. It’s not quite a cheer — Churchill’s speech has been sternly cautious — but there’s a sense of excitement, kept just in check, and a kind of relief. The talk has been about an invasion all spring, and finally it’s here, the beginning of the end. Everyone is smiling at the soldiers, even the locals clustered behind the public bar, and calling congratulations. Sarah steps up on the crate and turns the dial until it picks up faint dance music from the Savoy in London. There’s a sound like applause, and looking round, she sees with delight that it’s literally a clapping of backs. There’s a rush for the bar again. People want to buy the men drinks. They’re only sappers — road menders, ditch diggers, brickies — but they’re in uniform, and who knows when they could be going “over there.” Suddenly, and without doing a thing, they’re heroes, indistinguishable in their uniforms from all the other fighting men. And they believe it too. Sarah can see it in Colin’s face, the glow of it. She stares at him, and it’s as if she’s seeing him for the first time; he’s so glossily handsome, like the lobby card of a film star.

The crowd in the lounge is three deep and thirsty, and she pulls pints until her arm aches, but when she turns to ring up the orders she sees that the public bar is emptying out. She wonders if it’s the sense of its being someone else’s party that’s sending the farmers home or just that they have to be up early tomorrow. She glimpses her father, Arthur, shouldering his way to the door, shrugging his mac on over the frayed dark suit (Sunday best before she was born) and collarless shirt he wears when out with the flock. He jams his cap on his head, fitting it to the dull red line across his brow, and gives her a nod as he goes, but no more.

She’s been working here for almost a year now, since she turned sixteen, but in all that time she has never once served him on his occasional visits. He sticks to the public bar, where most of the local regulars are served by Jack. It’s become the Welsh-speaking half of the pub, while she, with her good schoolroom English, serves soldiers and the motley assortment of new arrivals in the lounge. She would stand him a pint or two if he let her (Jack wouldn’t mind), although it occurs to her that this is why her father steers clear. They could do with saving even the few pennies he spends on beer — money is why she’s working here at all — but of course that’s why he barely acknowledges her. It’s not that he’s ungrateful, she knows. She’s been in charge of the housekeeping money in the old biscuit tin ever since her mother died three years ago, but only since she started working has he shown her the books, the bank account, the mortgage deeds. It’s a mark of respect, his only way of offering thanks. Of course, she had her own ideas of how bad things were all along, but guessing and knowing are different and now she knows: the war is holding them up — the national subsidy and the demand for woolen uniforms. Her father is a proud man — prouder in hard times than good, she thinks — and she’s grateful that poverty in wartime is a virtue, something to be proud of. It reminds her of the epic tales he tells of the great strike, though he was only a boy then. But she wonders sometimes, also, what it’ll be like when the war is over.

It crosses her mind that the same thought has sent him out into the night early. Still. she’s not sorry to see him go, not with Colin here too. She doesn’t want to face any awkward questions, and she doesn’t want to tell the truth: that she’s stepping out with an Englishman. She catches sight of Colin through the crowd, dipping his shoulders to throw a dart. Beneath the national betrayal is an obscurer one to do with her pride at taking her mother’s place beside her father, a sense of being unfaithful somehow.

Pretty soon the pub is down to just soldiers and diehards. She can hear the Welsh voices behind her, wafting over with the smell of pipe tobacco. They’re quieter tonight, slower, sluggish like a summer stream. The talk for once isn’t politics. This is a nationalist village, passionately so. It’s what holds the place together. Like a cracked and glued china teapot, Sarah thinks. The strike, all of forty-five years ago, almost broke the town, and it’s taken something shared to stick back together the families of men who returned to work and those who stayed out. The Quarryman’s Arms is the old strikers’ pub; the hooks for their tankards are still in the ceiling over the bar — a bitter little irony, since most of its regulars, the sons of strikers, are sheep farmers now. Their fathers weren’t taken back at the quarry after the strike, blacklisted from the industry. For a generation the families of strikers and scabs didn’t talk, didn’t marry, didn’t pray together. Even today the sons of scabs are scarce in the Arms, only venturing up the High Street from their local, the Prince of Wales, for fiercely competitive darts and snooker matches (games the soldiers have monopolized since they arrived).

