‘Kate,’ Olivia said determinedly. ‘I wouldn’t care if it were full of the most uncouth Amazons to walk the earth if it means I can get away.’ She ran round in front of me and kissed Angus so extravagantly that he blushed.

‘Thank you, Angus. It’s been staring me in the face!’

‘Oh well,’ I said gloomily. ‘With any luck they won’t take you.’

We linked arms again. The rest of our small party was standing by the iron gates of the cemetery. I felt a great rush of affection go through me – a sense of the preciousness of people I knew so well when everything around was changing.

‘My best friends.’ I reached up and kissed each of them and we walked to the gate with our arms round each other’s backs. ‘At least love is something they can’t ration, even if they are taking you away from me.’

I spent the evening before Angus left round at the Harveys’. It was a comforting household with its littered, nestlike clutter of newspapers and periodicals, books and music scores and dogs’ baskets. Two black Labradors sprawled snoozily in the hall beside a deflated football, a stack of the family’s gas masks in their boxes, a carton full of Meccano and an assortment of old shoes and galoshes. John’s clarinet lay askew across a chair. Mary was sitting at the table in the living room in a cone of light surrounded by algebra and Paradise Lost. On the mantelpiece a round-faced clock was just visible between John’s swimming cups, sheaves of paper and invitations, candlesticks, receipts, ration books and good wishes cards. Mrs Harvey, who resembled Angus facially but was much rounder and had hair several shades lighter, sailed cheerfully through the mayhem apparently oblivious to it.

We all ate together. They were comfortable people. Being with them was like wearing a very old coat, so much so that I realized regretfully that evening how much I had taken them for granted. I had been beguiled by the Kemps for so long. My hatred for Alec Kemp seethed in me now, a revulsion born of former adoration. But it allowed me to appreciate the Harveys at last, and their home which was so familiar, into which I had run freely for so many years and always been made welcome.

Peter Harvey was black-haired, balding, thin. He smoked and smoked cigarettes and his chest sounded as if it was full of dried peas when he coughed. He had gnarled, prematurely arthritic hands which meant that although his firm produced beautiful instruments, he could no longer play them. But he was not downcast. He had a jovial, slightly sardonic way with him. Ruth Harvey was kind and comforting, though often with a rather distracted air, as if any question you asked her cut through a train of thought which brought her back from somewhere quite different and she was uncertain for a second quite where she was.

We didn’t talk that evening of Angus going away. We sipped sherry and listened to the seven o’clock wireless broadcast, the nation’s ritual. The Red Army had invaded Finland. The Western Front still ended short of France. Every bulletin was listened to with rapt attention and a strong sense of dread.