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for the CO’s morning meeting, Larry is aware of a new sensation. He feels light of body, light of heart. It seems to him that nothing really matters very much at all. Not his senior officers, not the war, not the turning of the whole great world. He tells himself it’s the morning sunshine after weeks of rain. He tells himself it’s no more than natural animal spirits inspired by the smile of a pretty girl. But he can still see that smile before him in his mind’s eye. She’s sharing with him the oddity that two strangers should be crouched on the floor of a lake house in wartime, discussing a nineteenth-century novel. She’s trying to make him out. That wrinkle between her eyebrows asks: what sort of person are you? Her smile so much more than a smile.
    As is his habit, his mind reaches for comparisons in art. Renoir’s smudgy pink-cheeked girl reading a book, smiling to herself. But Kitty’s smile wasn’t private; nor was it provocative, like a hundred faux-innocent Venuses. She smiles to lay a courteous veil over an active curiosity. There’s a painting like it by Ingres, of Louise de Broglie, gazing, head a little tilted, one finger to her cheek, daring the viewer to know her.
    ‘Buck up,’ says Johnny Parrish.
    Larry hurries into the library, which is already noisy with the chatter of officers. Brigadier Wills arrives and the meeting begins. Most of it concerns the lessons to be learned from yesterday’s exercise. Larry, perched on a window shelf at the back, allows his mind to drift.
    He thinks of the library in his father’s house in Kensington; far smaller than this grand open-roofed hall, but sharing the magic of all libraries, which is that the books on their shelves open onto infinite space. He came every evening in the school holidays to join his father in prayers in the library, which gave it something of the mystery of a church. He has almost no memory of his mother, who is in heaven, and therefore inescapably confused with the Mother of God. It came as a shock to him to discover when he was sent away to school that the Blessed Virgin cared for other children as well.
    Our Lady, hear my prayer. St Lawrence, hear my prayer
.
    St Lawrence is his own saint, the third-century martyr who was roasted to death on a grid-iron, saying apocryphally, ‘Turn me over, I’m cooked on this side.’ There was fun with that at school.
    Larry prays often, from long habit, inattentively. It has become the manner in which he expresses his desires. This despite the fact that at Downside the subtle monks taught him a wiser notion of prayer. Its object is not to seek God’s intervention in our favour, but to align ourselves with God’s will for us. Perhaps even – Larry has been especially drawn to this – to relieve us of self-will altogether. Dom Ambrose, the same monk who taught him to love George Eliot, was a devoted follower of Jean-Pierre de Caussade. The eighteenth-century Jesuit preached abandonment to the will of God within the sacrament of the presentmoment. Père de Caussade’s prayer was ‘Lord have pity on me. With you all things are possible.’
    Lord have pity on me, prays Larry. Find me a girl like Kitty.

3
    Ed Avenell shows up at River Farm early on Sunday morning, and by the time Larry gets up he finds Mary Funnell is eating out of his hands.
    ‘Mary, sweet Mary,’ he’s saying to her, ‘do you dance, Mary? Of course you do. I can always tell a girl who has dancing feet.’
    He spins her round the kitchen table, bringing her back pink-faced and flustered to the draining board where she’s been washing dishes.
    ‘You’d dance the night away if you could.’
    ‘What a terrible man your friend is,’ Mary Funnell says to Larry. ‘The things he says to me.’
    ‘I’m buying your love, Mary,’ says Ed. ‘I’ll say almost anything for a hard-boiled egg.’
    Larry marvels to see Ed’s charm operating at full throttle. The wonder of it is he tells nothing but the unvarnished truth, and