Had he ever come home without something for her? Some little parcel thrust into one of the pockets of his jacket, a peek of brown paper, the loop of a white string bow? Then handing it to her as though it were worthless, something picked up on the way. Never waited to be thanked. Hated fussing. Just gave her the present and went out to pull weeds, or mend the seed boxes, or put creosote on the fencing, or any of those numberless, endless little jobs that went on, painstakingly, year after year, until suddenly, one day, they didn’t.

‘Well, then, on the 20th of August, 1672, as we have already stated at the beginning of this chapter, the whole town was crowding towards the Buitenhof, to witness the departure of Cornelius De Witte from prison, as he was going to exile ...’

She was four when he went to the war and she saw him twice before it was over. A man in khaki who gave her bars of Cadbury’s chocolate in wax-paper wrappers. When he came back for good he was a hero. Tunisia, Sicily, Arnhem. Especially Arnhem. Above all, Arnhem. Second Battalion the Parachute Regiment. One of the sixteen who got out. Won his DSO there rescuing his sergeant. Desmond Wilcox, Captain. DSO. The one who stepped forward when the others were too frightened or weary or confused. Wouldn’t that be enough? Knowing it was you? Remembering it? But when the street parties were over and the flags were back in the attics, he didn’t seem to believe in much. Not in God or King George or the Welfare State. Something had been lost. In the Rhine perhaps. All that gallant slaughter. And truly, she had tried to understand, but how could she, girl that she was? Though now that she was older, much older than he’d ever been, she thought she did understand. The blankness. The way sense can unravel so completely you never quite recover it. What was the word for when nothing made sense any more? The one time she asked him about the war he’d made a face as though tasting something unpleasant on his tongue, and said, ‘Oh, that.’ Didn’t have the language for it, any more than she had the words now to tell the others what it was like, every night a stepping-stone and always wondering if there would be another, or if the next step would take her into the water.