“I suppose.” As though I could have stopped myself coming back, even if I tried. There had been that moment, you see, that moment with David at the lakeside when I had felt something, something rare. As a child I would have called it magic. As an adult, you weren’t supposed to believe in magic, even if you needed it, even if you needed it desperately.

Mrs. East’s front door cracked open and she beckoned me over.

“Saw you coming back down the lane. I’d give anything to sleep like I did when I was your age, and there’s you wasting it. Tea?”

Inside, her house was the same as ours, save it looked like the person who lived there liked it. There were family pictures on the walls. A grainy black-and-white of her parents. Her son, Ian, a boy in a donkey jacket with a puppy, a man with a bow tie and a lost expression. My favorite was the one of her husband in uniform during the war. He was wearing an army cap and smiling. It was a picture taken to give to a woman. The eyes were promising.

Mrs. East told me once that while he’d been away fighting the Germans, she used to go dancing with airmen from the RAF camp. She told me she couldn’t sit at home for five years and that there had been an American who told her he painted her name on the side of the big bombs before they flew them over Germany. “He told me I set Hamburg alight,” she said and I knew he was her lover, the American, and I wondered if her husband had known it too.

After Mrs. East had poured the tea, she got the frying pan out and put four rashers in it. When it started to sizzle, she went and stood over it, giving the bacon the odd idle push with an egg slice. Only after I started talking, telling her about David and the manor, did she take a couple of the rashers out of the pan, sandwich them between two slices of bread, and hand me a plate along with the sauce bottle.

As I ate, she came over and I felt her pick up the end of my plait and hold it between her fingers for a second. “Don’t get old, Andy.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“This lad, blond haired or dark?”

“Blondish.”

“Blond men go bald early. Such a shame.” Her smile was quick and wicked. “What’s he like then?”

What was David like? I furrowed my brow.

“Oh dear, oh dear!” Mrs. East let out a dry laugh that turned into a coughing fit. Finally, between wheezes she got out, “You’ll have to dance with him. We always said you could tell what a man was like by dancing with him.”

“I’ll bear it in mind.”