She smiled and kissed me, but even in my happiness I could hardly conceal my shock. She was skin and bone, her hair limp and straggly and her eyes dull.

‘Livy – you look so ill,’ I said gently to her, feeling I had to cajole her. She seemed so knotted up in herself.

‘Well, you don’t exactly look like Doris Day yourself,’ she replied, evasive and teasing.

It was true. Like so many other women we were shrunken and worn down by the war. I assumed that the exacting hours the Wrens had demanded from her had taken their toll, compounded by her bout of pneumonia. But I couldn’t imagine what they had done to her emotions.

One evening I went round to Park Hill to spend some time with her. I felt slightly nervous as I walked down under the trees. She was so unpredictable nowadays.

Alec and Elizabeth were evidently frantic about the state of her. They trod around her as if she might detonate at any second, while being on the other hand ferociously jolly towards me in an attempt to pretend that all was well, that ‘poor Olivia’ was just a little worn down after all her war work.

‘What she needs is a good holiday,’ Alec said. He was leaning against the polished surface of a grand piano which I dimly remembered seeing in the house on my last visit. He was leaner, his forehead lined and grey hair showing at his temples. Hearing his voice, I remembered my encounter in the fog with my bicycle, and I knew for sure that it had been him.

When Livy and I were left alone, I said, ‘That’s a really beautiful piano,’ I hesitated. ‘Look, I’ve barely played through the war and I’m fearfully rusty, but would you like to have a go at some duets?’

‘Oh no,’ she replied languidly. She seemed to find it almost too much effort to speak. She sat smoking, drawing hard on the cigarette so that her cheeks were sucked in. There was an ashtray on the little table beside her with several stubs in. ‘I haven’t played for months either. I don’t suppose I shall. Can’t think what he bought the wretched thing for.’

‘But you were so good at it,’ I protested. ‘You mustn’t just let it all go.’

She ground her cigarette stub into the ashtray. Her next words sent a chill through me, they were spoken with such flat indifference. ‘What does it matter?’

‘Livy – ’ I went to her and knelt down carefully beside her chair and took her bony hand in mine. It felt like a starved bird. ‘My dearest Livy – what’s wrong? You look so thin and unwell.’

She looked into my eyes then, really stared, as if she was searching for something. But in hers I saw a kind of hard blankness so unlike the vivaciousness of the young Livy that it made me want to cry.

‘What is it?’ I asked softly.