‘She placed her in my arms and said “This baby needs its father,” and I looked at her and saw not Bea, but myself, this little daughter who looked like me.’ He laughed. ‘I was like Narcissus. I fell in love with her. Bea had died for her, my child. Does that make sense?’

Dora nodded. She’d known grief, could smell and taste its maw, had watched helpless as it gobbled down her past, and future too. She knew Geoffrey’s anguish, its weighty pain.

‘And you, Dora,’ he went on. ‘Do you have sorrows like that?’

‘My father died too.’ Dora couldn’t say what other sorrows went with that death, the grim crumble of her being.

‘You told me.’

Her life sundered, shattered by the Nazis. And all the while Geoffrey was living his private tragedy here, in this farm. Life was strange, that way, she thought, the way a war roiled and churned the world so she and Geoffrey had washed up together, like flotsam and jetsam.

‘I was told I looked like my mother,’ Dora went on. ‘She died when I was tiny.’

She felt his fingers through her hair.

‘Your mother’s hair?’

‘My mother’s colouring,’ Dora said. ‘My father’s curls. A bit of both.’

A bit of comfort, too.

She moved her hand around his back, pulling him closer. He’d said, ‘you have every right to ask.’

It was spring. Geoffrey had invited her for lunch. She bought a hat, in de Gruchy’s. A ridiculous hat, old-fashioned, expensive, but there was no choice, a cloche of forget-me-not straw, finished with airy blue feathers. She wore the blue spotted dress that she’d bought before the Germans came. It matched the hat and highlighted her blue eyes and hair. She remembered Miss Besson’s question, ‘Do you dye your hair, or is it naturally that colour?’ As if you could get dye these days. Not even on the black market. What had she been insinuating? Dora couldn’t bear to think about that. It was a sunny day, the kind of day she remembered from the posters on the underground for holidays in Jersey. The sunny Channel Island. Weary troops would find a welcome home. There were pictures of children playing on the sand, striped beach umbrellas, a woman in a swimsuit. Lapis skies and yellow suns.

Where once every lane led to the ocean, now they turned back, devoured themselves. The beaches had become forbidden zones, verboten. Military property, flanked with anti-aircraft guns with their long steel barrels. She missed the cries of children as they jumped in the waves or built sandcastles, she missed the joy of being alive that they promised. There were few spaces left for them to play now, few parents happy to let them out into the streets. Silence. That’s what Dora hated most about the island now. The Germans had suffocated sound, joy, desire.