Sam pauses to watch a flock of long-tailed tits flittering in the hedge, and then strides on again. He misses Lizzie now that she is no longer there at The Keep – now that she’s met David, married him and gone to live in Bristol – but he really likes David. He’s glad that Lizzie is happy. Of course, they stay in touch – he’s been to stay with them – but things have changed and he wonders sometimes what it might be like to have a mother and a father. Hal and Fliss have often talked to him about his father, who had the odd nickname of ‘Mole’.

‘It was because he was always under tables or chairs, burrowing behind things when he was little,’ Fliss told him. ‘It seemed very natural, when he joined the navy, that he would become a submariner.’

It was a shock to Sam to find out that his father was murdered by an IRA bomb when he was working at the MoD. Clearly there was some secret here. Hal hinted at Naval Intelligence, but refused to be drawn further about Mole’s career. It was another shock when Sam learned that his grandfather and uncle, Mole and Fliss’s elder brother and their parents, had been murdered in Kenya when Mole was only four and that he’d come back home to The Keep at almost the same age that Sam was when Lizzie brought him to meet his family. To hear this was extraordinarily upsetting: history repeating itself. Although he’s known these things for a long while, it’s only very recently that they’ve crystallized and come to the fore. During this last year Sam has become subtly aware of his own mortality. Worse, there’s an inescapable and decidedly uncomfortable feeling that there’s a curse on the males in his lineage. It is as if there is an ill-defined shadow lying across his future.

He tells himself that it’s crazy to feel like this, way too dramatic, that Mole would be proud of him. He’s passed the Admiralty Interview Board and might be following in his father’s footsteps. But, instead, he feels this strange confusion, the sense of terrible loss as if, after all these years, he’s mourning for his parents and for his grandparents.