Ian Slater: Rage of Battle

And amid all this, Wilkins. Rosemary tried to imagine the parents of such a boy, but she knew that one was inevitably wrong. Some of the most disruptive in class had iron discipline at home, and at the other extreme, well, some of the parents were really worse than the students. She thought his card had said his mother was an accountant in Leatherhead, his father something to do with insurance.

Going up in the lift from the shelter, one of the girls squealed and jumped as if stung. Everyone laughed afresh except the girl, face red as beet root. Wilkins was grinning, his callow expression infuriating Rosemary. “Wilkins!”

“Yes? Me, miss?”

“Was that you?”

“Me, miss?”

“Saturday morning for you. Three hours.”

He was still grinning. She had to stop herself from making it four hours. And when she got home, Georgina, who had come down for the weekend from LSE, was all-knowing, at dinner full as usual of sociological theory, claiming that such a boy was “society’s fault.” The boy’s acting up, she told Rosemary, was “quite clearly a cry for attention.”

“Well, he’ll get it,” Rosemary replied tartly. “I’ve given him a Saturday morning.”

“You see?” responded Georgina, pausing as she reached over a textbook opened ostentatiously to the left of the bread rolls. Georgina’s new habit of reading at the table was, Rosemary had no doubt, another of her younger sister’s defiances of bourgeois manners. Besides, reading while you were eating was something Rosemary had never mastered. For the moment their father was either keeping out of it behind his newspaper or simply wasn’t paying attention.

“See what?” demanded Rosemary, glaring across at Georgina. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“This boy Wilkins,” replied Georgina, breaking a stale ration roll, buttering it with nonchalant grace. “I think he wants you all to himself.”

“Don’t be absurd, Georgina. He’s a recalcitrant yobbo.”

“I mean,” said Georgina, astonishing Rosemary with her ability to have broken the roll without a fall of crumbs onto the pressed white linen tablecloth, “he probably has a thing for you.”

Rosemary’s face turned beet red. She glanced at their father, but he was hidden behind the Daily Telegraph. Anne Spence, who’d just entered the dining room from the kitchen as the exchange between her daughters was heating up, looked wearily down at her younger daughter. “Don’t be ridiculous, Georgina. Rosemary’s old enough to be his mother.”

“Exactly,” countered Georgina knowingly.

A rush of exasperation came from behind the Telegraph, Richard Spence lowering the newspaper, breaking its back, folding the broadsheet to a quarter its size. “That fool Knowlton’s at it again!”

“Who?” asked Georgina. Her father peered over his reading glasses, unsure of whether she knew or not. “Knowlton — Guy Knowlton. That idiot professor who keeps taking out ridiculous advertisements.”

“Oh,” said Georgina, “the man who wants to collect all our hair dryers to save energy.”

“Yes. That’s him.”

“He sounds like a harmless enough eccentric to me, Father.”

“That’s not the point, Georgina. I was telling your mother — you were here, weren’t you, Rosemary?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Here we are, desperately short of all kinds of things, paper not being the least of them, and yet they persist in allowing this, this madman to waste space in—”

“It’s a free country, Daddy,” said Rosemary, tired of his constant harping about the dotty professor. For Richard Spence, Dr. Guy Knowlton, the author of a text on archaeology, continued to represent all that was self-indulgent and wasteful in a country that was fighting for its life and yet in which old fools like Knowlton were allowed to squander valuable resources.

“Do you really think so?” asked Georgina, looking at Rosemary.

Rosemary lifted the teapot lid, seeing it pointless to try to squeeze any more out of the exhausted tea leaves. “Think what?”

“That it’s a free country,” continued Georgina, taking the last of the milk for her tea.

Anne Spence pointedly left the room.

“Don’t upset her like that,” said Richard. “You know how quarrels upset her.”

“It’s not a quarrel, Daddy,” replied Georgina. “I’m merely stating a fact. Just because we’re at war doesn’t mean we can’t question whether we’re really living in a free—”

“Georgina!”

In the strained silence that followed her father’s rebuke, Georgina returned to her book and Rosemary could hear the steady, heavy ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room, recalling that the last time she had been so aware of its presence was after she and Robert had made love, when— ironically — at the height of the Soviet rocket attack, she had felt so safe in his arms.

Georgina finished the bread roll and, licking her fingers, ran them around the bread-and-butter plate to gather up the remaining crumbs.

“My God, Georgina,” exclaimed Richard. “Is that what they teach you up there—?”

“It’s very proletarian, Daddy,” said Rosemary. “Didn’t you know?”

Georgina poured herself more tea as if squeezing the pot. “This is a bit weak, isn’t it?”

“We have to use the leaves over again,” said Rosemary. “Rationing. Or don’t you have that in London?”

“I don’t know why you’re so shirty, Rose,” retorted Georgina.

“She’s worried,” said her father.

“We all are,” said Georgina. “This wretched war has mucked everything up. It’s the same old story. Big capital against—”

“Not at the table,” said Richard.

“I would have thought,” put in Rosemary, “that the war suited you very nicely. Liberating women from the bourgeois apron strings. Kitchen to factory. Manpower shortage and all.”

Georgina’s cup stopped in midair and she replaced it on the saucer without having sipped the tea. “Why didn’t I think of that? Rosey — that’s quite brilliant.”

“Thank you,” said Rosemary. “I’m glad we poor country folk occasionally think of—”

“Still,” cut in Georgina, “I bet I’m right about Willie.”

“Who?” asked Richard, looking up from his newspaper. He had thought she said, “William.”

“That boy-Williams.”

“Wilkins,” Rosemary corrected her.

“He’s got the hots for you, Rosey.”

Richard Spence’s paper shot away from him. “What a vulgar expression. Insulting people, is it? Is that what you’re learning up there?”

“Oh really, Daddy. It’s just an expression—”

“Yes, and I don’t care for it.”

There was another long, strained silence.

“Well,” said Georgina finally, “and how about this Robert Brentwood? Bit sudden, Rosey, you sly fox. When do I get to meet him?”

“Excuse me,” said Rosemary, pushing her chair back from the table, brushing her lips quickly with the napkin.

“I only wanted to—” began Georgina. Richard Spence folded the newspaper neatly, ran his hand down the crease, and taking his reading glasses off, rubbed his eyes. “I thought you had grown out of it, Georgina.”

“Out of what?”

“Don’t be obtuse. Your willful aggressiveness. You’re not happy until you push people to the edge. God knows where you get it from.” He looked hard at her. “Why do you do it?”

Georgina said nothing, holding her teacup like a communicant’s chalice, staring ahead.

“Is it because,” Richard said, “you think we don’t — care for you?”

“Care?” said Georgina, her tone defensively hostile as she turned on him. “You can’t even say the word, can you?”