‘Not this time,’ whispered Maynard. He leaned across and kissed the figure on the forehead. Then, ‘Aubrey, get your rest. You’ll feel hellish in the morning if you don’t sleep on.’

But the figure beside him was restless now. He reached out for the cord that dangled at his bedside, drew on it, and a lamp illuminated the room.

Aubrey Higgins was several years older than Maynard Charles. Almost entirely bald, he nevertheless had a beard of striking silver. Though he had once been broad and powerful, now his body was slight; he appeared to sink into the bed sheets, and the ribbon that dangled around his neck was attached to a mask that was itself attached to the oxygen tank at his side. He paused to put the mask over his lips, drew in deeply, and then removed it again.

Maynard sat up and looked at him fondly. ‘You’ve been doing so well.’

‘I can smell brandy, Maynard. You haven’t been having a little tipple without me, have you?’

‘I needed it, Aubrey, like you wouldn’t believe.’

Maynard climbed out of his own bed, crossed the room to perch on the other and touched his companion’s shoulder. Aubrey Higgins: the secret of the Park Suite.

They’d met in ’15, that summer when the entrenchment was hardening across the Western Front and what had been thought of, the year before, as temporary measures were rapidly becoming permanent constructions. Both were Warrant Officers, both old in the regiment. Maynard had signed up in 1914. At the age of thirty-nine, he might have avoided the front altogether if he’d played his cards cannily enough – and at the time, night manager at a Bristolian hotel of some growing renown, there was even a chance he could call it a reserved occupation. And yet . . . Maynard had no family, no wife and children and no prospect of either to keep him in England. He was a man of principle and a man of duty and, when people asked him why a handsome, well-to-do, esteemed fellow like him had not yet dignified the holy seat of marriage, he had any number of tactics to evade the question. Love had not found him, he was fond of saying, but the fact was that love had found him several times over, but Maynard consistently pushed it away – whether out of shame, or propriety, or fear, he had never been able to say.