The woman puts down the flask and wipes her lips. Glancing sideways, she sees him looking at her. Tom looks away politely, but not so quickly that he fails to notice the darkness around her eyes. He doesn’t want to make her any more uncomfortable, so he squeezes himself against the side of the car, aware of his bare, dirty knees. He’d had to cut off his trouser legs yesterday: they had caught fire as he’d been dragging things from a burning lorry. He hadn’t been badly burnt, though he had felt briefly ridiculous, and now he feels ridiculous again: his legs are alternately white and red, streaked with dirt and calamine lotion. Despite her ruined clothes, the young woman beside him carries herself like a lady, and she is … Tom presses his fingers into his forehead. He is horribly tired, and his thoughts are rattling. But yes, she’s rather beautiful.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Zoë sits huddled against the side of the car. She is hemmed in by the concertina struts of the folded-down roof, which are digging into her back. The seat itself is upholstered in ridges of hard green leather and the wheel wells jut up into it, painted metal curves that amplify every pebble that passes beneath the tyres. Zoë can’t get her arm comfortably over the roof struts, and the wheel well is too smooth and hard to sit on.

They have turned off the main road onto a smaller, rougher one, winding through low hills towards the sea. The car bounces and rattles along, and with every bounce, the slippery leather slides her towards the middle. The officer has wedged himself into his own corner, one hand gripping a strut, the other hooked into one of the pockets of his filthy battledress tunic, which is undone to reveal a thin khaki shirt. His long legs are pulled up awkwardly, ankles jammed under the seat in front of him. He isn’t wearing shorts, as she had thought, but trousers that have been clumsily sawn off at the knees, which are burnt raw and smeared with some dirty pink ointment. He has his face turned away, his peaked cap, with its badge of a crowned cannon, pulled down low against the sun.

The soldier in the front seat, the one with the machine gun, keeps leering at her in the rear-view mirror. He has sandy hair, slicked back with pomade, and a faint, boyish moustache. He is scared, she can tell: glancing at the sky, then back to the mirror, then back to the sky. His fingers are tapping a hard rhythm against the wooden stock of his gun. When he shifts his eyes to the mirror again, the driver raises his large hand and pointedly adjusts it so that the eyes disappear.

‘I’d be ever so grateful if you kept your eyes on the map, sir,’ he says evenly.