The last summer of his life he sat hours together on the old chintz-covered swing-bed in front of the willow tree, chain-smoking Woodbines and watching the shadows flood the lawn until they swallowed him and only the tip of his cigarette still showed, a faint red pulse. How she had longed to bring him in, to rescue him as he had rescued his sergeant. Her mother wasn’t up to it, sitting all day in the kitchen listening to Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton on the wireless, biting her nails until they bled. So it was she who had gone, crossing the lawn at dusk to stand in front of him, waiting for the right words to come into her head, for a dove that would bring her the gift of speech. But nothing came, and he had gazed up at her through the smoke of his cigarette as though from the far side of a pane of glass. He felt sorry for her perhaps, knowing why she had come out, knowing the impossibility of it. But instead of saying sit down beside me Alice, sit down, daughter, and we will try to understand together the unbearable truth that love is not always enough, that people cannot always be brought back in, he had said, very conversationally, as though in reference to a discussion he had been having with her in his head for weeks, ‘They used flame-throwers, you know.’ And she had nodded, yes, Daddy, and left him, and gone to her room, and pushed her face into the pillow and bawled. Because she should have done it, should have, and she had failed.

The summer ended, the doctors came, the first frosts. Suez. The day he passed over she was in the parlour with Samuel and heard from the bedroom overhead a noise like something dropped, an ornament, a small vase or something, and then her mother calling, ‘Desmond! Desmond! Desmond!’

After dark, Miss Bernard came to lay him out. BerNARD, dear, not BERnad. Put her umbrella in the elephant’s foot by the door. Shook hands like a man. Got Daddy’s parting wrong. The old people were afraid of her because she seemed to know where she would be needed next. To have an instinct for it. Samuel paid her – a guinea? – and all night they sat up listening to the water spill off the gutters because no one had cleared out the dead leaves. What a muddle it was! The hissing of the rain. Her father in his astonishing stillness. Samuel’s breath like feathers on her cheek.

Ting!