They walked the seashore, side by side, not quite touching, and yet the closeness between them was like a physical embrace. They walked the dunes and they found a sheltered hollow that became their special place to sit and talk.

‘Where is it you come from?’ she asked him. ‘Lincoln, did you say? It’s a city, isn’t it? I’ve never been to a city.’ There was a wistful note in her voice.

‘Should you like to go?’ Jonathan asked softly.

She leant against his shoulder and looked up at him coyly. ‘Maybe – with you. Tell me about it?’

‘Well,’ he began, idly tracing lines in the sand, drawing a rough sketch-map to illustrate his words. ‘There’s a cathedral high on the hillside – built by the Romans, would you believe? It dominates the city. Wherever you are, you can see it standing proudly overlooking us all. Then the houses and streets sort of radiate out from it. There’s a steep hill climb with old houses built close together on either side – buildings so old you’d wonder sometimes how they still stand.’

Esther watched his face as he talked. Watched the memories of his home flitting across his face. Memories in which she had no place. She loved the sound of his deep voice. There was little trace in his speech of the Lincolnshire dialect that was so prevalent in the countryside, and so strong in hers.

‘Quaint little shops,’ he was saying, ‘and old bookshops – dusty and musty, but fascinating – all huddling together on the hillside. Near the cathedral there’s a castle with dungeons. It’s old too, though I can’t remember when that was built.’ He grinned at her ruefully. ‘I expect I was told at school, but somehow in your own home town you take things for granted. They’re there. You expect them always to be there, so you don’t bother.’

Esther nodded eagerly. ‘It’s like the sea here. It fascinates me. I love to stand on the Spit and watch it come swirling in around me, but the folks who’ve lived here all their lives never come to look at it. They just know it’s there.’

Jonathan nodded. ‘All the same, I bet if you took them away from it – inland – they’d soon miss it.’

‘Do you miss the city?’

He looked up from his sand drawing and gazed out across the wide expanse of beach, across the water as far, if he could have seen it, as the foreign shoreline. ‘Not while I’m here, no. But when I was over there – oh, yes, I missed my home town – my home country.’

Esther’s gaze followed his own as she murmured, ‘I suppose they all do.’

By saying ‘they’ and not ‘you’ it was as if she was separating him from the men still over there, trying to make him believe he need not go back.