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The summer of that year seemed to go on for ever.

Stella remained in hospital, somewhat improved. Perdita and Billy had contrived to see Mary several times, each visit taking a book from the family collection. Perdita stole Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca
from the public library, and after reading it and carefully removing its institutional stamps, had offered it as an extra gift. Mary received it graciously and confessed only later that she found it dull.

There was still a feeling of distance and loss between them, but gradually, too, something was re-establishing; there was some corridor of understanding they cautiously met in. The first time Perdita tried one of her iambic pentameter sentences, Mary had laughed – it was too lah-di-dah and stupidly musical. Nevertheless, the sentence emerged complete, so they laughed together in the end, both aware of the inherent possibility of recovery. Billy saw them laughing and joined in, unsure of its import, but pleased to find again the girls' long-ago smiles. With each visit Perdita felt a little more confident, of her friendship, of her speech, of finding continuity. She loved Mary. That was it. It was all that simple.

School too was becoming slowly more tolerable. Perdita had earned the respect of her teachers, who discovered that she was, after all, unusually intelligent, but simply preferred not to be asked questions and not to speak. Once they stopped badgering her, she fell into excellence. She wrote essays of surprising maturity and stylistic verve; she continued to fail at maths – in which she had no interest – but was otherwise cherished as a gifted student. When the tale of her unfortunate background was known, she was endowed in addition with a kind of narrative claim; teachers told her story to one another; she exemplified misfortune; she made them feel better about themselves.

She was promoted to the ‘top' class and in this singular treatment became further marked out and separated from her peers. But Perdita, understanding by now the difficulties of school, was resigned to her loneliness. No one wanted to talk to a stuttering girl, and now that she was ‘brainy' she was even more difficult to accommodate. Her peers called her the M-M-Martian and when she heard this she thought:
yes, that is so, I feel like an alien; I feel as if I am visiting from another planet
.

Twice weekly the whole student population did air-raid practice. A shrill whistle blew, they quickly lined up, and with swift organisation were dispatched to trenches that had been dug along the edges of the playing field. Students in the Junior Red Cross, or those who had scored highly in cloud or plane identification, led the way. For a time Perdita was designated a stretcher-bearer, but she couldn't believe in this phoney, play-acting war, the way the girls clutched each other and whispered of possible atrocities and the boys, having fun, enjoyed their sense of control. Something in the delineation of roles and responses seemed way too improbable. Perdita began to long for a Zero to appear in the sky, so that her class might see for themselves what her nightmares had already shown her.

It is curious the way children come to understanding. I had circulated the words of sonnet LX around and around in my head, particularly the opening, the repetition of which I loved:

It had rested in me, ticking over like the relentless minutes it described, providing a bright, fluent space I could play my voice in. Then, all of a sudden, I realised Shakespeare was wrong. There was no forward incessancy, like waves meeting waves, but recursion, fold, things revisiting out of time. The narrator of
Rebecca
returned to Manderley in dreams and memory; my sense too was of the implicating dragnet of the past, the accumulated experiences to which I was somehow compelled to return, the
again
and
again
, one might say, of moments drastically mistaken.

Dreams, nightmares, descriptions written to Mary; these summonings were a form of backwards learning. I recognised my haltings and erasures, my bothersome blanks. I recognised – with a gloomy apprehension – that although my body had moved, parts of my mind were lodged still in an alto
gether elsewhere, lagging behind, fraught and ill-fitted. Adults like to imagine that childhood has a wholesome and charming contiguity, but children too know, or at least now and then intuit, the dreadful fractures that craze any thoughtful life.

It was the beginning of 1944, the time of the Battle of Monte Cassino. The routine of school tends to steamroller memory. Hours of learning smudge into a toneless field, and what is recalled are rare moments of drama or triumph. Perdita remembered all her life her history teacher, Mr Graves, not for his lessons, which were plodding, strict and sincere, but for the occasion on which – outrageously – he burst into tears.

