When everything slows and the room is still he’s climbing away from my body, fast. He says ‘Christ’, and his voice is small and frightened. When our clothes are straightened out he is giving me looks across the room from the sides of his eyes. My face is bleeding.

He has me moved to another office. I know it’s his way of showing remorse because of that cold wife. He never talks about her but I know she’s cold like cod on a slab. I don’t take it personally. Liaisons of that kind are naturally frowned on in the forces. I leave some time before seeking him out. Then I think he needs encouraging, that he might be afraid he’s hurt my feelings.

I telephone then, every day. Of course the new secretary answers. She says, ‘Peter’ (she doesn’t actually say Peter of course) ‘is not able to speak to you at present.’

And I say, in my best Wren voice, ‘Perhaps you could tell him it’s a matter of the utmost urgency?’

I try to see him, but he is never alone, and is colder than the winter sea. The nose takes on a look of cruelty. I write. I wait outside his quarters. His face looms in my sleep. Eventually I go to his office, in tears, though I haven’t meant to cry. The secretary is still there, blond, trim and impassable as a shield for him. Following that they move me away from Southampton.

Since that I have been with men a lot. Anyone’s. Everyone’s. Other Wrens won’t speak to me. Officers’ groundsheet, and not just officers. It’s something I can do well, when I don’t care for them at all. There’s a comfort in a man’s body, but I am playing it, I never lose myself. I am supreme for those moments. I’m queen, jewelled with ice and thorns.

They never come back to me. They’re coated in a thick rime of disgust. I don’t allow myself disgust.

* * *

As days, then weeks passed, I became almost savage with anxiety about Olivia. At that time I was taken over by it and it felt as if nothing and nobody else mattered. Just as when Alec had imprisoned her in her bedroom all those years ago, my energy was all directed into thinking how I could help her and release her.

It was not a good start to our marriage. We stayed at the house in Chantry Road, which was an arrangement Douglas was happy with, but made me feel I had not yet graduated fully from being a child, and I was restless and perverse. Douglas was working very hard as ever, pushing himself on, conscientious to the point of obsession, and I suppose lonely. He found it difficult to talk to men his own age, all returning now with their stories of war. Now and then he talked about moving on, finding a job in London. Each of us seemed shut away in our own thoughts and concerns.