To Sarah it seems like so much tosh, especially now that the quarry is cutting back and barely one in five local men work there. But the old people all seem to agree that the village would have died if not for the resurgence of nationalism in the twenties and thirties, reminding them of what they had in common, reminding them of their common enemy: the English. Dragoons were stationed here to keep order during the strike, and in the public bar the sappers are still called “occupiers.” It’s half joking, Sarah knows, but only half. The nationalist view of the war is that it’s an English war, imperialist, capitalist, like the Great War that Jack fought in and from which he still carries a limp. But tonight the success of the invasion has stilled such talk. Even the laughter of the locals — raucous, intended to he heard in the lounge by the English, to make them understand that they are the butt of jokes even if the language of the jokes themselves is beyond them — is muted. The Welsh nurse their beer, suck their pipes, and steal glances down the passage to where Sarah is serving.

It thrills her, oddly, to stand between the two groups of men. listening to their talk about each other. For she knows the soldiers, clustered around the small round tables, crammed shoulder to shoulder into the narrow wooden settles, talk about the Welsh too: complain about the weather, joke about the language, whisper about the girls. Tonight they lounge around, legs splayed, collars open, like so many conquerors.

Sarah wonders if the locals are as filled with excitement as she is, just too proud to admit it. She yearns to be British tonight of all nights. She’s proud of her Welshness, of course, in the same half-conscious way she’s shyly proud of her looks, but she’s impatient with all the talk of past glories. Her father is a staunch nationalist. He’s never forgiven Churchill for Tonypandy. But she’s bored by all the history. Some part of her knows that nationalism is part and parcel of provincialism. This corner of North Wales feels a long way from the center of life, from London or Liverpool or, heavens, America. And nationalism is a way of putting it back in the center, of saying that what’s here is important enough. It’s a redrawing of the boundaries of what’s worthwhile. And this really is what Sarah wants, what she dimly suspects they all want. To be important, to be the center of attention, not isolated. Which is why she’s so excited as she moves through the crowd collecting empties, stacking them up, glass on glass in teetering piles, by the presence of the soldiers, by the relocation of the BBC Light Program a few years ago, by the museum treasures that are stored in the old quarry workings, even by the school-age evacuees. They’re all refugees from the Blitz, but she doesn’t care. It’s as if the world is coming to her.

And she knows others feel this. The sappers are a case in point. No one quite knows who the base they’re building is for, but speculation is rife. The village boys, who haunt the camp, watching the sappers from the tree line and sneaking down to explore the building at dusk, are praying for the glamour of commandos. There’s talk of Free French, Poles, even alpine troops training in the mountains for the invasion of Norway. Jack is hoping for Yanks and their ready cash. American fliers, waiting to move on to their bases in East Anglia, do occasionally drop in for a drink. But they’re always faintly disappointing. Each time they’re spotted sauntering around Caernarvon, getting their photos taken under the Eagle Tower, rumors start that it’s James Stewart or Tyrone Power, one of those gallant film stars. But it never is. For the most part the Yanks are gangly, freckle-faced farm boys, insufferably polite (in the opinion of the local lads) with their suck-up “sirs” and “ma’ams.” Once, one of them, a tail-gunner from “Kentuck,” pressed a clumsily wrapped parcel of brown paper and string on Sarah, and when she opened it she saw it was a torn parachute. There was enough silk for a petticoat and two slips. He’d been drinking shyly in a corner for hours, summoning up his courage. She was worried he’d get into trouble, tried to give the bundle back, but he spread his hands, backed away. “Miss,” he told her, and he said it with such drunken earnestness, she pulled the parcel back, held it to her chest. He seemed to be hunting for the words. “You . . . ,” he began. “Why, you’re what we’re fighting for!” She’s dreamed of him since, getting shot down, bailing out, hanging in the night sky, sliding silently toward the earth, under a canopy of petticoats.

She wonders if Colin will give her a gift before he leaves. She watches him lean against one of his fellows, cocking his head as the other whispers something in his ear. Colin shakes his head, grins beneath his mustache like Clark Gable, taps the side of his nose. She could get him to tell her who the camp is for, she thinks, but she won’t. Somehow it would be unpatriotic to ask the sappers themselves what they’re building: disloyal to Britain (they all know the slogans — walls have ears, loose lips, etc.), but also, more obscurely, disloyal to Wales. It wouldn’t do to give the English an excuse to call the Welsh unpatriotic. Only the Welsh, it occurs to her, are allowed to declare themselves that. But whatever the purpose of the new camp, with its long, low barracks and staunch wire fences, there’s been a sense in the village over the last month of being part of something, of the preparations for the invasion (although it’s odd, she thinks, that here’s the invasion itself, and the camp not occupied). Colin, though, has told her, during one of their hurried trysts behind the pub, that the work’s nearly over. “Just waiting for our marching orders, and then we’re off out of it.”

