She watched him push off, pedal away, was tempted for a moment to run after him, find out where he was going, who he was meeting. But he’d turned a corner, was out of sight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

London: October 1958

He switched on his front and rear lights and set off, hoisting his right leg over the crossbar, settling into the saddle, the steady rhythm of pedalling. He didn’t want to go to this rendezvous. He wanted to stay with Betty. She’d begun to talk for the first time, and like an idiot he’d let the moment slip. The hell with this meeting. Betty was more important. He pulled over, one foot on the kerb, looking past his shoulder, hoping to see if she’d run after him. She wasn’t there. He turned, pedalled back through Soho Square, into Carlisle Street.

She’d gone. He jumped off his bike, throwing it on the kerb, running into the Partisan, searching. He couldn’t see her. Nick was there.

‘Have you seen her?’ John said. ‘Have you seen Betty?’

‘Sorry, comrade,’ Nick said. ‘She left after the meeting. Said she was in a rush.’

John backed out, picked up his bike, his heart hammering against his sternum. It felt bruised, painful, his bones shattered into shards pinching and pricking his flesh. He’d been trapped. He wished he could chew off a limb, free himself, like a fox or a hare. He envied them their bravery, their determination, their will to live. Their freedom.

He had lost her. She and his baby. He would have married her, cherished her. They’d have lived together, raised a family, like Arthur, like so many men and women after the war, putting the past behind them, looking to the future. They had been separated, as if the twisted metal and sordid secrets of war still raged, as if its aftermath had the power to haunt and live on through them all.