It wasn’t just bed, although she wouldn’t have minded if it were, but it wasn’t; there was more. They walked in the parks, inhaling the sticky sweetness of late-summer grass. Women and girls sat in perfumed clusters on their lunch breaks; they fanned themselves repeatedly but languidly, therefore not especially effectively. They talked about clothes and their children. The only telltale sign that the war was not far away was that their dresses all looked a little shabby and make-do, and they wore their long hair in perfunctory, loose up-dos; still the comfort and practicality was attractive, and Vivian liked it more than the strict pretension of her girlhood. They greeted one another with hugs and hugged again when they parted; she didn’t remember doing that. Was that something new since the war? A need to touch. Birds sang in the trees, dogs whisked past their legs, chasing a ball or carrying a stick, children ran in boisterous, chaotic gangs. She and Howard ate picnics of sandwiches and drank from a flask. Vivian couldn’t think why she’d worried about the spread of cold meats and pickled onions just a day or so before, because everyone was casual now.

They visited the National Gallery, relieved to be in the quiet, cool rooms, away from the dust and noise. They shared thoughts on the paintings and she recalled things her governess had told her about perspective, light, the symbolism of fruit or colours and such. He thought her ideas interesting, her opinions important. He repeatedly stopped at a picture and asked what she thought of it. If she said, ‘I like it,’ he wanted to know why. Was it the subject, the technique? He thought what she had to say mattered and so, of course, it did.

‘What of this?’ He had stopped in front of Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillère. A painting of a popular boating and bathing spot on the Seine near Bougival, west of Paris.

‘I like it. Very much.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s fresh and direct.’

‘Isn’t it,’ he agreed.

‘They all look as though they are having so much fun. I can feel the boats bobbing, moored in the shadows.’

‘And Diego Velázquez’s Toilet of Venus, what do you think of this?’

‘I like it too.’

‘Why?’ He probed.

‘She’s beautiful.’

‘Yes! Her back is just like yours.’

Vivian paused in front of Rubens’s picture of Samson and Delilah; the enormous bear of a man brought to his knees by a woman. She shuddered involuntarily, disturbed by Delilah, who looked on, her expression a curious mix of pity, contempt and a hardness that must have grown from cold shame at her own miserable part in delivering the man up to the Philistines.

‘Brilliant, isn’t it,’ commented Howard.

‘I don’t like it. A tragic story. I despise Delilah for taking the bribe and discovering the source of Samson’s strength.’

‘His hair that had never been cut.’

‘Quite so. The worst of it is that she cut it as he slept, presumably after lovemaking.’