She looks at him now leaning against one of the stained wood beams, chatting with his mates; the dark, cropped hair at the nape of his neck, where it shows almost velvety below his cap. He laughs at something and throws a glance over his shoulder to see if she’s heard, and they grin at each other. She sees other heads turn toward her, and she looks away quickly. She is wearing one of her parachute-silk slips tonight, beneath her long wool skirt; she likes the feel of it against her legs, the way it slides when she stretches for a glass, while the soldiers are watching her.

The moment is interrupted by Harry Hitch. “Girlie” he croons. “Another round, eh? There’s a good girl.” He’s trying to wind her up, and she ignores him as she pours. Harry’s with the BBC. He’s a star, if you can believe it, a comic with the Light Program. “Auntie,” as she’s learned to call the Corporation from Harry and the others, has a transmitter tower on the hillside above the quarry; the radio technicians discovered the Arms when they were building the tower, and they’ve been coming up of an evening with their “chums” ever since, six or eight of them squeezed into a battered, muddy Humber.

She sets a scotch before him and then a pint, what Harry calls a “little and large.” The glasses sit side by side like a double act.

“Nice atmosphere tonight,” Harry is saying. “Lovely ambulance.” It’s a joke of some kind, Sarah knows, but when no one laughs, Harry chuckles to himself. “I kill meself.” he says. He’s already half gone, she sees, must have had a skinful even before he arrived. Sarah has listened to Harry on the radio, laughed at his skits, but in the flesh he’s a disappointment, a miserable, moody drunk, skinny and pinched-looking, not the broad, avuncular bloke she imagined from his voice.

“Ta,” he tells her, raising his glass. “See your lot are celebrating tonight too.”

“My lot?” she asks absently, distracted by a wink from Colin.

“The Welsh,” he says, with a slight slur. “The Taffs, the Taffys, the boyos!” He gets louder with each word, not shouting, just projecting, and as soon as he has an audience he’s off, as if on cue. “Here, you know we English have trouble with your spelling. All them l‘s and y‘s. But did you hear the one about Taffy who joined the RAF? He meant to join the NAAFI, but his spelling let him down.” Sarah only smiles, but there’s a smattering of laughter at the bar. Harry half turns on his stool, rocking slightly, to take in the soldiers, their shining faces. “You like that one, eh? On his first day the quartermaster hands him his parachute and Taff wants to know what happens if it don’t open, and the quartermaster, he tells him, ‘That’s what’s called jumping to a conclusion.'”

More laughter, not much but enough, Sarah sees with a sinking feeling, for a few more heads to turn. She catches the eye of Mary Munro, the actress. “Here we go,” Mary mouths, rolling her eyes. Mary’s thing is accents; she can do dozens of them. Once she even did Sarah’s just for a laugh, and listening at home, Sarah blushed to the tips of her ears, more flattered than embarrassed.

“Oh, but they’re brave,” Harry is going, “The Taffs. Oh yes. Did you hear about that Welsh kamikaze, though? Got the VC for twenty successful missions. But he’s worried, you know. His luck can’t hold. Sure he’ll cop it one day, so he goes to the chaplain and tells him what he wants on his headstone.” He drops into a thick Welsh accent. “‘Here lies an honest man and a Welshman.’ And the chaplain says he doesn’t know what it’s like in Wales, but in England it’s one bloke to a hole.”

The men are all laughing now, stopping their conversations to listen. The snooker players straighten up from the table, lean on their cues, like shepherds on crooks. “Come on. Harry,” Mary calls, “It’s supposed to be our night off.” But she’s booed down by the soldiers, and Harry rolls on, unfazed.

“Reminds me of the tomb of the Welsh Unknown Soldier. Didn’t know there was a Welsh Unknown Soldier, did you?” He winks at Sarah. “Nice inscription on that one an’ all: ‘Here lies Taff So-and-So, well known as a drunk, unknown as a soldier.'”

“Takes one to know one,” someone heckles from the public bar behind Sarah, but the delivery is halting, the accent broad and blunt. It’s water off a duck’s back to Harry.

