He shrugged, took a breath. ‘When I was nineteen,’ he said, ‘I was engaged. It seemed a good idea, the next step. It’s what you did. Leave school. Get a job. Get married. It’s a small island. Families know each other. Parents have ideas. You go along with it.’

Dora understood that pressure, she’d witnessed it time enough in Berlin. Her cousin Naomi, for instance, just had to look at a boy and her aunts were arranging the wedding. Vati disapproved. A waste, he’d say. What’s the hurry? Get the girl educated.

‘So who was she?’

‘Her name was Vanessa.’ He paused and looked at her, a smile teasing his mouth. ‘You had dealings with her father. Sir Leonard de la Moye.’

Do you understand now?

‘Ah,’ Dora said. ‘Go on.’

‘It was announced in the Evening Post. And The Times. There was a big engagement party. A rather grand affair.’

Apart from the hospital dance, Dora had never seen Geoffrey dressed up, couldn’t imagine him mingling with the good and the great of Jersey, although he must have been a catch at one stage with his farm and land, and he was handsome enough.

‘That doesn’t seem like you,’ she said.

He smiled. ‘It was a world away.’

‘So what happened?’

‘About two months before the wedding, I met Bea. She was on holiday with her parents. She was a very modern woman. A stenographer. Vanessa didn’t work. All she was expected to do was marry, settle down. I’d never met anyone like Bea. A working woman, with her short frocks and bobbed hair. I was bowled over by her. Attraction of opposites, I suppose. Perhaps it was infatuation, but at the time it seemed real.’

He was holding his cup, flicking his thumb on the handle so it sung.

‘One thing led to another. I didn’t think. Nor did she. We were young, impulsive. Frankly, I was an idiot. Infatuated. Never gave a single thought to Vanessa, or the consequences. After the holiday, Bea returned to Manchester.’ He paused. ‘I’d told her at the start I was already spoken for. That our affair had no future. She agreed. She said she had a job to return to anyway.’

He gazed past Dora, stared at the Aga.

‘I thought about her after she left. Of course I did. But I was caught up in the plans for the nuptials. Vanessa and me. Where we’d live. Practical things.’

He turned back to look at Dora.

‘Then a week before the wedding, Bea turned up, with her father. She was pregnant. He was a policeman. He threatened to break every bone in my body if I didn’t do the decent thing and marry Bea.’

His eyes focused once more on his cup, his finger scratching at a small chip on its rim.