Mrs. Sutton had once been Colin's nurse up at the Manor: she had married
old Sutton after his first wife's death; old Sutton who wouldn't die and
let Anne have his farm. And now she watched them as if she were afraid
of what they might do next.
"Poor old Nanna," Jerrold said.
"Goodness knows what she thinks of us," said Anne.
"It doesn't matter what she thinks," said Colin.
And they laughed; they laughed; and Jerrold was not quite sure, yet.
But before the night was over he thought he was.
They had given him the little room in the gable. It led out of Colin's
room. And there on the chimneypiece he saw an old photograph of himself
at the age of thirteen, holding a puppy in his arms. He had given it to
Anne on the last day of the midsummer holidays, nineteen hundred. Also
he found a pair of Anne's slippers under the bed, and, caught in a crack
of the dressing-table, one long black hair. This room leading out of
Colin's was Anne's room.
And Colin called out to him, "Do you mind leaving the door open, Jerry?
I can't sleep if it's shut."
They were silent for a while. He was intensely aware of her as she
turned her head round, slowly, to look at him, straight and full.
And the sense of his nearness came over her, soaking in deeper, swamping
her brain. Her wide open eyes darkened; her breathing came in tight,
short jerks; her nerves quivered. She wondered whether he could feel
their quivering, whether he could hear her jerking breath, whether he
could see something queer about her eyes. But she had to look at him,
not shyly, furtively, but straight and full, taking him in.
He was changed. The war had changed him. His face looked harder, the
mouth closer set under the mark of the little clipped fawn-brown
moustache. His eyes that used to flash their blue so gayly, to rest so
lightly, were fixed now, dark and heavy with memory. They had seen too
much. They would never lose that dark memory of the things they had
seen. She wondered, was Colin right? Had the war done worse things to
Jerrold than it had done to him? He would never tell her.
"Jerrold," she said, suddenly, "did you have a good time in India?"
"I suppose so. I dare say I thought I had."