“Well-known drunk, unknown soldier,” Harry repeats happily. “That reminds me,” he cries, and gestures for Sarah to refill him.

“Haven’t you had enough?” She’s aware of the silence in the bar
behind her, the listening locals.

“As the sheep said to the Welshman?”

“Very funny,” she tells him.

“Oh, you Welsh girls,” he says, wagging his linger. “You know what they say about Welsh girls, dontcha, girlie?”

“No.” she says, suddenly abashed.

“Give over, Harry.” It’s Mary again, her voice lower this time, warning.

“Sonly a bit of fun. And she wants to know, don’t she? You want to know?”

Sarah is silent.

“Well, what they say is, you can’t kiss a Welsh girl unexpectedly.” He pauses for a second to drink. When he looks up his lips are wet. “Only sooner than she thought!” There’s a stillness in the bar. Harry shoots his cuffs, studies his watch theatrically. “I can wait,” he says.

He turns back, and Sarah throws his scotch in his face.

There’s a second of shock, and then Harry licks his lips with his big pink tongue, and the laughter goes off like a gun. There’s a cheer from the public bar, and she’s conscious of Jack standing in
the passage behind her.

“Steady on,” Colin is shouting over the din. He’s shouldered his way to the bar. “You all right?” he asks Sarah, and she nods.

“No hard feelings,” Harry is telling her. He holds out his hand for a shake, but when she reaches for it, he raises his empty glass and tells her, “Ta very much. I’d love one.”

“Come on, mate,” Colin says. “Leave it now.” He lays a big hand on the dented brass bar rail in front of Sarah.

Harry looks at his hand for a long moment and then says flatly. “Did you hear this one, mate? Do you know it? About the Welsh girl? Her boyfriend gave her a watchcase? Tell me if you’ve heard it before, won’t you?”

Colin sighs. “I haven’t, And I don’t want to.”

“Really? You might learn something. She was right chuffed with that present, she was. I asked her why. A watchcase? Know what she told me? “He’s promised me the works tonight.”

Colin shakes his head, puts down his pint. Sarah sees that his mustache is flecked with froth.

“Colin,” she says softly.

“The works, sunshine. D’you get it? Penny dropped. ‘as it? Tickety-tock. I can wait. All night. I promise you.”

“You’re asking for it, you are.”

“All we’re doing is telling a few jokes. Asking for it? I don’t think I know that one, though. Is there a punchline to it? Is there?”

Jack is there (limp or no limp, he’s quick dowm the length of a bar), his huge arms reaching over to clamp round Colin before he can swing, but somehow Harry still ends up on the threadbare carpet. He leans back on the stool, trying to anticipate the blow, and he’s gone, spilling backward. It’s a pratfall, and after a second the bar dissolves in laughter again. Jack squeezes Colin once, hard enough to drive the breath out of him. Sarah hears him say. “Not here, lad, nargoss,” and then he releases him quickly. Colin shrugs, takes a gulp of air, glances at Sarah, and joins in the general laughter.

Harry is helped up by Mary and Tony, one of the sound engineers. “Up you come,” Mary tells him. “And they say you can’t do slapstick. You’re wasted on radio, you are.”

“Always told you scotch was my favorite topple,” Harry mutters.

Mary leans across to Sarah and says loudly, “Never mind, luv. All you need to know about Englishmen, Welshmen, or Germans, for that matter, is they’re all men. And you know what they say about men: one thing on their minds . . . and one hand on their things.”
There’s a round of whistles from the crowd. “Always leave ’em laughing, eh.” She grins at Sarah. She turns Harry toward the exit, but at the door he wheels round and lunges over, almost taking her and Tony down in a drunken bow.

“Ladies and gentlement. I thank you.” There’s a smattering of sarcastic applause, and when it dies out only Colin is clapping, slowly.

“Piss off,” he calls. Sarah wishes he’d drop it now. In his own clumsy way, he’s trying to be gallant, she knows, but there’s an edge of bullying to it.

Harry tries to shake himself loose, but Mary and Tony cling on. “I did see a bloke in here once,” he says, “with a terrible black eye.”

“Looking in the mirror, was you?” Colin shouts.

“Actually, no. He was a soldier, this fellow. Told me he’d been fighting for his girlfriend’s honor. Know what I said to him?”

