As always, I was surprised by her shrewdness. She had seen me frowning at the aircraft and its camera pylon mounted behind the passenger door.

“No, it’s a good plane—it might bring you a present.”

Henry sat against my knee, pushing Alice’s hand from my chin. “Daddy, has it got a bomb?”

“A bomb? Who would want to bomb Shepperton?”

“Uncle David might. He has a bomb, Daddy. He told me.”

“Not anymore. Besides, he’s much too fond of you and Mummy. Home, everybody…”

*   *   *

David Hunter came to see us that afternoon. He had left the RAF at the end of his short-service commission, after active service against the terrorists in Kenya and a last tour flying the Vulcan nuclear bomber. “Think, Miriam,” he liked to remind her, “if that Turk hadn’t defected to the Russians, your husband and I could have dropped the first hydrogen bomb on Moscow. How does it feel to be married to a man who might have started World War III?”

His scatty charm still protected him, but he had the edginess of a man who expected the past to come up behind him and tap him on the shoulder with some absurd but nagging inquiry. For a year he had drifted along the fringes of private aviation, and then bought a small company specialising in aerial photography. He would be away for months, photographing industrial complexes in Brazil or hotel developments in the Seychelles. For the past week he had been based at Fair Oaks, making a cine-film of the prewar Brooklands motor-racing circuit.

As rootless as ever, he never ceased to be amazed by my quiet domesticity, suspecting that I had repressed a large part of my true nature. Aware that Miriam felt uneasy at any talk of Shanghai, he rarely referred to our war years together.

He arrived with presents for the children, a bottle of whisky for me which he promptly opened and began to drink, flowers for Miriam and lavish compliments she was too delighted to resist.

“Why are pregnant women so erotic? Tell me, Miriam. In my bones I know we’ll get married one of these days.”

“There’s a queue forming,” Miriam warned him. “Richard Sutherland, Henry, Jim … You’ll have to fight your way down the aisle.”

“God, woman, I’m kneeling by the altar.” He placed his hands on Miriam’s smock. “It must be due any moment—if it comes this afternoon, can I watch?”