‘I shall volunteer for the RAF. I’m going to offer to train as a pilot.’ As he spoke, his eyes met mine, but I could hear a certain kind of assertion in his voice and knew it was directed at William.

‘Mummy, what’s the matter?’

I’d taken the presumptuous step of following her upstairs after the meal and knocking on her bedroom door. There was no reply but I opened it and stood in the doorway. ‘May I come in?’

‘You already are in.’ She had her back to me.

Timidly I walked towards her. ‘You seem very upset about everything. Is it William – having to leave Oxford when they call him up?’

She went to her dressing table with an agitated pretence of sorting through one of the drawers, though I could see she was achieving nothing. She couldn’t seem to bring herself to speak. Her thin, deft hands folded handkerchiefs, tinkered with the contents of a sandalwood box, jewellery she almost never wore.

‘Mummy?’ I forced myself to move closer. My experience in nursing had at least made me more at ease in approaching people.

‘You know I’m no good at talking about things,’ she said. ‘Never have been. You just have to get on with life, not keep blathering about it all the time.’

I felt encouraged. Even this much expression of her inner feelings represented progress.

‘You must feel very hard-pressed now you’ve taken on so much more in the garden – and Granny. You’re doing such a good job with her. It must be jolly tough. You two never exactly got on well, did you?’

Mummy ceased her activity suddenly and stood still. Her shoulders began to shake and I could see from her twisting lips that she was trying to ram her feelings back down inside herself.

Look, you were a nurse,’ I said gently. ‘You know you’re doing the best job you possibly can.’

Her voice came out in a kind of screech. ‘But it’s not a job, is it? It’s an imposition. He just takes it for granted that I’m here to do it all. He always has done. And I can’t make a fuss – not with the war . . .’

‘But you always wanted to carry on nursing – ’

‘Nursing’s not the same as this though, is it?’ she cried, whirling round to face me. What I had intended as a sympathetic conversation seemed to be fast turning into a row. ‘It’s one thing to be a professional and be paid and be able to walk away from it,’ she said, slamming the drawer shut. ‘It’s quite another when it’s family and you have feelings all tied up with it and you can’t just go off duty. Oh, I can’t bear it.’

Her whole body seemed to crumple and she sank down on the green sateen eiderdown. Cautiously I sat down as well, not daring to touch her. A tear ran down each of her pale cheeks and then there were no more.