I put the telephone down and went to the kitchen. I knew that I should eat something but couldn’t. I sat at the table, surrounded by all his possessions, none of them mine, and wondered if he had ever meant any of it. I had. I had meant it all. I felt ill with my thoughts now. The smog had come down heavily enough to seep into the house through cracks in the plaster; you could taste the sulphur at the back of your throat.

One of the old pre-War magazines from the bottom of my wardrobe lay on the table. I opened it at the most-thumbed page to see a review of a play Lorelei had been in. It was some light comedy in which she had fallen in love with someone unsuitable – a writer of comic songs – and she had had to convince her father to approve of their marriage. It came off in the end, of course. According to the critic, the play was mediocre but Lorelei blazed ‘like a firework’. So he was in love with her too. The review was printed below a photo of her and her co-star dancing in eveningwear.

I had to keep the nerves down – actors went through the same thing before they went on stage, I knew. Stage fright. I gazed again at Lorelei’s face, made up of tiny dots on a page that from a distance looked like her but that, when you got closer, turned into nothing. I tried to pick out a shadow of uncertainty there, a sign that one day it might all fall apart. It had – but not in a way that anyone could have predicted.

Wandering out into the back garden, I found the brazier still smouldering but containing only ashes now. A jackdaw burst from the crack in the bricks where Nick had kept the drugs, sweeping up into the smog and disappearing within seconds. And, as he passed the neighbouring house, I saw a pair of human eyes watching me. Patricia was there again.

Anger got the better of me and I rushed through our house, out the front and hammered on her door. I kept it up until she answered, looking amazed. ‘You’re going to stop watching us. Now!’ I told her furiously.

‘What?’

‘If I ever catch you watching or listening to what goes on in our house, I’ll be putting in a call to the police about how you’re always listening to Churchill and talking about buying a fake exit visa to get out. How do you feel about that?’

‘But I don’t –’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it? Want a NatSec investigation on your record? How will that go down with your Party branch?’

She looked dumbfounded. I thrust her away from her own door and pulled it hard closed before spinning around and returning to our house.