Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page B

ground: earlier, she had asked him why he hadn’t come earlier and what had been happening to him, and when he had said it was too long a story for now, she had at once desisted; the old or, rather, younger Clary would have continued with a relentless cross-examination, but that first evening she seemed to know that he did not want to talk about that . . .
    Which, he reflected now as he sat in the train on his way to London and Archie’s flat, had been quite unlike the behaviour both of the Admiralty and the rest of the family. The Admiralty, of course, had a right: he recognized – belatedly – that he had behaved very badly from their point of view, that the four years of isolation and intense intimacy had impaired his sense of reality, or values. Different things had imperceptibly come to seem important: saving his own skin had evolved to continual anxiety about Miche’s – if she was discovered to be harbouring him she would be shot. They had made a number of hiding places and he had become as wary as an animal of any activity near the farm – could hear the sound of a motorbike or any other engine even before she did. For the Germans did turn up from time to time, at infrequent intervals, to extract food from them and other farms. They would take chickens, eggs, fruit, butter if it was to be had, and once, on an occasion that had afterwards caused Miche to sob with rage, one of her three pigs. Sometimes these things were punctiliously paid for, sometimes not. But apart from the major preoccupation of staying alive there had been two other elements to his life then – each unpromisingly begun from the lack of any alternative – that had gradually come to absorb him completely. The drawing had started because he had nothing better, or even else, to do. She had a pad of thin, lined paper on which she wrote the occasional family letter – to her sister in Rouen, to an aunt who was a nun in a convent near Bayeux. Even on the blank side the lines showed through, but he became used to this. He had started by drawing aspects of the kitchen, which was large and accommodated all indoor life except sleep. There, Michèle cooked and washed and ironed and mended, packed up eggs or chickens or rabbits – the last two live – for selling in the market where she went every other week. In season, she would put fruit she had picked into punnets, or preserved into jars, bundle herbs: anything she grew or raised to sell was got ready to carry on her bicycle with the small wooden cart behind it. Here he passed much of his time, idle, unless she found some task for him, but always he had to be poised for flight. The first drawings had been merely pleasant distraction, but quite soon he found himself becoming more serious, more critically responsible about them: he recognized that he was out of practice, and some time afterwards that it had been years since he had done any drawing without feeling faintly guilty and self-indulgent (Zoë had always resented him spending any of his spare time on what she called his Art). Now he had time to practise as much as he liked. And Michèle, once she realized that it was more to him than an idle ploy, went to great lengths to provide him with materials – chiefly paper, some pencils and once some charcoal. These she obtained occasionally on market days – there was not much there, she said, only things for the pupils of the local school, but once she came back with a small box of watercolours.
    His second preoccupation had been, of course, Michèle. He had first gone to bed with her after about four months at the farm. It had been a matter of straightforward lust and the comfort it provided. They had had a bad day – in the morning the goat was found mysteriously dead, a disaster since it had recently produced a kid who would now have to be fed by bottle on the precious cow’s milk. She had been deeply upset because she could think of no reason for the goat’s death. She brought the kid