“Bloody hell!”

“I said,” Harry bawls over him, “it looked like she wanted to
keep it.”

He’s red-faced and suddenly exhausted, and Mary and Tony take their chance to frog-march him out.

Over Mary’s shoulder he gives the room a limp victory V-sign as he’s carried out, and over Tony’s arm flashes a quick two fingers at Colin.

And then he’s gone, dragged out into the darkness.

“Sorry about that,” Colin says, and Sarah tells him quickly it’s fine. She needs the job. She doesn’t need customers fighting over her. Her English is supposed to be good enough to talk her way out of situations.

“You shouldn’t have to put up with it,” he goes on, but she shrugs. She’s conscious of Jack still keeping an eye out behind her. It’s a small village. She doesn’t want talk.

“Anyhow,” she says, “thank you, sir.”

“Don’t mention it, miss,” he tells her, getting it finally, but still a little peeved.

She wipes down the bar, drops Harry’s dirty glasses in the sink. She finds herself feeling a little sorry for the old soak after all. Mary has told her that his wife was killed in the Blitz. An incendiary. “You wouldn’t think to look at him, but it was true love.” It makes Sarah wonder. She’s heard Harry telling jokes about his wife on the show: the missus: her-in-doors; his trouble and strife. “Showbiz,” Mary told her with a grim, exaggerated brightness. “The show must go on and all that.”

The clock strikes ten-thirty. “Amser, gwr bonheddig. Amser boddio,” Jack cries, clanging the bell behind her, and Sarah chimes in: “Time, gents. Last orders, please.”

*  *  *  *  *

She rinses glasses while Jack locks up, pouring the dregs away, twisting each glass once around the bristly scrub brush. They come out of the water with a little belch, and she sets them on the rack. Normally she’d stay to dry and polish them, but Jack says it’s enough. “Only gonna get dirty again tomorrow,” he tells her. “Gerroff with you.” He reaches over her and switches off the radio, and she realizes, with a little flush, that she’s been swaying to the muted band music.

“It’s all right,” she says. “I’ll see to these.” But he takes the towel from her and nods at the door. She wonders if he knows.

“Long night,” he says, handing on her coat. “Get you home.”

Colin is waiting for her round the corner.

“Eh up!” he calls softly, appearing from the shadows of the hedge and pulling her to him. He’d been waiting for her here one night last week, when they’d kissed for the first time. His mustache smelled damp, muddy even, but she’d liked it, and she’s met him here every night for a week now. Tonight, she’s promised to go somewhere more private with him.

She’s been kissed before, of course. Only sixteen, but she feels she’s acquitted herself well with Colin, surprised him a little. She was wary of his questions about her age, tried to be mysterious and mock-offended — “You can’t ask a girl that!” — but the way he’d laughed had made her feel small, childish. “I pull your pints, don’t I?” she told him. “There’s laws, you know. Can’t have kids serving in a pub.” But she could see he wasn’t convinced, and so she kissed him back. She’s practiced with the local boys, but the ones her age are all off now, joined up or in factories. The only one she’s kissed lately is David, their evacuee — just goodnight kisses, and one longer one to make him blush on his birthday — but it doesn’t count, because he’s younger than her, if a bit moony.

Colin clambers onto the bike he’s brought and wrestles it around for her to perch herself on the handlebars. She’d been hoping for a jeep, but he is only a corporal. She feels self-conscious raising her bum onto the crossbar, aware of him watching, but then they’re off. Colin pedals firmly. She can feel the bike vibrating with his effort as they near the brow of the hill behind the pub, and then her stomach turns over as they start to coast down the far side. Pretty soon they’re flying, laughing in the darkness. The wind presses her skirt to her legs and then catches it, flipping the hem up against her waist. Her slip billows in the breeze, as if it remembers its past life as a parachute, and her knees and then one thigh flash in the moonlight. She wants to lean down, to fix it, but Colin has her hands pressed under his on the handlebars, and when she wriggles he tells her, “Hold still, love. I’ve got you.”

