‘It’s the wife I’m worried about,’ he said. ‘I know how she’ll be taking it. And the devil of it is, we’ll be off into the blue any day now. She’ll be on her own, then, with the two of us to worry about. I shan’t feel happy, Noel, going off and leaving her like that.’

‘Can’t you get up to see her? You could do it in twenty-four hours. I’m sure you could get permission from Brigade.’

‘Now? Impossible. It’s any moment, now, Noel. You know that. I dare not. I shall phone her, though, tonight.’

‘Shall I go up to the orderly room and tell them to put a trunk call through for you?’

‘Would you, please?’

The colonel lit his cigarette.

‘That boy,’ he said suddenly, ‘he’s been in and out of trouble since he was two years old. The frights he’s given us…’ his voice grew tender and reminiscent, ‘…and the laughs we’ve had afterwards. He was two years old, and the wife was out shopping with him; she had him in the pram. She left him to go into a shop and when she came out, there he was choking and blue in the face. The wife started shrieking – she always was like that – “My baby’s dead, my baby’s dead,” she kept on shrieking. Then along comes some big, fat woman and lifts the baby up by his feet and shakes him and thumps him on the back, and guess what comes tumbling out of his mouth? A half-penny and a penny. A penny, Noel – you just try swallowing a penny, sometime. Two years old and he swallows a penny, a penny, if you please. Ah, the laughs we’ve had about that.’

He puffed his cigarette. He was talking, not to Noel Norman but to the telegram on the green baize tablecloth.

‘When he was four he had a little wooden horse on wheels. His playroom was on the top landing. He got the door open, somehow, and came sailing out of the room on his horse, and before we could get to him he went flying down the stairs. A great, long flight of stairs. We thought he’d broken his neck. The wife was fainting with fright. And there he was on the floor at the bottom, howling his head off, not a scratch on him. The little devil, not a scratch.’

The telegram lay on the table, a silent enemy.