Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault

too shy to speak of the future, or to ask what plans he had made for them to meet again. Peter would know how such things were done. She knew where to send it, for he had told her that, when he went away, it would be to his old hospital, to take a house appointment there. She had not known what it meant, and it had seemed very remote and far away. But she had remembered the name. She knew that letters from Cornwall were often two days on the way; so it was half a week before she began seriously to watch the post.
    She rarely received letters, and in these her mother took a kindly interest, saying, as she handed them over, “Look, here’s one for you , Elsie, isn’t that nice? Isn’t it from Pamela? How is she getting on with her elocution now?” Marjorie was the elocutionist, and Pamela was at a secretarial college; but Elsie had good reason to know that Peter’s hand was alarmingly different from either; she wore, pinned to her liberty bodice by day and the inside of her pyjamas by night, a prescription for ferrous sulphate tablets, which she had found in the waste-paper basket.
    Her day pivoted, now, round her casual-seeming shifts to intercept the mail, or, for variety, the postman. By the second week she had developed a good deal of skill in both. In the third week, she ceased to encounter the postman personally, feeling ashamed to do so; in the fourth, she pretended even to herself that she happened to be in the hall only by chance. In the fifth week, the phrases of her own letter hid in the back of her mind, and came out at odd, sudden moments, running out and across like darting mice when she was in church or sitting at tea, and making her tighten her fingers, or twist her leg painfully round the leg of her chair.
    In the sixth week, in the middle of a scene at breakfast, while she was staring about her in vacant, almost unseeing misery, she saw it lying on the table a foot away from her, at the top of the morning pile. Because the scene had started before the letters came in, she was able to pick it up and put it in her pocket.
    She took it to the only safe place she knew of; the outdoor lavatory half-way down the garden. It had walls whitewashed over raw stone, with cobwebs in the corners; last year’s parish calendar, fixed in the mortar with rusty nails, showed a Christmas crib with very clean shepherds, and angels who looked as if they had all been to the same public school. A number of earwigs lived behind this. The place had been an old potting shed, and was big enough to hold, besides the wide, scrubbed wooden seat, the garden roller, mower and hose, and a wooden box full of dead-looking bulbs. Through the open window a wild fuchsia dripped with crimson and imperial purple, the small firm flowers and shiny dark-red stems shining half transparently between her and the light of a bright-grey morning sky.
    Elsie sat down on the dirty garden roller; it would have been sacrilegious to use the edge of the seat, and its presence shamed her. She wished there had been somewhere else to go; but it would be time, in a few minutes, to help her mother make the beds. She did not open the letter at once, though there was so little time. Perhaps it was the residual wretchedness from breakfast, or the cold, cloudy light, or those barren posts and slowly cooling expectations, that made her pause with her finger hooked in the envelope, feeling chilly and damp in the palms. But she interpreted her dread as the turmoil of ecstasy, and, ripping the fold, took out the letter, two sides of one sheet and one and a half of the next.
Dear Little Elsie,
    It was good to hear from you and to know that you still think kindly of me and that our talks together helped, maybe, to give you a fresh slant on things and make life seem less on top of you. I am glad that I was there, though no doubt if I hadn’t been someone else would; you were due for a new impetus of some sort, and the Zeitgeist has a way of producing such things at the