After the tea, she walked to the churchyard and laid a clutch of bluebells she’d found at the end of the garden. There was a small clump of cuckooflowers, narcissi and bluebells already placed next to the headstone. Her brother had been. Her mother had liked irises and always had a vase of them on her dressing table but Verity hated them: the sickly honey-sweet smell reminded her of her mother and now they would always make her think of death.

A throbbing sound overhead. Another plane, like the one before. It shone in the afternoon sun and even from here on the ground she could see it had a star on its tail. Peter’s Americans, whose purpose, no one knew. She lay full-length on the grass next to the grave like she used to do years ago on her mother’s bed and watched the vapour trail etch a parabola in the sky until it faded. When she looked back, it was this – not her mother’s death, not the crash, not even the flood, but lying on her back by her mother’s grave, a silver plane crossing the sky – that she remembered as the beginning of the future.

2.

Arthur emerged from the woods onto the dunes. The tide was out, leaving shiny tracks of water inlets on the vast expanse of sand. In the wide blue sky a plane was chugging west. It wasn’t strange to see planes – there’d been planes stationed at Holkham from the middle of the war – but this one was different. It wasn’t the RAF for one thing. It was a fat, sleek shining beast. An intruder on their peace. But what had Orwell said? – ‘the peace that is no peace’. Whatever it was, it felt as if he had no part in it. He imagined himself in the pilot’s seat high up in the air, looking down on his lonely figure on the beach. He remembered his brief sorties in the air – the feeling of power, the brilliance of being quite separate from the rest of the world and its petty cares down below. But it had been fleeting and it was over now.