“Like Roman ruins,” she says. “Like some antique site. I almost expect to see grand tourists quoting poetry among the fallen stones.”

“‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’?”

“And how!”

There are piles of broken old stone, and dressed new stone, stacks of timbers, iron beams, and roof tiles. It is all waiting by the roadsides. There is so very much of it to be put back.

“Have you been here long?” she asks.

“I only got in this morning.”

“I’m not distracting you from your work?”

“Terribly. Entirely. And I’m glad of it.”

“It’s heavy going, then?” She sees it on his face.

“I just wish that I could do more for the families. When I’ve met them, when I’ve spoken to them, the size of the gaps in their lives is so apparent. How can just a few photographs fill that? I wish that I could give them more of my time. That I could give them whys and wherefores and more comfort. But I can’t.”

She looks at him and sees what a burden on him this responsibility is. She wishes he didn’t have to carry that. Has she been fair to Harry in expecting him to answer her question too? “You underestimate what you’re doing. I’m sure that having those photographs does give them some comfort.”

“To know that their sons and husbands and brothers are definitely dead?”

“Don’t undervalue the significance of that. It will be a comfort to them to know that the facts they have are correct and that their loved ones are properly buried.”

“Properly? As in respectfully buried, or definitely buried?”

“Both, I suppose.”

They walk on. Her footsteps still for a moment by the window of a patisserie shop. There are towers of stacked sweetmeats behind the glass, tidily boxed chocolates, and a gingerbread model of the Cloth Hall as it must have been before. The wall above the shopwindow has been blown entirely out, exposing a first-floor interior that looks so terribly violated, with its sprigged wallpaper there for all to see, and its curtains bleached and tattered by the weather and catching in the breeze now.

“In May you told me that you couldn’t come here,” he says, “that you couldn’t bring yourself to make this journey.”

“Female prerogative.”

“Am I allowed to ask what changed your mind?”

“I started to wonder if you’d ever get round to it.”

“Of course I would.”