He wasn’t miles off the mark, either. Will had been brought up with a belief in what was right and proper that was all the firmer for being unexamined, and he had a deep-seated instinct towards propriety, in theory if not practice. But he’d finished his growing up in the trenches, where ‘right and proper’ had quickly dissolved in blood and mud and endless noise, and if there was a Will Darling who belonged in what most people would call a respectable life, he hadn’t come back from Flanders.

That was the point. That was the problem.

“Oh, shit,” he said, and put his face in his hands. “Shit. Give me a minute.”

“Christ. I didn’t expect this reaction. Look, if the very idea is beyond the pale—”

“It’s not that. Not you. Shut up a second, will you?”

Kim shut up, for which Will was grateful. His heart was thundering. He needed to think, and he didn’t know how, because he’d been doing his best not to think about this for some time. He’d jammed it all out of sight and out of mind, and now Kim had pulled everything into the open and he didn’t know where to start.

“Will?” Kim said, more gently. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“No, you aren’t. You’re stiff as a post, and not in a good way.”

“It’s not you,” Will said again, staring at his palms. “It’s other things. It’s what you said. About, uh, the future.”

“Look, if you don’t want that—”

“No.” He couldn’t make himself look up, at Kim. “Listen. It’s... You couldn’t plan ahead, understand? I mean, people did. They talked about when they got back to Blighty, their jobs, their girls, and then the next day they’d be dead. My first trench raid, three of the lads were chatting about what they’d do when the show was over, and they asked me too, only I was eighteen and I didn’t have a thing to say. Go back and marry the girl next door, if she’d have me? They’d have taken the piss for the next hour. So I said I wasn’t making any plans beyond the raid, and they all laughed at me for that instead. ‘Life goes on, lad, we’ll be home soon, get your thinking cap on.’ We lost all three of them that night.”

“Will—”

“I’m just saying, plans don’t mean much if your number’s up. And if I’d always been thinking about what I stood to lose— You can’t live like that. Or maybe other people can, maybe it helped them, but I couldn’t. So I just got on, do you see? Day by day. I got on with it, and I’ve been getting on with it ever since.”

“You do it well,” Kim said. “At least, to appearances.”