I made my way slowly towards Victoria Square, smelling the wet pavement mingled with cigarette smoke. People were shouting at each other, someone’s voice behind me, ‘Edna – Edna – over ’ere!’ and a woman with curlers round her head, not caring. Dare-devils in uniform and out of it scrambled up lamp-posts and on to high window-sills and stood laughing and waving: another group, some of whom were still dressed for the Land Army, sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with their arms round each other. Worries were put aside, everyone throwing themselves into this uplifting, long, long-awaited morning. This was enough: today. I saw a few people crying and Churchill’s words, relayed to us through loudspeakers in the streets, moved more people to tears: ‘God bless you all. This is your victory. It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land . . .’

I didn’t cry, not then. But perversely, after such a strong impulse to be alone, what I did feel was an overpowering need to turn to someone close to me to share these moments. Angus. And he wasn’t there. He never would be. Standing amid the jostling crowd and seeing this glimpse of what might have been gave me my most extreme moments of distilled pain in all the time since Angus was reported missing. I felt a physical sensation like an incision, too sharp and deep for tears. Yet once I had passed through it it left me lightened and relieved as if I had wept for a long time.

I bought a cup of tea from a mobile canteen on the street and stood quietly sipping it next to a lamp-post, hands tight round the enamel cup, soothed and easier in myself.

‘Awright, love?’ a gravelly voice asked next to me. A dapper man with a thin black moustache like Peter Lorre. ‘What a day, eh?’

I smiled. ‘Yes, isn’t it?’

There was something in the man’s stance and chirpy way of talking that Douglas would have loved to mimic, and I would have liked to see him do it. I stored the encounter in my mind as something to tell him. After handing the cup back I eased my way out of the crowds, away from the centre of the city, and began to walk home.

I experienced a sense of anticlimax, yet also of understanding. It was over – for us. I’d never imagined it like this, with war still raging on the other side of the world. It thought this day, when it came, would be a key to something. Angus would come home, somehow decisions would be made for me. But if the Red Cross were right, Angus lay in a sea grave. He was not missing. Not a Prisoner of War. Angus was dead. I had to accept the truth of that. I had to turn and carry on with the living.

Douglas didn’t arrive at our house until late afternoon, so I hadn’t been much missed.