Although her grandmother was French

She felt a little presumptuous. Having lived to the age of thirty-eight without giving more than a glance to the occasional war memorial or dull newsreel, she was not sure what she now expected to find. What did a "battlefield" look like? Was it a prepared area of conflict with each side's positions marked down? Wouldn't buildings and trees get in the way? Perhaps the people who now lived in these places would be sensitive about them; they might resent the arrival of some morbid sightseer, come like a tourist who hovers with his camera at the edge of an air crash. More probably, she thought, they would know nothing about it. It was all a very long time ago. "Battle of What?" they would say. The only person she could remember evincing an interest in these things was a boy she had known at school: a funny, gentle creature with a wheezy voice who was good with algebra. Would history be there for her to see, or would it all have been tidied away? Was it fair to expect that sixty years after an event--on the whim of someone who had shown no previous interest--a country would dutifully reveal its past to her amateur inspection? Most of France was now like England in any case: tower blocks and industry, fast food and television. She pushed back her hair, settled her glasses, and took out the book that Irene's Bob had given her to read. She found it hard going. It seemed addressed to insiders, people who already knew all the terminology and all about the different regiments; it reminded her of the aircraft magazines her father had bought for her during his final attempt to turn her into the male child he had wanted. Still, in some of the book's more matter-of-fact moments, the calmly given statistics and geography, there was something that held her attention. Most eloquent of all were the photographs. There was one of a moon-faced boy gazing with shattered patience at the camera. This was his life, his actuality, Elizabeth thought, as real to him as business meetings, love affairs; as real as the banal atmosphere of the cross-channel ferry lounge, known to every modern holiday-maker in Britain: his terror and imminent death were as actual and irreversible to him as were to her the drink from the bar, the night in the hotel ahead, and all the other fripperies of peacetime life that made up her casual, unstressed existence. Although her grandmother was French, she did not know the country well. She fumbled for words as the expressionless policeman thrust his hand through her car window at the dock and made some rapid, guttural demand. The big lorries shuddered on the quayside; no other cars seemed to have made this winter crossing to a cold, dark continent. Out of Calais, she found the road south. Her mind turned to Robert. She pictured the evening they would spend in Brussels. He was good at finding restaurants where he would not see anyone he knew and could talk to her without being on his guard. It was not that anyone would have minded; the majority of diplomats and businessmen away from home for long periods made "arrangements" for themselves. Robert was unusual in the double inconvenience of having both his wife and his mistress in England. The thought of this made Elizabeth laugh. It was typical of a certain impracticality in him. The reason he did not want anyone to see them was because he felt guilty. Unlike his worldly confr鑢es, who entertained their women on one of numerous business accounts, introduced them to their friends and even, sometimes, to their wives, Robert pretended that Elizabeth did not exist. This was something she found less appealing, but she had plans for it.