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HELEN VAUGHN
September 1944A month before, when the servicemen had been presented to the group of ladies, the Englishman had stood apart, gazing around him, dazed, and with none of the easy friendliness of the American. His hair, with its neat parting and short back and sides, was so pale and his body so thin that it lent him the look of Archangel Gabriel reappearing in Paradise after a famine. His outsize boots obliged him to an awkward gait. His steel blue eyes fixed on the group of women, scanning the heads to pick out his host. And Helen had stepped forward smiling to him and beckoning. He bent down, kneeling, fumbling in his kit bag, spilling out a gas mask, a razor, a volume of Swinburne’s poetry, and a pair of woollen combinations. Someone had tittered. Thrusting his hand once m
