Every morning at breakfast Anne had to look through the lists of killed, missing and wounded, to save Adeline the shock of coming upon Jerrold’s or Eliot’s name.  Every morning Adeline gazed at Anne across the table with the same look of strained and agonised enquiry.  Every morning Anne’s heart tightened and dragged, then loosened and lifted, as they were let off for one more day.

One more day?  Not one more hour, one minute.  Any second the wire from the War Office might come.

ii

Anne never knew the moment when she was first aware that Colin’s mother was afraid of him.  Aunt Adeline was very busy, making swabs and bandages.  Every day she went off to her War Hospital Supply work at the Town Hall, and Anne was left to take care of Colin.  She began to wonder whether the swabs and bandages were not a pretext for getting away from Colin.

“It’s no use,” Adeline said.  “I cannot stand the strain of it.  Anne, he’s worse with me than he is with you.  Everything I say and do is wrong.  You don’t know what it was like before you came.”

Anne did know.  The awful thing was that Colin couldn’t bear to be left alone, day or night.  He would lie awake shivering with terror.  If he dropped off to sleep he woke screaming.  At first Pinkney slept with him.  But Pinkney had joined up, and old Wilkins, the butler, was impossible because he snored.

Anne had her old room across the passage where she had slept when they were children.  And now, as then, their doors were left open, so that at a sound from Colin she could get up and go to him.

She was used to the lacerating, unearthly scream that woke her, the scream that terrified Adeline, that made her cover her head tight with the bed-clothes, to shut it out, that made her lock her door to shut out Colin.  Once he had come into his mother’s room and she had found him standing by her bed and looking at her with the queer frightened face that frightened her.  She was always afraid of this happening again.

Anne couldn’t bear to think of that locked door.  She was used to the sight of Colin standing in her doorway, to the watches beside his bed where he lay shivering, holding her hand tight as he used to hold it when he was a child.  To Anne he was “poor Col-Col” again, the little boy who was afraid of ghosts, only more abandoned to terror, more unresisting.

He would start and tremble at any quick, unexpected movement.  He would burst into tears at any sudden sound.  Small noises, whisperings, murmurings, creakings, soft shufflings, irritated him.  Loud noises, the slamming of doors, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, made him writhe in agony.  For Colin the deep silence of the Manor was the ambush for some stupendous, crashing, annihilating sound; sound that was always coming and never came.  The droop of the mouth that used to appear suddenly in his moments of childish anguish was fixed now, and fixed the little tortured twist of his eyebrows and his look of anxiety and fear.  His head drooped, his shoulders were hunched slightly, as if he cowered before some perpetually falling blow.