An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

halted for a moment, the belt of his mackintosh undone, looking up at the windows of the rehearsal room. Meredith waved; he didn’t think Bunny saw him.
    They had met in a railway carriage in the third year of the war. Bunny was going home on a twenty-four-hour pass and Meredith returning from a week’s leave in Hoylake. They had sat opposite each other in a compartment crowded with able seamen, he watching the darkening fields flying outside the window and Bunny staring down at a single sheet of notepaper, pale blue in colour, which he held on his jigging knee and from whose fold poked a spring of crab apple in bloom. At intervals, re-crossing his cramped legs humped on the hassock of his kit-bag, his boot struck Meredith’s shin and he muttered an apology, to which Meredith responded with a polite shrug of the shoulders. But then, as night fell and the lights were switched on in the carriage, illuminating the sepia photographs of Morecambe Bay at dawn and donkeys trotting Blackpool sands, he felt his privacy was being invaded and had stopped making those conciliatory gestures. Besides, from the pallor of his fat cheeks, those nails bitten to the quick, the splodge of oil on his trouser-leg and the button missing from his tunic, it was easy to distinguish to which class the man belonged. Though they both wore the uniform of a Private it was plain who was of superior rank.
    He had tried to sleep but the gambling sailors made too much noise. Instead he studied the reflections in the window; the blurred beak of his own nose, that thong as if of an Indian brave imprinted across his brow by the absurd cap which he had removed at Crewe and which now lay among the cigarette butts at his feet; the jutting shoulders of the poker players who sprayed their cards like fans beneath their mouths. Madame Butterfly , he thought, for he had sneaked a glance at the soldier opposite and seen that he was now weeping, the letter crumpled in his fist, scrunching apple blossom.
    At Wolverhampton the carriage had all but emptied, leaving only a sleeping woman cradling a badminton racket. Some miles from Nuneaton, as the train jolted with drawn blinds between an embankment, the man gave an audible sob. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. His voice was educated although he was wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘Bad news?’ Meredith asked, and lent him a handkerchief.
    The letter was from Bunny’s father, telling of a bomb that had exploded in the garden. Thinking in terms of his mother’s back yard in Hoylake, the washing sagging between poplar trees, Meredith had prepared himself for details of death. In his head he saw the hung sheets dotted with coal-smuts torn from their pegs and ripped into bandages as they sailed above the foxgloves. He assumed a melancholy expression and said, ‘I’m so sorry. No, please keep the handkerchief.’
    ‘There was a 300-year-old oak,’ Bunny said. ‘And a yew hedge even older. It wasn’t a raid. The bomber released its load because it was having difficulty reaching the coast. Another mile or so, another thirty seconds at the most and they would have dropped harmlessly in the Channel.’
    ‘What rotten luck,’ said Meredith.
    ‘Robyn was found in the orchard with his leg blown off.’
    ‘What can I say,’ murmured Meredith. ‘There aren’t any adequate words.’
    ‘My father had to shoot him.’
    Meredith still hadn’t forgiven him – not for the big house, the holidays touring France on bicycles, the expensive schooling, the mutilated pony or the affectionate parents. He himself had never known a father, being the issue of a man who smoked cigars and a girl plucked from the typing pool of the Cunard buildings in 1913.
    Desmond Fairchild was loitering in the corridor when Meredith emerged from the rehearsal room. He demanded to know when they would have the use of the stage. Like a beggar, he went so far as to pluck at Meredith’s sleeve. ‘Sorry to go on about it, squire,’ he said. ‘I just find it