‘Oh, Harry!’ she said and hesitantly touched his cheek. ‘Your lovely face!’
He bore it unmoving, almost insolent. Then Nora put her arms around him. She looked at him. ‘That must have hurt,’ she said, like a schoolboy admiring his friend’s scabs. ‘Does it hurt you still?’
Harry couldn’t speak. He had watched carefully, but seen no revulsion. Not even the revulsion he felt himself, each morning, every morning, facing himself in the mirror. He had studied his wound for a long time; he knew every puckered seam, every shining thread of scar tissue. He was lucky not to have lost an eye, he knew that. He knew, too, that the left side of his face was a thing of horror, a hollow, death’s head mask, a permanent insult to the rest of him, to anyone who looked at him. That pit under his eye, and th