He must have been sixty, certainly too old to enlist, but perhaps, like her father, had been in the First War. In any case he had a somewhat military uprightness, which combined with his bleary myopic stare to suggest self-contradiction. He had a full head of grey hair, and his manner with female teachers implied that he fancied himself as a ‘ladies' man'.

It was a Wednesday morning and Mr Graves stood before the class urging them, commanding them, to remember this time, this time of ‘the loathsome ruination of war'. There was a Benedictine monastery, he said, high on a hill, eighty miles south of Rome, over which the Allies and Fascists were fighting. It was a beautiful building – he had seen it himself on a personal pilgrimage in 1921 – containing both secular and sacred works of art and intellect from earliest antiquity. The great philosopher Thomas Aquinas had actually studied there.
Thomas Aquinas
: he wrote the name on the blackboard. The Allies had bombed the monastery in January and now, one week after school had recommenced, they had bombed it once again, this time pulverising the 1300-year-old building into merest rubble. It was gone, he said. Monte Cassino was destroyed.

‘Gone,' he repeated.

There was a quiet moment, in which the students expected a homily, or a summary, or a date to write down, but Mr Graves let out a harsh deep sob, and began to weep. This was not a guarded loss of control but a full-bodied collapse. He was loud and distraught. It was as if some force of dissolution had swept right through him. ‘Monte Cassino,' he sobbed. Some of the students nervously giggled. Others exchanged snide comments behind cupped hands. There was no sympathy for a grown man who would cry over a building somewhere; crazy old bugger. Some of the boys almost spat with masculine contempt.

At the very back of the room, Perdita was moved by Mr Graves' theatrical announcement. She sat motionless, aware of the varied responses around her, perceiving the spread of this tear-stain from which Mr Graves would never recover his authority. There were, she knew, whole cities that had been destroyed; millions of people had been massacred and lay with their faces on black roads, or in mud, or in gaping pits, gleaming with blood-thickened rain. Survivors stared from the shells of bombed-out buildings, or hid terrified as war vehicles, hot with recent violence, rumbled by, crushing anything in their paths. Here was a man mourning a single monastery. Perhaps this was what war did – destroy scale altogether. In order to feel anything there had to be an attachment of some sort, a personal violation, a memory forfeited. For Perdita this was like the moment when she had glanced up from her playing cards and seen the newspaper photograph of the weary soldier. The error of things seemed so huge; and the gap between different orders of experience so taut and so meaningless.

Mr Graves had now crumpled into his seat. He put his head on his desk and wrapped his arms over him, as if an air raid were in progress somewhere above. The classroom quietened. Students seemed to know now that some irrevocable point
had been reached. No one moved. Then Perdita rose from her back-row seat and slowly, oh so conspicuously, walked to the front of the room. Gently she lifted her teacher, Mr Graves, under the armpits, took a portion of his weight, and led him away, out of the room, out of the school building, out into the blinking and unforgiving light.

When she wrote to Mary about this incident later on, Perdita felt a new measure of respect for her teacher. It was not his collapse she admired, but his edifying tears. In her small world there was a kind of seizure of feeling: Stella, Mary, herself – none of them now cried. For all the woebegone and sorrowful events that had occurred, indeed for all the enormity of the war and the cataclysms of history, they had practised their own severe forms of containment and reserve. What in the school had been an outrage seemed to Perdita a breaking-through. Mr Graves had in some way responded with appropriate distress to a war habitually deadened in newsprint, abstracted into maps, rendered light entertainment. The phrase ‘loathsome ruination' remained and haunted her. It sounded Shakespearean. It had a dimension of passionate declaration she felt she understood.

Perdita spent a lot of time in the bathroom, in front of Flora's mirror. There she watched herself practise iambic pentameter sentences.

When she had told Doctor Oblov that the children at school called her M-M-Martian, he raised an index finger as she spoke, halted her and said, ‘Mar-
shun
, da-
Dum
, da-
Dum
, da-
Dum
. Make it an iamb. Think of the stress, the rhythm, as if it is a word in a sonnet. Not your word, but existing in a sentence already known. Put the stress on the second syllable.'

