“Well, it’s easy to think there’s a right way to be, isn’t it? There’s a box you’re supposed to fit in, and it’s awfully hard to see beyond the box. When I left Cardiff, Billy Bagshawe next door was on at me to marry him. Nice fellow, steady earner, no need for his wife to work, his ma and mine were best friends: it was obviously what I ought to do. And it probably would have been a good life, too, at least in the way people think about good lives, and it was so hard to say no and upset everyone. It seemed like the right thing to do, and sometimes, when I was first here on my own, I even thought I ought to go home and marry him. It would have been a lot easier. But it would have squashed me into a box marked Wife and put the lid on, and everything I have now, everything I could be, that would have gone away. Gone without saying.”

Will thought back to the phantom Will Darling’s quiet life as a village carpenter in a world without the war. “Right. Yes.”

“I expect it’s different for men, because you don’t get put in so many boxes in the first place. And it’s not fair or right how things are for you and Kim, not at all. But you’ve got horizons, haven’t you? Nobody’s telling you what your future ought to look like—”

“Only that we oughtn’t have one at all.”

“Yes, but he’s too rich to care what people say, and you never do what you’re told,” Maisie pointed out. “So why don’t you decide what a future means for yourselves and get on?”

Will couldn’t think of a reply to that. Maisie angled a beautifully plucked brow. “What did he say? I mean, about how it might work?”

“He didn’t get that far. I lost my nerve. Froze like a rabbit.”

“He’s let you down before. Are you scared he might do it again?”

“No,” Will said. “Maybe that’s stupid, God knows he can be a sh—a swine, but not deep down. It’s not very easy to get that deep down, but when you do— I’m not making sense.”

Her dark brown eyes softened. “You are, you know. Oh, Will. Well, then, if you’re not worried what he might do, is the problem what you might do?”

“Me? What do you mean?”