Roland made a slight grimace and attended to brushing biscuit crumbs from the front of his shirt. ‘I’m not sure about that, my dear. You mean your father?’

‘No – not really.’ Anna sat forward in her chair, reaching for the end of her hair, her habit of playing with a strand between her fingers, but it was gone – shorn and strange. ‘She talked about him a bit. Enough so that I’ve never needed to be too curious about him. I always knew who he was. And she told me enough when I was younger – not in great detail of course – to make me understand why they were divorced.’

‘Oh no,’ Roland corrected her quickly. ‘They were never divorced. Not formally.’

‘They must have been!’ She sat up straight again. ‘I mean it’s so long ago.’ Roland was shaking his head. ‘I’m sure she told me . . .’

His gaze fixed on the far side of the garden, Roland said stiffly, ‘Her name was still Craven, remember. If they had applied for a divorce I can only assume they would have been granted one after a certain time. But of course you don’t have to be legally divorced if you are living apart unless you want to remarry. Presumably Douglas Craven never wanted to do so.’

Anna had the words ‘And Mummy?’ on her tongue, but bit them back, seeing how Roland suddenly turned very brisk, sipping his coffee, twisting the top of the biscuit wrapper to seal it up.

‘D’you mind me asking you things?’ she wondered anxiously. ‘If you’d rather I didn’t . . .’

‘Of course you have questions, Anna,’ he said, his tone gentler again. ‘But I don’t know that I’m going to be much help. I never met your father properly, you see. Really I saw very little of your mother while she was married. It was only afterwards we spent more time together.’

‘Did you meet Angus Harvey?’

Roland startled her by suddenly closing his eyes and putting his head back for a second, giving out a long, tired-sounding sigh. ‘No. I never met Angus. The first time I remember seeing your mother was after he had been reported missing.’ He looked at Anna with sad eyes. ‘The war. If it had not been for the damn war . . . Messed up so many of our lives. Only one who did reasonably well out of the war was my sister Marjorie, strangely enough. Never looked back. Five children, running all sorts of naval wives’ do’s down there.’ He sounded amused.

Anna had a slight recollection of having met Marjorie, a woman on a large scale with a booming voice, rather intimidating in a child’s eyes.

Hesitantly she said, ‘I wondered whether Mummy ever really loved my father?’

‘Well that I can’t tell you. Couldn’t be sure.’ Roland’s tone had turned stiff again. ‘Rather a private person really, your mother.’

After a silence, she asked, ‘What about Olivia?’

‘Olivia?’ His brow puckered.