“That’s how Uncle Arthur used to talk,” said Anna-Rose, feeling suddenly quite at home, “except that he would have said ‘Drowning be damned.’”

The man laughed.  “Is he dead?” he asked, busy with Anna-Felicitas’s head, which defied their united efforts to make it hold itself up.

“Dead?” echoed Anna-Rose, to whom the idea of Uncle Arthur’s ever being anything so quiet as dead and not able to say any swear words for such a long time as eternity seemed very odd.

“You said he used to talk like that.”

“Oh, no he’s not dead at all.  Quite the contrary.”

The man laughed again, and having got Anna-Felicitas’s head arranged in a position that at least, as Anna-Rose pointed out, had some sort of self-respect in it, he asked who they were with.

Anna-Rose looked at him with as much defiant independence as she could manage to somebody who was putting a pillow behind her back.  He was going to be sorry for them.  She saw it coming.  He was going to say “You poor things,” or words to that effect.  That’s what the people round Uncle Arthur’s had said to them.  That’s what everybody had said to them since the war began, and Aunt Alice’s friends had said it to her too, because she had to have her nieces live with her, and no doubt Uncle Arthur’s friends who played golf with him had said it to him as well, except that probably they put in a damn so as to make it clearer for him and said “You poor damned thing,” or something like that, and she was sick of the very words poor things.  Poor things, indeed!  “We’re with each other,” she said briefly, lifting her chin.

“Well, I don’t think that’s enough,” said the man.  “Not half enough.  You ought to have a mother or something.”

“Everybody can’t have mothers,” said Anna-Rose very defiantly indeed, tears rushing into her eyes.

The man tucked the blanket round their resistless legs.  “There now,” he said.  “That’s better.  What’s the good of catching your deaths?”

Anna-Rose, glad that he hadn’t gone on about mothers, said that with so much death imminent, catching any of it no longer seemed to her particularly to matter, and the man laughed and pulled over a chair and sat down beside her.

She didn’t know what he saw anywhere in that dreadful situation to laugh at, but just the sound of a laugh was extraordinarily comforting.  It made one feel quite different.  Wholesome again.  Like waking up to sunshine and one’s morning bath and breakfast after a nightmare.  He seemed altogether a very comforting man.  She liked him to sit near them.  She hoped he was a good man.  Aunt Alice had said there were very few good men, hardly any in fact except one’s husband, but this one did seem one of the few exceptions.  And she thought that by now, he having brought them all those pillows, he could no longer come under the heading of strange men.  When he wasn’t looking she put out her hand secretly and touched his coat where he wouldn’t feel it.  It comforted her to touch his coat.  She hoped Aunt Alice wouldn’t have disapproved of seeing her sitting side by side with him and liking it.