She nods, although she has no idea if this is true. People keep saying it but she wonders how they’re so certain. Now she knows Jack lied to her so thoroughly, this is how she should feel. All traces of him gone.

‘Have you seen this?’ says Peter.

The headline on the newspaper he hands her reads:

FIRST DETAILS OF ATOM-BOMB BASE

‘Take it,’ he says. ‘Something to read on the train. Arthur was right all along.’

Not about everything.

In March, the Americans detonated a bomb in the Pacific. The newspapers said it was one thousand times as powerful as the bombs they dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. No one seems to be awfully worried about it. She’s read that scientists in the US have created something called the Doomsday Clock and they’ve set the time as two minutes to midnight. Midnight is the apocalypse. Meanwhile, their own little corner of the world carries on regardless. Peter says the base at Holkham is having an open day and visitors will see the jet planes that carry the atom bombs. Atomic warfare as tourism. But still the public doesn’t know about the secret missions Jack ran over the Baltic States in Russia. Each time he went, unarmed and vulnerable, Jack could have been shot down and there would have been no recovery and no return. Neither the British nor the Americans would have been able to rescue him. She remembers the ampoule from around his neck – the pill inside it must have been cyanide. They would have expected him to have killed himself rather than be captured. And she wonders what Jack found over there, over the mountains and steppe, what it was he saw. What has he left behind? There must be other photographs of missile bases and hidden weapons, developed in a laboratory somewhere, rather than the half-naked pictures of women and the bleak Norfolk marshes that she’d found. And his fatherless child who has a brother he’ll never know. How unbelievably pointless all that risk was when the real danger was waiting for him in the flood.

She takes the paper, knowing she won’t read it. ‘You’ll visit?’ she says and is embarrassed to feel a catch in her throat.

Peter laughs. ‘What would I do in London?’ And it is funny, the idea of him lumbering around the crowded city streets in his tweeds.