They had worked so hard at it all, learning all they had learnt, softening it with banter, he learning to farm, she making it her job to make things light, learning at the same time whatever it was she had to do, to be a good wife to him however he was, to cook, to be a housewife, a mother; and they had been happy, hadn’t they, for a time? Was that as happy as one was supposed to be, all things considered? Surely it was, as happy as others were, as others anyway appeared to be? They were doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, then, at that time, and what others were doing; but it wasn’t ever quite right. Normal, so normal; but they were in the wrong life. Charlie in the wrong life, trying to make the farm work, to be what such a man was supposed to be, then, at that time. She too. Had she known it even then, at the beginning? Had he? Or had it only come to him later, to make it clear to them both? To make it clear, and clear off, leave her behind. And now she was the one here, still here, doing it all still, for her boys.

Take the plunge, others said. You need a life of your own. They’ll get used to it soon enough.

Yes, maybe.

Or maybe not.

Now and then over the next year or so, in the term time when the boys were gone, Michael came to stay. She had Mrs T make up the spare room for him but the second time he came he slept in her bed, returned to his, sometimes but not always, before morning. What Mrs T noticed she couldn’t say. It wasn’t only Mrs T but the house that seemed to demand the propriety, even when almost a year had passed. Of course Michael, like most of the men she knew, had been in the war, but in the Navy, on the Arctic convoys. He almost never spoke of it. Only once he had mentioned that it was cold. And frightening? she had asked. Yes, he said, very frightening. But that was all he said, nothing else. And not a piece of it showed in him. How could she live again with a man who did not speak? Michael or any of these men she met. She was becoming used to being alone now, she knew that it wouldn’t work. She knew that it could be as lonely inside a relationship as outside of one. So she let him stay, only that. Sleep with her. She never told him about the broken city. Later there would be others, but never for long.