‘I’ve done something to my ankle,’ he said. He played cricket on Saturdays and she had the house to herself then. He’d learned to play in the war, so he said, in Sark. Got the locals to teach us and we formed a team. You didn’t know that, did you? That the Wehrmacht had a First Eleven? It was their last Eleven too. We were thrashed. But we took it in good spirit. We played the game, and all that.

More English than the English. Even in Sark, even in the war. She didn’t know whether to be proud of him, or ashamed. He never mentioned what the Wehrmacht were doing in Sark. Never talked about his war. Or his work before the war, except to say it was at the university. She’d asked him once if he’d supported the Nazis. He’d given a lopsided smirk.

‘You had to be a Party member, Betty, if you wanted to succeed.’

‘Things that were done in your name,’ she’d said.

‘The guilty ones were prosecuted. Why should I take responsibility for things I had no control over?’

He’d snapped at her. Amnesia was the way he lived with the past, a convenient forgetting.

He pushed himself up and walked towards her, limping. He smiled, and she saw that his mood was warm. She could never be sure whether she’d be sailing with his breeze or knocked sideways by his boom. She’d been six years old when the war started, twelve when it ended. When they’d met again, they were strangers. He was father to her, never daddy. Even now, they were ill at ease, the space in their lives filled with silences, with fantasies, a web of seeming. She guessed it was like that all over Europe, only her father seemed more remote than most, more absent. Stricter, too, with the power to terrorise with a single word, a sharp tone. A stiletto in her gut.

‘You should stand up to him,’ Dee used to say, but it was easy for her. She never had to live with a bully, to live to milk the softer moments, like now, to pretend he loved her, and she him, to all the world a devoted family.

‘How about a cup of tea?’ he said. ‘Will you put the kettle on?’

§

She slipped the cosy over the top of the pot and laid the tray with the Royal Doulton cups and plates, the sugar bowl and the cake that Mrs H had left for them. They’d had to start from scratch after the war and this tea set was one of the first new things her father had bought, after the tablecloth. One or two pieces had since been broken, and the milk jug was chipped, but her father insisted on using it.

‘So you can be proud when you bring your friends home.’