One of the dogs has dropped behind as it determinedly investigates some scent. Elizabeth turns and whistles for it, and after a moment, the dog grudgingly leaves the smell and trots towards them.

‘Jane,’ Elizabeth says fondly. ‘She’s getting on now and she likes to do what she wants. She’s the matriarch,’ she explains, glancing around at the corgis. ‘That’s her daughter and granddaughter … and over there is her great-granddaughter.’

Why is she talking about dogs? Philip can’t possibly be interested. She is just putting off the moment.

The water is dripping from the peak of his cap and the shoulders of his jacket are spangled with rain. She has been enjoying the walk but he must be soaked, she realises with a guilty look. ‘Shall we turn back?’ she asks.

Chapter 10

Philip is glad to agree. There is rain trickling down beneath his collar and his hands are frozen. He has never thought that he would remember with nostalgia those sweltering days aboard Valiant after the Chinese stokers jumped ship in Puerto Rico. Stripped to their shorts, stinking and sweating, he and his fellow midshipmen had to shovel coal into the ship’s furnaces all the way to Virginia and he had dreamt of a cold, wet winter day.

No longer.

‘You have sisters, don’t you?’ Elizabeth asks after a moment. ‘Are you close to them?’

She doesn’t ask about his parents. She must know that they have lived separate lives for many years.

‘I wouldn’t say close. I’m the baby of the family and my sisters are all much older than I am. They’re very … boisterous.’

In his memory, his ears ring with the noise his sisters create when they are all together. They’re all restless movement, jumping up and down, and swirling their skirts, a mass of swooping scented kisses and talking over each other and shrieks of laughter. Their conversation is a vibrant mixture of English, French, and German as forgetting a word in one language they would switch to another and then carry on in that until they went off at a tangent and into a new language that for some reason seemed better suited to it.

‘I’m very fond of all of them,’ he says. ‘Especially Cecile. She was killed in an air crash in 1937.’

‘What a tragedy,’ Elizabeth says.

‘Don, her husband, and my two nephews were with her. They were coming over here to a wedding. Cecile was heavily pregnant.’ A muscle jerks in Philip’s cheek. ‘She gave birth on the flight, perhaps even during the crash. The baby died with her. It never had a chance to live.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Elizabeth’s voice is so quiet that Philip barely hears her. He is remembering the sound of the gun carriages laden with coffins trundling over the cobbled streets of Darmstadt. He was sixteen. He flew to Germany from Gordonstoun and followed the coffins with his brothers-in-law in their Nazi uniforms, Uncle Dickie a row behind. Philip’s memories are blurred but he remembers his uncle’s hand on his shoulder during the funeral. He remembers the heavy tread of feet, the silent crowds watching. The sullen sky spitting sleety pellets of ice. The occasional stiff-armed salute and murmurs of ‘Heil Hitler’.