A battered Volvo estate car had turned into the drive, rolling in the deep ruts. A boyish-looking man with a shock of pale hair and strong footballer’s shoulders stepped from the car. He opened the rear door, released a harness, and swung out a little girl in a party frock.

“They’re here. Just look…”

Eyes bright with pride, Sally beckoned me to the door. She hoisted Jackie onto her shoulder, rubbed noses, and quizzed her about the party. She kissed her husband, who greeted me pleasantly but warily. When we followed Sally and her daughter into the sitting room he told me that David Hunter was due at Norwich station within an hour.

“I’ll collect him from the station, and we’ll join you at our site—we’re digging out a wartime Spitfire. Sally thought you’d be interested.”

“I am—my son should have come along.”

Sally had mentioned that Edward was a member of a local group of aircraft enthusiasts, excavating the remains of old planes that had come down in the estuary. Photographs of the aircraft stood on the mantelpiece—an ancient Heinkel and a wingless Messerschmidt encrusted with peat being lifted by crane from a mud flat. An almost intact Hurricane had pride of place. Edward and his team posed beside it with the curator of an aircraft museum to whom they had donated the Battle of Britain fighter.

But there were more important matters at hand than these forgotten aircraft. I took Jackie’s present from my bag and handed the box in its bright tissue and ribbon to the serious-faced little girl. I thought affectionately of the hundreds of hours that Sally had happily given to my own children. Jackie stood beside her mother, now and then raising her arms stiffly to remind herself of her taffeta dress, watching me with her sweet but empty smile. Her prominent knees and elbows, the hands that flexed so sharply that their palms touched her wrists, and her toneless face made me realise that the clouded mind of this handicapped child would never be aware of the loving home that Sally had created for her.

Already I regretted the overelaborate toy I had bought, a model kitchen with battery-powered lights and cooker far beyond Jackie’s grasp. She seemed almost to understand this, as Edward set out the toy on the coffee table and connected the batteries. She stared at her father with her trusting, fixed smile, as if she were crossing the world at a slight angle to the rest of us. Now and then she reached out in a tentative way, and then gravely withdrew when Sally held her hands, a child of nature who would forever play alone in a twilit garden walled by shadows she could never touch.