He crept down the passage to her bed, the whole length of the house, from his room to hers. I heard you coming, she whispered. He thought he had been as quiet as ever but she had been listening for him.

You played well, at the cricket, she said.

Kind of you to say that, but it’s not entirely true.

Well, Richard was better.

Richard’s always better.

There was a sound at the window. For a moment she froze.

What’s the matter?

There’s something at the window. Like someone scratching against the glass.

They listened.

Oh, I know what it is, she said. It’s only a rose. It’s Madame Alfred Carrière. She must have come loose again. Your mother told me her name.

Afterwards they lay with the sheet away to the side of them.

You never told me about your father, she said. What happened in the war.

His hand was in her hair. She loved to feel his hand in her hair.

I said he was in the Burma campaign.

You didn’t say that he was missing. That everyone must have thought he was dead.

Oh, didn’t I?

And then he said, Does it matter?

I don’t know, she said. I think it does.

He pulled up the sheet then and wrapped himself around her but they didn’t sleep for a while. There was the white rose scratching at the glass of the open window, and beyond it, the night. The night lay over the house and all the fields and the woods, and there were sounds in it. The sounds were strange to her. A lone raw cry, eerie, came from somewhere beyond the garden, towards the wood.

What was that? Was it something being killed?

It’s a fox.

A fox killing something? It sounds like the cry of whatever the fox killed.

Just a fox being a fox, I think.

Calling its mate?

Mating.

Can’t foxes mate silently?

His laugh ran through them like a tremor.

Next time we come, I’ll tell Mum we’ll both sleep here in the spare room.

Yes, she said. Yes, that will be much better.

We’ll still be quiet.

Of course.

Seeing like Capa