Pastoral by Nevil Shute Page B

called Kingslake Woods—somewhere near Chipping Hinton. I’d never been there before.”
    The name meant nothing to her. “Was it very wild country—in the woods?”
    “Not specially. They were lovely woods.”
    There was a short pause. Then she said: “You must be tired, aren’t you?”
    He grinned. “Sleep a bit this afternoon.”
    “I shall, too,” she said. “I’m on to-night.”
    “Are you?” A thought came to him, sly and subtle and altogether bad. “Could you let me have the frequencies and D.F. stations? I like to get those in my mind before the briefing.”
    She had been operational for too short a time to know the idiosyncrasies of all the pilots. She said: “Of course. If you’d like to walk over to the office I’ll give them to you now.”
    They left the mess together and went over to Headquarters, to her little bare office with the ink-stained deal table, the two hard chairs, the bulldog clips and the buff papers. She read out to him the information that he wanted; he wrote it all down carefully in his notebook, asked a question or two, and slipped the book back in his pocket.
    “Thanks awfully,” he said. He paused, and then said rather shyly: “It was lovely in the woods this morning. Perishing cold, but it was awful fun.”
    She said: “It must have been. Did you have to wait very long?”
    “A fair time.” He launched into a description of the expedition. For ten minutes they talked badger and fox. “Foxes often make their homes in old rabbit-burrows,” she said presently. “I think most of them do that. But I don’t know about badgers. Did this one have an earth of his own?”
    “I don’t know,” said Marshall. “We didn’t go to it. We were chasing off after the fox, because of the time.”
    The girl said: “I’ve never seen a badger, or even a badger’s earth.”
    Elaborately casual, Marshall said: “I can show you this earth any time you like. Show you the badger, too, if you like to put your hand in and pull him out.”
    They laughed together. “Would you like to do that one afternoon?” he said. “You’ve got a bike, haven’t you?”
    She hesitated for a moment. “I’d love to see it,” she said. “If I met you out there, would you show it me?”
    His heart warmed to her for her discretion. “Sure,” he said. “It’ll take you about an hour to get there on your bike. What about half-past three to-morrow afternoon?”
    She was suddenly frightened at his confidence. Between then and half-past three to-morrow afternoon there lay an operation, a thing of darkness and of terror, of bombs and fire and flares and flak and death. Beyond that, he was making an assignment to go walking in the woods with her.
    “All right,” she said. “Half-past three to-morrow.” That wouldn’t bring bad luck, would it?
    He said: “That’s a date. Have you got a map?”
    She had a map, a map on which in lonely absorption she had traced in red the solitary cycle rides that she had made around Hartley Magna. He studied it for a minute or two and then drew a little pencil circle at an intersection of two lanes. “There,” he said. “Half-past three to-morrow.”
    She smiled up at him. “I’ll be there.”
    He went back to the mess and she went over to her quarters and up to her room. She undressed partially and lay down on her bed, pulling a blanket over her. Life for her had suddenly become very full of incident. First there was the operation immediately ahead. She took her work very seriously. She hadbeen bored with the work of training at her last station; she had wanted to be more closely in contact with the war. Now that she was at an operational station the war terrified her. From time to time when the machines were coming back from the target she had to bear quite heavy responsibilities in the fleeting moment. There had been a terrible occasion ten days previously when a crippled aircraft running short of petrol over the North Sea had appealed for a W/T fix, and