Maggie coughed. Dipped a hand in the river. The coolness of the water seemed to steady her, and her breaths began to even out. ‘No. As far as I’m aware, he’s fine. The reports haven’t mentioned anything about the North Sea in weeks. They’ve got them on the run in Europe.’ She dragged an arm across her nose and cheeks. ‘Have you been reading them?’

Ned baulked. ‘Some of them. Most of them.’

‘And what have you learned?’

‘Not much. What you said: they’ve got them on the run.’

‘In Europe.’

‘Yes. In Europe.’

Ned felt the heat of the implication. He didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. Hadn’t known what to do all summer.

‘Other families are getting letters, you know.’ Maggie was twisting her fingers through the current.

‘Other families?’

‘Of the men who were in Singapore. The ones who were redeployed, or injured, or captured. Letters are arriving.’

Ned hadn’t known that. Had thought there had been no word at all, and that this lack of correspondence was just as likely a good thing as bad. He let this new truth filter through him, felt the sucking dread of it. Felt, for a few moments, like he might pour himself into the river.

Sometime later Maggie cuffed a wavelet, broke the silence. ‘Mum loved being on the water. Did you know that?’

Ned roused himself. ‘No.’

‘Sailing, mostly. She went to the Lake District as a child, where she learned how. Best time of her life, she told me once. But she rowed as well. That’s how she met Dad. She was at sculling practice one morning and he was helping unload a shipment of apples. When she was coming past the dock, he spilled a case into the river. The apples bobbed towards Mum’s boat, and she had to stop and wait as he fished them out with a net. She said he was being clumsy, but Dad always maintained it was deliberate. That’s what he used to say about it. A wellplaced case of apples.’

Ned had heard his father say it before: Nothing like a wellplaced case of apples. He had thought it a simple expression about getting on with your neighbours, about the importance of friendly gestures. He’d never thought it had anything to do with his mother. Her name flashed into his mind: Liesel. The thought of her as a young woman, rowing down flat freshwater, jolted him. He’d grown used to thinking of her as a parent, as a wife. As dead.

Maggie’s hand was still in the river, her fingers ripping through the water. ‘She had a little yacht she used to take me out on. Bill too, though he wouldn’t remember. He could barely walk.’ She began to cry again, this time with audible sobs. She gripped the side of the dinghy, her hands pale and tight on the Huon pine.