In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson

brown corduroy knee-breeches, she looked like a film star.
    She wasn’t very tall, perhaps about five foot two or three, and the drab uniform couldn’t hide the kind of figure I’ve heard men whistle at in the street. She had a pale, heart-shaped face, perfectly proportioned nose and mouth, and the biggest, deepest, bluest eyes I had ever seen. Her blonde hair cascaded from her brown felt hat, which she wore at a jaunty angle and held on with one hand as she walked in from the street.
    I was immediately put in mind of Hardy’s novel A Pair of Blue Eyes , which I had read only a few weeks previously. Like Elfride Swancourt’s, this land-girl’s eyes were “a sublimation of her.” They were “a misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface . . . looked into rather than at.” Those eyes also had a way of making you feel you were the only person in the world when she talked to you.
    â€œNasty out, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you’ve got five Woodbines for sale, have you?” she asked.
    I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “We don’t have any cigarettes at all.” It was one of the toughest times we’d had in the war thus far: the Luftwaffe was bombing our cities to ruins; the U-boats were sinking Atlantic convoys at an alarming rate; and the meat ration had just been dropped to only one and tenpence a week. But here she was, bold as brass, a stranger, walking into the shop and without a by-your-leave asking for cigarettes!
    I was lying, of course. We did have cigarettes, but what small supply we had we kept under the counter for our registered customers. We certainly didn’t go selling them to strange and beautiful land-girls with eyes out of Thomas Hardy novels.
    I was just on the point of telling her to try fluttering her eyelashes at one of the airmen knocking about the village—holding my tongue never having been my strongest point—when she totally disarmed me with a sequence of reactions.
    First she thumped the counter with her little fist and cursed. Then, a moment later, she bit the corner of her lower lip and broke into a bright smile. “I didn’t think you would have,” she said, “but it was worth asking. I ran out the day before yesterday and I’m absolutely gasping for a fag. Oh, well, can’t be helped.”
    â€œAre you the new land-girl at Top Hill Farm?” I asked, curious now, and beginning to feel more than a little guilty about my deceit.
    She smiled again. “Word gets around quickly, doesn’t it?” “It’s a small village.”
    â€œSo I see. Anyway, that’s me. Gloria Stringer.” Then she held her hand out. I thought it rather an odd gesture for a woman, especially around these parts, but I took it. Her hand was soft and slightly moist like a summer leaf after rain. Mine felt coarse and heavy, wrapped around such a delicate thing. I always was an ungainly and awkward child, but never did I feel this so much as during that first meeting with Gloria. “Gwen Shackleton,” I muttered, more than a trifle embarrassed. “Pleased to meet you.”
    Gloria rested her hand palm down on the counter, cocked one hip forward and looked around. “Not a lot to do around here, is there?” she said.
    I smiled. “Not a lot.” I knew what she meant, of course, but it still struck me as an odd, even insensitive, thing to say. I got up at six o’clock every morning to run the shop, and on top of that I spent one night a week fire-watching—a bit of a joke around these parts until the Spinner’s Inn was burned down by a stray incendiary bomb in February and two people were killed. I also helped with the local Women’s Voluntary Service. Most days, after the nine o’clock news, I was exhausted and ready to fall asleep the minute my head hit the pillow.
    I had heard how hard a land-girl’s job was, of course, but to judge