Out on the quay he opened up the shop. It was quiet, apart from the odd fisherman and his boat, and the sky was grey, tinged with the pale yellow haze of the coming day.

It had all seemed clear enough when he was staring at the bare iron ceiling of the barracks or pointlessly disassembling and reassembling a Bren gun: articles for the local press, a lucky break, London, travel. The world. And yet somehow, now he had returned, the seaside town had sucked him back in. The salt air itself seemed to get in his nose, his eyes and his brain and lull him to inertia. He’d written little. Done little. He was putting off everything because of Verity and it scared him, because each time she left him in the woods, she became less real. They’d only ever been together here, in this cut-off place, and that was why it filled him with dread and pulled him in. They needed to get away from here, both of them together. They needed to get to London where he could write them both free, free from this soul-sapping end of the bloody world.

Arthur looked up at the shopfront with his usual combination of familiarity and loathing. Above the awning Silver’s Grocers was written in red paint. But it was also a tobacconist’s, a sweet shop, a newsagent’s, even a chemist’s, as they stocked a selection of women’s beauty products and Knight’s Castile soap for men. The tins and boxes of non-perishables were in tall columns on two sides, the produce was arranged outside, and on the floor behind the long counter were the sacks of flour and grains. Even now, when sugar was still on rations, his mother had a way of making the shop feel full. The only thing they didn’t have was meat. For that you had to go to Thurgood’s. Thurgood himself was skinny, which didn’t seem right for a butcher, and Arthur knew for certain he was up to something with the meat rations, selling the choicest cuts on the black market. But he was local. His was a local name and Arthur had the impression that the Thurgoods had been here, on the Norfolk marshes, forever. Silver, though. It was only marginally better than Feinsilver. His grandfather, Ivan Feinsilver, changed his name when he came to London from Warsaw. Now both he and Arthur’s father were gone, but the name remained, with its whiff of foreignness. It still sounded Jewish, Arthur thought, with a twinge of discomfort and then shame at the discomfort. He wasn’t even Jewish officially as Mary Silver, his mother, was from an old East End family of tailors, all dead, but he felt his difference. The half counted.