Home for a spot of leave and Roly too, so we’re planning to hold a hop next weekend and would be chuffed if you could make it. It’ll be a kind of reunion! A song and dance to cheer the Home Front troops! It’d be marvellous to see you. Do bring a friend if you can. Hope you can make it. RSVP, Marjorie Mantel.

I hadn’t seen her in years and only dimly remembered that she had a brother called Roland. Marjorie was always rather ‘jolly hockey sticks’ when we were at school, and I was intrigued by the thought of seeing her. I found myself smiling, missing Livy. The old Livy. We would have laughed together about this invitation.

It was such a long time since Livy and I had met, let alone laughed together. Once again she had been reposted, and I wasn’t sure where. I wrote several times asking if she was recovered, was anything wrong? She assured me in a tight sort of way that she was better. But there was another change in the letters: they were no longer bright and over-excited; they were determinedly factual, flat – actually dull – something which would have been unheard of before. But I kept writing. When the war’s over, I thought, we’ll sort this out. We’ll talk properly and everything will be all right.

I took Brenda Forbes along to Marjorie’s with me.

‘Hello,’ Marjorie brayed, swinging her front door wide open to the dark evening. ‘Kate Munro – how absolutely marvellous to see you! It must be how long? And who’s this?’

I introduced Brenda ‘. . . we did our nursing together.’ Brenda said a curt ‘Evening’, in her rather graceless way.

Marjorie had grown from a buxom girl into a sizeable woman. She had a wide face with a large, beak-like nose and very thick dark eyebrows, and her black hair was curled and piled round her head. She wore a bright pink dress and a leafy brooch which put me in mind of a Christmas decoration. Brenda, who was short and stocky, was dwarfed by her.

‘Nursing!’ Marjorie boomed at me. ‘How heroic. I simply couldn’t do it.’ An elderly black Labrador stood panting at us. ‘Don’t mind Wally,’ she went on distractedly. ‘He wouldn’t dream of hurting you, would you darling?’ As she patted his gaunt head the doorbell rang again. ‘Oh – someone else! No rest for the wicked. Do dispose of coats . . .’ She shimmered towards the front door again.

Brenda shot me a look of amazement.

‘She’s very good-hearted,’ I reassured her.

The Mantels had a very large drawing-room at the front of the house with a smooth olive-green carpet and green curtains to match covering the blackout blinds. The chairs had been pulled back round the edges of the long room and a row of tall red candles were burning in front of a huge gilt-edged mirror above the fireplace. The effect was a blaze of warm light adding to the more discreet table lights arranged round the room on the piano, a sofa table, a chest of drawers.