Lurching along in the darkness, the sticky tropical heat of the Malayan night bathed Evie in sweat. It was hard keeping Jasmine and the two schoolboys entertained, not to mention the baby and Stanford, who was now a toddler, when there wasn’t even anything to see through the window. Hugh, at eighteen months old, was a substantial weight to hold in her arms for a train journey of more than ten hours. Staring blankly into the blackness of the jungle, broken only by the lights of kampongs, she saw occasional fires burning in the distance – a token belated effort towards the failed scorched earth policy of the British.

Her thoughts returned to Arthur. She tried to picture him, hiding in dense undergrowth, boot polish applied to his face, as he moved secretly behind enemy lines. Her imagination kept failing her. Where were those enemy lines and where and how would Arthur and other white-skinned men hope to hide from detection? While Arthur, and no doubt his colleagues, spoke Malay, it was impossible he could pass as a native. As well as the risk of being caught by the advancing Japanese, there was the risk of being seen and betrayed by frightened local villagers. Their abandonment by their former white masters surely made their support for any stay-behind British unlikely. And no doubt, if the Malays didn’t turn them in to the Japanese, and the British guerrillas were subsequently discovered, the repercussions would be fatal for the Malays, so who could blame them?

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. It was all too horrible to think about. If Arthur was operating undercover, he would lack the protection afforded by a military uniform. Not that Evie had a lot of confidence that the Japanese would respect the Geneva Conventions anyway. She’d heard enough about the terrible massacres that had taken place in China in the Sino-Japanese war to make her feel sick to the stomach.

Hugh, as if sensing that tonight was no night for misbehaving, had gone off to sleep quickly, lulled by the movement of the train as it hurried along between the dark shapes of palm oil and rubber trees and virgin jungle. Evie let her thoughts drift back to Arthur’s final words to her, his promise that if they both got through this war alive, they would one day be together.

It was almost a year since Douglas’s death. The passing of time had helped her to accept what had happened, but she still missed her husband. She hadn’t loved him the way she loved Arthur. They had never been soul mates, but she had cared for him deeply despite his shortcomings as a husband and a companion. Now that she’d had time to reflect on her marriage and Doug’s character, Evie believed she had come closer to understanding him since his death than she ever had while he was alive.

Douglas had been damaged as a child and that damage had persisted into the character of the adult man. It had stunted him, crippled him emotionally just as the fall into the tin mine had crippled him physically. But Evie was beginning to feel able to follow the words of the Taoist monk and forgive herself for her inability to love Douglas as much as she would have liked to or thought she ought to. And at last, she could forgive herself, because with his death she had completely forgiven him.