I positively ached to have a "bonus" with Isabella, even here, in the street, in the still pouring rain.
But there was little likelihood of that, and my chances weren't exactly helped when she suddenly stopped.
"What's that noise?" she asked.
"What noise?" I said, stopping next to her and dreading the moment.
"That clicking noise?" She listened. "That's funny. It's stopped now."
She walked on and I followed.
"There it is," she shouted triumphantly. "It's you, when you walk."
"It's nothing," I said quietly. "Just the boots."
I could see she was confused. I was wearing rubber boots. They would make no noise, certainly not a clicking noise.
"No, come on," she said. "That's definitely a sharp metal sound, and you've got Wellies on. So what is it?"
"Leave it," I said sharply, embarrassed and angry. In truth, more angry with myself for not saying than with her for asking.
But she wouldn't leave it.
"Come on," she said again, laughing. "What have you got down there? It's a toy, isn't it? Part of your chat-up technique?" She danced away from me, looking down, searching for the source of the noise and laughing all the while.
I had no choice.
"I've got a false leg," I said quietly.
"What?" She hadn't really heard and was still dancing around, laughing.
"A false leg," I said more loudly. She stopped dancing.
"I've only got one leg."
She stood still, looking at me.
"Oh, Tom, I'm sorry." I thought for a moment that she was crying, but it might have been the rain on her face. "Oh God, I'm so sorry."
"It's all right," I said.
But it wasn't.
Isabella stood in the street, getting wetter, if that was possible, while I told her everything I could remember about being blown apart by an IED and my subsequent medical history.
She listened, first with horror and then with concern.
She tried to comfort me, and I despised it. I didn't want her pity.
Suddenly I knew why I had come back to Lambourn, to my "home." I must have subconsciously understood that my mother would not have given me the lovey-dovey consoling parental hugs I would have hated. She would not have tried to be reassuring and sympathetic. And she would not have tried to commiserate with me for my loss. I preferred the Kauri "Get on with your own life and let me get on with mine" attitude.
Grief, even the grief for a lost foot or a lost career, was easier to cope with alone.
"Please don't patronize me," I said.
Isabella stopped talking in mid-sentence.
"I wasn't," she said.
"Well, it felt like it," I replied.
"God, you're awkward," she said. "I was only trying to help."
"Well, don't," I said rather cruelly. "I'm fine without it."
"OK," she said, obviously hurt. "If that's the way you feel, then I'll bid you good night."
She turned abruptly and walked away, leaving me standing alone in the rain, confused and bewildered, not knowing whether to be pleased or disappointed, angry or calm.
I felt as though I wanted to run, to run away, but I couldn't even do that, not without a cacophony of metallic clinking.
On Monday morning I went to Aldershot to try to collect my car and my other belongings out of storage.
Isabella came with me.
In fact, to be totally accurate, I went with her.
She drove her VW Golf in a manner akin to a world-championship rally driver.
"Do you always drive like this?" I asked, as we almost collided with an oncoming truck during a somewhat dodgy overtaking maneuver.
"Only when I'm not being patronizing," she said, looking at me for rather longer than I was happy with.
"Watch the road," I said.
She ignored me.
"Please, Isabella," I implored. "I don't want to survive an IED only to be killed on the Bracknell bypass by a lunatic woman."
She had phoned the house early. Too early. I had still been in bed.
"That Warren woman called for you," my mother had said with distaste when I went down to breakfast.
"Warren woman?"
"Married to Jackson Warren."
I'd been none the wiser.
"Who's Jackson Warren?"
"You must know," my mother had said. "Lives in the Hall. Family made pots of money in the colonies." She had sounded very old-fashioned. "Married that young girl when his wife died. She must be thirty years younger than him, at least. That's the one who called. Brazen hussy."
The last two words had been spoken under her breath but had been clearly audible nonetheless.
"Is her name Isabella?" I'd asked.
"That's the one."
So she was married.
"What did she want?" I'd asked.
"I don't know, do I? She wanted to speak to you; that's all I know."
My mother had never liked being in a position where she did not know everything that was going on, and this had been no exception.
"I didn't even know that you knew that woman." She'd said the words with a mixture of disapproval and nosiness.
I hadn't risen to the bait.
Instead, I'd gone out of the kitchen and into the office to return the call to Isabella.
"I'm so sorry about last night," she'd said.
"So am I."
"Please, can we meet again today so that I can apologize in person?"
"I can't," I'd said. "I'm going to Aldershot."
"Can't I take you?" she had replied, rather too eagerly.
"It's all right," I'd said. "I'll get the train from Newbury."
"No." She had almost screamed down the phone. "Please let me take you. It's the least I can do after being so crass last night."
So here we were, dodging trucks on the Bracknell bypass.
Everything I owned, other than my kit for war, had been locked away in a metal cage at an army barracks in Aldershot prior to the regiment's move to Afghanistan. Everything, that is, except my car, which I hoped was still sitting at one end of the huge parking lot set aside for the purpose within the military camp down the road from Aldershot, at Pirbright.
"Let's get my car first," I said. "Then I can load it up with my stuff."
"OK," she said. "But are you sure you'll be able to drive it?"
"No, I'm not at all sure," I said. "But I'll find out soon enough." It was something that had been worrying me. My Jaguar was an automatic, so at least there were only two pedals to cope with, but both of them were designed to be operated by the driver's right foot. I planned to use my false right for the accelerator, and my real left for the brake: two pedals, two feet, just like driving a Formula One racing car.
"But are you insured, you know, to drive with only one leg?"
"To be honest, I'm not really sure about that either, so I'm not asking. I had intended to cancel my insurance and to take the car off the road before I was deployed, but somehow I never found the time. It's been taxed and insured for the past five months without anyone driving it, so they must owe me something. And I haven't told the insurance company about being wounded."
She drove in silence for a while.
"Why didn't you just tell me you were married?" I asked.
"Does it matter?" she replied.
"It might."
"What exactly might matter: the fact that I'm married, or that my husband is more than twice my age?"
"Both."
"I'm actually amazed you didn't know already. Everyone else seems to. Quite the scandal it was, when Jackson and I got married."
"How long ago?" I asked.
"Seven years now," she said. "And before you ask, no, it wasn't for his money. I love the old bugger."
"But the money helped?" I said with some irony.