She has never been to Camp Sunshine, the old holiday camp, but as a child, before the war, she remembers seeing posters showing all the fun to be had there; pictures of cheerful tots and bathing beauties by the pool. On hot summer days, gathering the flock for shearing from the hillside above, running to keep up with her father’s long, loose stride, she would steal glances at the faceted blue gem of the pool below her and imagine its coolness. Of course, these places aren’t for locals. Even in better days the most her father could afford was the odd day trip on a growling charabanc to Rhyl or Llandudno. Besides, as he used to tell her, “Who needs a pool when there’s the ocean for free?” But she hates the sea, the sharp salt taste, the clammy clumps of seaweed. She’s only ever seen swimming pools at the pictures, but she thinks Esther Williams is the most beautiful woman in the world. So as soon as Colin coasts through the back gates of the old camp, she asks him to show her the pool. He looks a little surprised — he has one of the empty, mildewed chalets in mind — but something in her voice, her eagerness, convinces him. He props the bike in the shadows behind a dark hut and leads her through the kids’ playground. She clambers up the slide and swishes down on her backside, arms outstretched. He watches her from the roundabout, circling slowly. When she bats at the swings, he calls softly, “Want a push?” and she tells him, “Yeah.”

She settles herself, and he puts his hands in the small of her back and shoves firmly to set her off, and then as she swings back he touches her lightly, his lingers spread across her hips, each time she passes. When she finally comes to a stop, the strands of hair that have flown loose fall back and cover her face. She tucks them away, all but one, which sticks to her cheek and throat, an inky curve.

“I saw the pool from up there,” she tells him, breathlessly, and she pulls him toward it. She can see the water, the surface, choppy, and she wants, just once, to recline beside it and run her hand through it like a movie star. But when she gets close and bends down, she sees that what she has taken for the surface of the water is an old tarpaulin stretched over the mouth of the pool. She strikes at it bad-temperedly.

“For leaves and that,” Colin says, catching up. “So it doesn’t get all mucky.”

“But what about the water?”

“Well, they drained it, you see.”

He can see her disappointment, but he isn’t discouraged.

“Come ‘ere,” he says, taking her hand and pulling her along to the metal steps that drop into the pool.

He climbs down and unfastens the cloth where it’s tied to the edge by guy ropes. “Follow me.” He slides down, his feet, his legs, his torso, until she can see only the top of his head. She notices a tiny, sunburned bald spot, just as he looks up and she realizes he can see up her skirt. She jumps back, snapping her heels together, and he grins and vanishes.

“Colin,” she calls softly, suddenly alone.

There’s no answer.

She crouches closer to the flapping gap, like a diver about to plunge forward. “Colin?” she hisses.

Nothing.

Then she sees a ridge in the cloth, like the fin of a shark moving away from her, circling, coming back. “What’s that?” she says, and as if from a long way off comes the cry; “Me manhood.”

Despite herself she laughs, and in that moment grabs the railing of the steps and ducks below the cover.

It’s surprisingly light in the empty pool. The tarpaulin is a thin blue oilcloth, and the moonlight seeps through it unevenly, as if through a cloudy sky. The pool is bathed in a pale, blotchy light, and the illusion of being underwater is accentuated by the design of shells printed on the tiles of the bottom. Overhead the breeze snaps the tarpaulin like a sail. She can just make out Colin, like a murky beast at the far end of the pool, the deep end. She takes a step toward him and finds the world sloping away beneath her suddenly, almost falls, stumbles down toward him.

When she gets closer, she finds him walking around in circles, with exaggerated slowness, making giant O shapes with his month.

“What are you doing?” she wants to know.

“I’m a fish,” he says. “Glub, glub, get it?” And she joins him, giggling, snaking her arms ahead of her in a languid breaststroke.

He weaves back and forth around her. “Glub, glub, glub!”

“Now what are you doing?” she asks as he steps sideways and bumps her. “Hey!”

“I’m a crab,” he says, sidling off, scuttling back, bumping her again.

She feels his hand on her arse.

“Ow!”

“Sorry!” He shrugs, holds up his hands. “Sharp pincers.”

“That hurt,” she says, pulling away. She starts to backpedal toward the shallow end, windmilling her arms. “Backstroke!” But he catches her, wraps her in a hug.

“Mr. Octopus,” he whispers, “has got you.”

For a moment she relaxes, kisses him, but he kisses back with force, this soldier she’s only known for a week. She feels him turning her in his arms, as if dancing, and she tries to move her feet with him, but he’s holding her too tight, simply swinging her
around. She feels dizzy. Her shoes scuff the tiles, and she thinks, I just polished them. The pressure of his arms makes it hard to breathe. She moans softly, her mouth under his mouth. When they finally stop spinning, she finds herself pressed against the cold tile wall of the pool. Up close it smells sharply of dank, chlorine, and rotten leaves.

