Away from her father, Verity intended to study as a form of rebellion – that would show him she was serious. She would ace her exams and get in despite him. She had to. But when she was actually out in the garden, instead of studying, she sketched out a furious picture of the house with deep, black strokes in charcoal and a gloomy, lowering sky.

5.

The flat was his mother’s world, her kingdom, the repository of years of collected knick-knacks of the Silver family, which she obsessively dusted and polished.

National Service had been six hellish weeks of basic training – endless square-bashing, being screamed at by the sergeant, lunging bayonets into straw dummies – followed by months of numbing boredom and deprivation, broken only by the odd lurch into thrilling danger. It had been the smell of other men’s sweat and slops in canteens; day after day of card games or reading on your barrack bed; the permanent reek of engine oil; the numbing cold in the freezing barracks. Once, the sudden rush upwards, away from the earth in a Tiger Moth. And early on, the inert body of a boy his age, then eighteen, hanging by a rope from the toilet cistern. He hadn’t written about that to his mother, nor to Verity.

Hating it, he had yearned for Verity and, by extension, the woods and the sea, but never this flat. Arthur saw the five (six if you included the WC) draughty little rooms above the shop as nothing to do with him. He slipped into the same routines as before: stirred the porridge in the kitchen at the back, which overlooked the rooftops of the cottages on Red Lion Yard, and, breakfast over, set up the shop. But if his mother wasn’t looking, he peered through the nets of the tiny front parlour from where, on a clear day, he could see right across the harbour and the saltmarshes to the line of pine trees in the far distance, and could imagine Verity there.

His mother expected her tea. Her room was, if anything, even more crammed with gimcracks than the rest of the flat. All he ever snatched sight of confirmed it as a shrine to femininity, all lace and costume jewellery. The scent of floral perfume and lemons pervaded the room. She was already in her work dress, hair pinned and make-up done.

‘What have you done to your hair? It’s sticking up,’ she said, taking the cup from him. In her voice, just the trace of the east London accent she’d striven to lose.

‘It’s supposed to be like that. It’s the style.’

He turned, quickly, before she could collar him about anything else, catching only a glimpse of her pursed lips.

‘I don’t like it, Arthur,’ she called down the stairs. ‘It’s common. Like a Yankee.’