Thank goodness for my little job, she thought. She was still working Tuesday, Thursday and half of Friday and Saturday with Mr Perry. It got her out of the house. Otherwise, she thought, I’d be going off my head by now.

Norm scraped into the house just in time for tea, having been down the pub after the football. Em thought sourly that he could always manage to be in time for his mother, if nothing else.

Edna had made a fish pie and the room stank of fish, but it tasted quite good, padded out with a lot of potato and carrot.

‘Nanna,’ Robbie said in the middle of tea. ‘Can we get a dog?’

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ Edna corrected him.

‘A dog?’ Bill chuckled. He picked up his teacup, which looked like a toy in his big hairy hand. He worked an overhead crane at the factory – had done all through the war, while they were making tanks instead of railway carriages. ‘You’ll never get that one past yer nan.’

‘Please, Nanna?’

‘Ooh, no, I’m not having animals in my house – they’re dirty,’ Edna said.

Em immediately felt that she wanted Robbie to be able to have a dog, even though she wasn’t too fussed about animals either.

‘One day, son,’ Norm said. ‘When we’ve got our own house – then you can have a dog.’

Robbie’s face lit up with excitement. He looked tanned and healthy from their afternoon in Aston Park. ‘Can I, Dad? When? When’re we going to get our own house?’

Norm ruffled his son’s cropped hair. ‘I don’t know, son. When our boat comes in, I think – that’ll be the time.’

Robbie’s brow creased. ‘We ain’t got a boat – have we?’

When Em and Norm went to bed that night, Norm was chattering, as if to break through the silence that seemed to have grown up between them. He talked about the fishing and his mates, and what they’d seen going along the cut and the people they’d met.

The big bed took up most of their room and there was just space for a couple of chairs and a chest of drawers, which they shared.

Em stood barefoot on the lino, brushing out her hair in front of the tilted mirror on the chest of drawers. She took her hairgrips out and laid them out carefully. Without her hair pinned back, and in her nightdress, she looked younger. She turned and got into bed.

‘All right, love?’ Norm asked, when she pulled the bedclothes up rather huffily.

Underlying her anger was the answer she never gave him. We can’t have a baby, because you went with that woman and caught some horrible disease, and now you can’t make babies. She had laughed at the time – well, in the end – and tried to forgive him. Norm thought that was all long forgotten. But they had made Robbie before – so why not now?

But she knew she wasn’t going to say it – not that. She lay back, looking at the ceiling for a moment. Things could be better between them, even despite that. They had to be. She turned to him suddenly.