As soon as it felt safe, I stopped walking. On the other side of the road a little corner café was still open and advertising fresh mutton in the stew, rather than the spam and corned beef that still made up the meat staple of our diet. It seemed a good place to sit for a while to examine what I had taken.

I sat at a cracked table to order a tea, carefully lifted out the book and opened it to discover the pages were fine old paper, thick and creamy, thinly lined. I didn’t recognize the handwriting that appeared – it could have been Lorelei’s and I knew it wasn’t Nick’s, unless he had gone to some pains to disguise it. It was compact yet spiderishly untidy, and it made me wonder about the person who had made those little marks and dashes on the page – can you really tell someone’s personality from their handwriting? It seems a silly idea, and yet, as I traced the careless lines and reckless curls, they seemed to conjure the woman I presumed was their author. I pictured her rapidly scratching a pen across the surface of each page, with the doors locked and bolted to prevent anyone catching her. The writing filled page after page, but it was all in a strange form, nothing like what I had expected.

6

‘Lucky old Democratic United Kingdom. All the best parts of London are over there,’ Nick said, peering through the wire fence, across the Thames to the fenced-in north-western sector and the American troops guarding its borders. ‘I always fancied myself as a bit of a boulevardier, you see. No chance of that now. Goodbye, Westminster, farewell, Buckingham Palace. Hello, Croydon.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘And hello, American soldiers too.’

We were beside the wreck of Westminster Bridge – the first stop on a sightseeing tour upon which he was taking me that first day that we met.

I looked through the fence too. The other side seemed very far away. ‘Were you in the army?’

‘Yes.’

‘D-Day?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘POW?’

He dropped his cigarette and ground it underfoot. ‘In Belgium.’ I never knew what to say to men who had been through what he had been through. There were so many of them, and yet I was always lost for words. He didn’t want to talk about it either, it seemed, and instead gazed up at the huge grey battleship towering above us. ‘Do you know about the Archangel?’ he asked.