First a drop came, then another, until soon rain was falling, splashing gently onto the patio at the side of the house, darkening the stone, and onto the leaves of the trees and the glass bulbs, sending up haloes of light against the sudden dusk. Girls holding little jewelled bags above their heads ran shrieking, ahead of their stumbling partners, for the house.

‘This way,’ said Verity, grabbing his hand. He caught a spark of her wide, white eyes.

She led him back towards the drive, to a maze of trees. As he was pulled along, the entire scene was lit up by lightning, caught in a neon, motionless flash. Instinctively, he looked back. There, standing in the doorway where Muriel had been a few moments before, was Jack. He was wearing a sly smile.

Arthur held on tight to Verity's hand. When they stopped running he heard her shallow breathing and felt it hot on his neck. They were standing in some kind of arboretum, trees twined above them, a bower of dripping green. It formed a cocoon, a verdant cave where they could hide, unseen, from the drive or the house. Jack surely couldn’t see them in here. Above them now, a low, deep rumble of thunder. They were soaked, their clothes stuck to them, but her face was radiant with laughter. The rain dropped off the trees pitter-patter onto the leaves above them, and the sweet smell of earth suffused the arbour. She smelt faintly of something dark, less of the perfume now. She’d been drinking. He kissed her mouth and it tasted of whisky. She submitted to the kisses. It felt as if she returned them. He touched his lips along the line of her jaw and then down her beautiful, long neck and along her collarbone, damp with the heat and then the rain.

She put something cold into his hand. It was Peter’s hip flask.

‘Where’d you get that?’

‘Stole it,’ she said. ‘Peter’s too busy chattering away to Americans to notice. Go on, have some.’

He swallowed some of the whisky, let it slide down his throat and vibrate through his head. On the side of the flask it said, etched into the silver:

Peter John Frost
17th February 1951

‘Peter’s twenty-first,’ Arthur said. He had a memory of Verity against the bark of a tree in her dark, moonless garden – kissing her cold mouth in the gloom, the smell of wet oak trees, the figures from the party silhouetted in the downstairs windows of the house. Peter’s birthday party had been only a few months before Mrs Frost was found on a deserted stretch of beach by the bottom field, in nightclothes.