“I’m sorry. Where are my manners? I’m Clara Lawrence.” The woman in black offers Edie her hand.

“I’m pleased to meet you. Edie Blythe.”

The woman is eating a cornet of cockles and Edie can smell the vinegar. “Will you?”

Edie shakes her head. “No, thank you.” She can smell waffles and hot toffee too. It takes her back to Ypres and makes her feel slightly nauseous. She realizes that she hasn’t eaten since the previous day.

“Are you here on holiday?” asks Clara, who seems determined to have a conversation.

“No. I wish it were the case. I have been to Ypres. I thought my husband might be buried there.” It seems almost impolite to say it, like she’s thrusting too much unsavory unsolicited information at a stranger.

“Oh, dear. How sad. Do I presume correctly that you didn’t find him, then?”

“Yes.” Edie shields her eyes to the bright light. She wonders if Clara Lawrence, in her well-cut mourning, is a veteran of these matters. “I mean, I didn’t. And you?”

“A holiday. A break. I’ve been taking the waters in Le Touquet. I feel more liquid than solid at present. If the sun gets too strong I might start to steam.”

Edie walks down the beach with the woman in black silk crêpe. There are tents to hire for the day, striped in bright barley-sugar pinks and greens and yellows, and wooden chalets with fretted eaves and spiked parapets that remind Edie of the bourgeois mausoleums that she has seen in French cemeteries. The families who have rented the chalets sit on the steps, drape their towels proprietorially, and take tea from china cups. Siblings are burying one another in the sand. They laugh and fight and conspire. Fathers loosen their collars while the children run feral. Awnings strain in the wind, ropes rattle, and always the sound of the sea.

“It must be difficult for you not to have a grave.” Clara squints into the sun before she turns her eyes back to Edie.

“It seems to get more so,” she replies. “With time you’d think it might recede, but the questions seem to be getting louder. The telegram said, Missing, believed killed, and that word, believed, seems to be looking all the more flimsy.” Is it right to say it out loud? Is it bad form to share these sentiments with a stranger? She can’t seem to stop the words from falling out of her mouth. “I have never felt more unsettled. In the past four years I have never felt more certain that he isn’t in his grave.”

“Have you any good reason to think that? Have you any evidence that it might not be the case?”

“No. Not really. It’s just an instinct.”