“I’ll be leaving soon,” he whispers. “We’re almost done here. Will you miss me?”

She nods in his arms, pressing her head against his chest, away from the hard wall.

“I’ll miss you,” he tells her, his lips to her ear. “We could be at the front this time next month. I wish I had something to remember you by then. Something to keep up me fighting spirits.”

She feels him picking at her blouse, the buttons. She feels a hand on her knee, fluttering with her hem and then under her skirt — “Mermaid,” he croons — sliding against the silk of her slip, against her thigh.

“Nice,” he breathes. “Who says you Welsh girls don’t know your duty. Proper patriot, you are. Thinking of England.” Her head is still bent toward him, but now she is straining her neck against his weight. Between them she can feel the bony crook of his elbow, pressing against her side, and across her belly the tense muscles of his forearm, twitching.

“Nargois,” she tells him, but he doesn’t understand. “Nargois!”

She feels pressure and then pain. Colin grunts into her hair, short, hot puffs of breath. She wonders if she dares scream, who would hear her, who might come, wonders if she’s more afraid of being caught than of what he’s doing to her.

She begins to turn her head against the coarse wool on his chest, trying to shake it, and he says, “Almost, almost,” but at this she lifts her head sharply, catches him under the chin with a crack, and he cries out.

He steps back, clutching his jaw.

“Are you all right?” She starts to reach for him.

“Cunt!” he says, snatching at her wrist. She doesn’t know the word, it’s not in her schoolbooks, but she knows the tone, pulls away, curses him back in Welsh.

“Speak English, will you?” he tells her, turning her loose.

She leaves him there, struggling up the slope toward the steps. She thinks of a flirty argument they had over the bar one night last week. He’d wanted her to teach him some Welsh, but then she’d laughed at his pronunciation, and he’d gotten mock-mad. “Ah, what’s the point?” he said. “Why don’t you just give it up and speak English, like the rest of us?” She’d turned a little stern then, mouthed the nationalist arguments about saving the language, preserving the tongue.

“Oh, come on,” he hisses after her now. “Play the game. I didn’t mean it. Come back, eh? We’ll do it proper. Comfy, like. Get a mattress from a chalet, have a lie-down.”

But she keeps going, slipping a little on the tiles, tugging her skirt down, shoving her blouse back in, and she hears him start to laugh. There’s a shout from the deep. “Who are you saving it for, eh? Who you saving it for, you Welsh bitch?”

She expects him to come after her then, feels her back tense against his touch, won’t run for fear he’ll chase. But before she reaches the opening. she hears shouts, a harsh scrape of feet on the concrete above. It’s as if she’s willed her own rescue into being, and yet she cowers from it. Torch lights dance over the cover of the pool. Despite herself, she turns to Colin with a beseeching look — to be found like this! — but he’s already past her, his head in the shelter of the tarpaulin, peering out. Frantically she tries to button her blouse, her fingers fumbling. “Shite,” Colin breathes, but the lights and the footsteps are already receding, and she leans against the wall, her heart hammering. The thought of being discovered, the near miss, makes her stomach clench. Her throat feels raw. She looks back at Colin, wanting to share their escape, but he is already scrambling up the ladder and, a second later, gone.

A clean pair of heels, she thinks, the English phrase so suddenly vivid she feels blinded by it.

Her body seems heavy, waterlogged, her arms shaky, too weak to pull her up the metal ladder, and she clings to the cold rail as if she might drown. It’s a few moments before she can climb out of the pool. There are shouts at the other side of the camp, where the barracks have been built — the local boys must have broken in again — but she hurries the other way, back over the playground. The seesaw and roundabout are still, the swings rocking gently in the breeze. She finds the bike where he left it, propped up behind a chalet, and climbs on, noticing as she hitches up her skirt that the stitching of her slip is torn. It will take her five minutes to mend with a needle and thread, but she suddenly feels like weeping.

She pushes off, pedaling hard, although she finds it makes her wince to ride. She doesn’t care that she’s stealing his bike. She’ll throw it into the hedge outside the tillage. She knows he’ll never ask about it, and if he does, she decides, staring at her pale knuckles on the handlebars where his fingers have curled, she’ll pretend she’s forgotten her English.