‘Mother threw a party for them once, I seem to remember,’ said Peter.

Her father paid no attention, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘I suppose they think we’re overrun with spies, after those bloody Reds shipped to Russia last year. He was an Old Boy at your school for God’s sake – Maclean. Humiliating.’

‘He was there years before me, Father…’ began Peter. ‘Look, about the milk parlour. Everyone’s going over to mechanisation. I know we’ve got the bucket milkers but we could get so much more milk out of the cows if we had a new system. And we could buy more cows. I really think now would be a good time.’

‘Sad state of affairs. School seems to produce a lot of effeminates and traitors these days. It was a fine school in my day. I can’t fathom it – an Old Greshamian publicly exposed like that.’

‘You mean people like Benjamin Britten, Father?’ Verity said facetiously. He looked at her blankly.

‘Leave it, Ver. Father, please. The cows.’ Peter’s neck was flushed at the collar.

‘Peter,’ she said, warning. She saw how their father’s face had drooped – dismayed, even angered by her brother’s insistence. They were in danger of blowing up at each other.

Mrs Timms bustled in and cut up the cake. They all stopped talking, glad of the interruption. ‘Don’t stop on account of me,’ she said, but they always did.

No one mentioned the memory of that terrible tea Mrs Timms had made for everyone nearly a year before, another one of stored-up rations scraped together. There had been a coffee cake, made with Camp, and rock cakes, which suited their name; tiny sandwiches with edges that had dried up and lots of sherry that Father had found from somewhere. Conversation had steered determinedly away from the reason for the gathering in the first place. That had been the rule since Mother died. They were used to the atmosphere of silent grief for what was lost.

The drawing room was filled with relics from her mother’s past – clocks that had stopped ticking, heavy, dark tables and a grand piano that no one played. On top of it stood a series of photographs in gilt frames memorialising her mother’s family. The central picture was of the old hall itself with her mother as a young girl in an Edwardian-style white dress, flanked by her two older brothers. All the people in the photograph were now dead, both brothers lost in the war.

Verity watched as her father topped up his tea with something from a decanter and his heavy-lidded eyes grew heavier, his face sagged and his long body collapsed in his chair. Finally, she heard the raspy sound of his snoring. She sighed, impatient. The exams were starting next week. She had her first one – Classics – on Tuesday and she should be cramming rather than sipping tea.