Perdita thought that perhaps he did not understand how it
felt to be teased. Children were monstrous in their vehemence, their punishing exclusions.

‘When I was a bald boy,' he added, ‘other children called me “the egg”. They used to come up from behind, flip off my cap, and rap my skull with their knuckles. I was a weakling, I cried, so they grew more cruel.'

Perdita was repeating in her head: ‘I was a weakling, I cried, so they grew more cruel.' She wanted to discuss this with Doctor Oblov. She turned the flower dome in her hands and tried, with an agonising expectation of failure, to formulate a question.

Then instead, on an instinct, she simply said, ‘Mar-
shun
!' She had successfully converted Martian to a sayable iamb.

‘Bravo,' said Doctor Oblov. He gave an enormous smile, leaned back in his chair and laced and unlaced his fingers.

Perdita was now looking at herself in the mirror, repeating, ‘Mar-
shun
.' No stutter, no stumbling mountain range of Ms. She looked at herself critically. She would have liked a crimped hairdo and fuller lips. Better still, she would have liked to be the woman in the booth at the cinema, so gorgeously synthetic that she was a figure of awe.

‘Mar-
shun
!'

Flora's voice came plaintively from behind the door. ‘Are you going to be all day in there?'

Perdita looked at herself one last time. Her face floated, pale and extraterrestrial in the shadowy bathroom. A plastic curtain of crudely drawn fish framed her head. All of a sudden she could scarcely breathe. There was contingency here, and painful faintness. She shaped her lips around a rhythmical sentence she did not try to speak. The sentence was: ‘I am coming, Flora. Just one minute more.'

On a scorchingly hot day in early March they picked up Stella
from the hospital. It had been arranged that she would stay for a while with her daughter at Flora and Ted's, ‘to settle her', said Flora.

She stood passively in front of an electric fan in the foyer of the hospital building, wearing a pale blue dress Perdita had never seen before. It had a cloth belt that accentuated her terrible thinness and a neat narrow skirt. At her feet sat a touchingly small vinyl bag of personal items. Although accustomed to Stella's absence, Perdita was glad they were to be reunited. She felt a surge of affection – surprised at its tenacity – and stepped forward to embrace her mother. Perdita had grown and perhaps Stella had also shrunk: they were misproportioned, the daughter now slightly taller than the mother. Perdita lay her arm around her mother's shoulder, just as Billy sometimes did for her, as they walked the sombre route between the bus stop and Greensleeves. Ted carried the vinyl bag, Flora fussed as she hurried ahead to open the windows of the car, so that they would not all swelter.

At first Stella remained staunchly silent, not responding to questions, not offering conversation. But gradually she seemed to sense the Ramsays' beneficence; the fuss was for her, their intentions were generous. Perdita watched her mother make a valiant effort to be sociable.

‘I'm not good for anything much,' she heard Stella declare, ‘but I can try to get work again, I suppose.'

Ted reminded Stella she had a widow's pension. She was pleased and surprised.

‘We can help you find somewhere to live,' Ted announced, steering the car around a corner. ‘But only when you're ready. There's plenty of time.'

‘There's plenty of time,' Flora repeated.

In the back seat with her mother, sticky with the fierce heat no open window would alleviate, Perdita was aware of the
fulsome goodness of the Ramsays. They acted helpfully because they were disposed naturally to do so; there was no calculation or pause, no hesitation or profit. Outside the car window the impersonal world streamed by, the mysterious energies of all those independent lives, laborious or playful, embedded in complex unhappiness or pleasure, the lives of men like Mr Graves, undone by a single confiscation of the war, or Mary, incarcerated, experiencing who knew what daily humiliations and plights.

‘Is the war still on?' Stella asked. She looked straight ahead. Her face was flushed with the heat. She had not once looked directly at Perdita.

‘Yep,' said Ted decisively. ‘Still the bloody war. But it won't be long now. We're gaining the upper hand.'