Now he was gone, she at last understood what this war was. His words could not teach her but his absence had.

War was suffering. Agony. Death might at any moment so easily take him. The thought made her want to vomit. So that she could find air, she brought to mind every moment she had spent with him. Extraordinary. Bright. Loving mostly. Sometimes angry or unsure. Always complicated and emotional. Sometimes there had been a feeling of melancholy staining them. They knew they were stealing. He was stealing another man’s wife. She was stealing happiness. They were both stealing from the war effort. That was how it seemed. He had to go. Or stop. Stop loving her. No, that was the one thing he couldn’t do.

He was alive still. That was all she knew. Enid received letters and had enough charity in her to tell Vivian as much, although nothing more. Enid could not forgive Vivian; she lived in utter and perpetual horror of another letter from the War Office. She was a mother; when she looked at Howard, she didn’t see a lofty, dark, strong man, at least not that alone. She was aware that he was grown, but she was also terminally aware of the boy she’d pushed, impelled into the world, the toddler whose chubby hand she held as he took his first inexact steps, the cheeky schoolboy who didn’t settle to lessons, the handsome fourteen-year-old who set off alone to London and the excited, proud young man who held her arm as he led her to a box in the theatre to see the play he’d penned. She wanted to protect them all. All her Howards. Her only son. She couldn’t forgive Vivian for endangering any version of him.

Vivian understood; she hated herself for her part in Howard’s joining up just as fiercely as Enid did. She’d tried to explain as much but Enid had become a different woman since Howard had left. She’d hardened, bricked up her heart. Vivian wondered whether Enid felt guilt too. She had told her boys that it was all theirs if they wanted it, the world and what it had to offer, if only they were brave enough to reach for it. It wasn’t true. This world had nothing to offer them except pain. Enid must feel cheated. Worse, she probably felt shame that she’d misled her sons. Misguided them. Let them down.

Vivian knew that Enid had put pressure on Howard to give her up. Stop the affair. Did she berate herself about that? She’d told him to leave Vivian alone because she’d feared for him. She had been trying to protect him, but now she must wish she’d turned a blind eye to their affair. She had to be asking herself whether, if she had done so, might he have stayed?

Vivian had only been a mother for three years, but she was sure that a mother’s lot was to blame herself, to accept culpability and fault. However, the stark truth was that Howard no longer cared whether he was living up to his mother’s expectations or not. Vivian was all. She knew it and felt the responsibility. Enid’s small, symmetrical face seemed sunken, her sharp, intelligent eyes accusatory. Vivian missed the smile that had danced. They could not recapture their easy intimacy. She missed that too. She was very alone.