There was silence in the room save for the clock ticking and the kettle humming on the hob, and outside a lone seagull cried mournfully. For a long moment the two women stared at Kate, and then Rosie’s face crumpled and she let out a cry that pierced Kate’s heart, for it echoed her own foreboding. She went and knelt before the girl, grasping her hands as they twisted in her lap, while Beth stood by, not moving, as if she had not really taken in the dreadful news.

‘Listen, Rosie, listen. His plane has been posted missing, but that doesn’t mean he’s – he’s dead. He could have baled out. Anything. You mustn’t give up hope. None of us.’ She looked up at Beth in mute appeal for help, but Beth was stunned. Woodenly, she moved to sit in the Windsor chair that had been her husband’s. The husband she had lost so recently. And now perhaps she had lost her son. Beth gripped the wooden arms tightly and stared unseeingly in front of her.

Kate scrambled to her feet. Grannie Harris, next door, she’d fetch her. Then she remembered. Poor Grannie Harris could hardly walk now and spent most of her day in a bed under the kitchen window, so, as she said herself, she could ‘still look out an’ see what’s going on’.

Kate bit her lip. Rosie was rocking backwards and forwards, wailing horribly, a high-pitched noise that went right through Kate.

There was only one person she could fetch to help; her mother, Esther Godfrey.

What was it Danny had said, she thought wryly as she ran back towards Brumbys’ Farm, her feet flying across the turf. ‘They never speak to one another, but when there’s trouble, real trouble, they come together.’ Well, Kate thought, there was ‘real trouble’ now right enough.

‘Of course I’ll come at once,’ Esther said without hesitation and only paused to issue instructions to her husband.

‘I’ll manage the milking, Esther love, you go,’ Jonathan said calmly.

‘Poor Beth,’ Esther murmured as she hurried along the lane beside Kate. ‘To lose her husband and her son so close together, to say nothing of . . .’

‘We don’t know he’s dead yet, Mam. That’s what I’m trying to get them to believe.’

Her mother eyes were sharp as she looked into Kate’s face. ‘Do you believe it?’

‘I’ve got to,’ Kate muttered, ‘else I’ll go out me head an’ all.’

They couldn’t stop Rosie crying. They tried everything – comforting her, talking to her, hugging her, even, in the end, Esther being quite firm with her. But to no avail. She sat rocking, her arms around her bulging stomach, sobbing at first, then wailing loudly and then leaning back exhausted against the back of the chair, the tears just pouring silently down her cheeks.