Camomile Lawn Read Online Free

Calypso, Walter, Polly and Oliver consumed; not only breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, but continual snacks from the larder. Remembering the last war she speculated on the return of food rationing, one of the chief topics of conversation among her friends and relations of that time. The shortage of potatoes. The occasion when one of her aunts had had her butter ration stolen on a bus, blown up into an epic, treated as a tragedy almost equal to the loss of a dear one in the trenches. Helena stood in the doorway leading to the kitchen, remembering the telegraph boy bringing the news, ‘killed in action’, and the physical shock in her chest. ‘Now all’s to do again.’
    ‘What, Madam?’ said Cook.
    ‘Oh, nothing, Cook. I was just thinking. What shall we feed the Major’s crowd on?’
    ‘Something filling.’ Cook said this every August. Helena was horribly aware of the end of the life to which she had grown used, afraid of what a drastic change might do to her uncertain equilibrium. Women entering what is euphemistically called ‘the change of life’ were not famous for making the passage of others’ lives pleasant.
    I must, she told herself, speak to Mildred, she is a rock, and she smiled at Cook as she thought of Mildred Floyer, barely five feet tall but with the strength required to cope with a High Church parson husband in a parish which was essentially Chapel and Low.
    ‘Poor Mrs Floyer has two sons,’ she said.
    ‘Coming to lunch, are they?’
    ‘Going to war.’
    ‘Then we must see that they get a good lunch,’ said Cook, who had the talent of living in the moment.

Five
    ‘W HEN IS THE FULL moon?’ Polly, lying on the rocks beside Oliver, watched him watching Calypso swim out from the cove with Walter. Oliver closed his eyes and lay back.
    ‘Thinking of the Run?’
    ‘Yes. Shall we let Sophy do it? She does so want to.’
    ‘I don’t see why not, if she practises a bit first.’
    ‘Will you tell her? It will fill her cup of happiness.’
    ‘A full moon ago,’ said Oliver, ‘I was on the Ebro.’ Polly said nothing.
    ‘One of my friends, a Czech, was killed, never made a sound, shot through the jugular. He and his friends burned a priest, made a bonfire and burnt him. What good did that do? The joke was it turned out he was one of us, or had been.’
    ‘Joke?’
    ‘Atrocities are jokes, you can’t survive otherwise. We all committed atrocities, their side and ours, made this pit, built a fire in it and pushed them in to frizzle.’
    ‘You did?’
    ‘I stood by. It comes to the same thing. I don’t remember whether I actually pushed anybody in but I think I helped.’
    ‘Think?’
    ‘We were all drunk, Polly. If it wasn’t wine it was fear or rage or just wanting some action. There’s an awful lot of waiting about. To fill the time you burn, rape, pillage.’
    ‘Rape?’
    ‘Yes. Well, actually she was more than willing and later I thought, oh God, I may get clap.’
    ‘Did you?’
    ‘No, I was lucky. I didn’t.’
    ‘Just the once?’
    ‘No, sweet, every time I got the chance.’ Oliver laughed.
    ‘So that’s why you say we are all capable of killing. You’ve changed.’
    ‘Who would you like to kill?’ Oliver leant on one elbow, looking at Polly stretched beside him, her body nearly as beautiful as Calypso’s.
    Looking down her nose at the bobbing heads in the cove, Polly said, ‘I don’t think I know anyone I want to kill, but I’d like to have the power to make people suffer,’ she lied, speaking lightly, for there were times when it would be nice to have Calypso out of the way. ‘What’s your killing game to be?’
    ‘It’s just an idea. I must plan it. Look how far out the twins are. They’ve got Sophy with them.’
    ‘They won’t drown her. D’you know, Olly, their father was a stretcher-bearer in the war?’
    ‘Jolly brave. He’s never talked about it. He’s not a war bore.’
    ‘Poor Uncle. I hope none of us will become like him.’
    ‘The Somme,