‘There’s nothing more to be said.’ She covers her face with her hands, but after a sharp intake of breath she lowers them again. ‘I should have known better. I’ve learnt a hard lesson. A very hard lesson indeed.’

She swallows. He can see her struggling to maintain her dignity, struggling to keep her emotion in check. ‘Anyway, what’s done is done. No point crying about it. Everyone suffers a broken heart sometime, I suppose.’

The smile she conjures is a brave one and though precariously thin it does its job and papers over the cracks. She makes to leave, but then hesitates a moment before turning back.

‘Thank you, Jack.’

‘For what?’

‘For listening. For keeping my secrets. For helping me when I asked you to. For letting me talk. If I’d had to keep all this to myself, I think I’d have gone mad.’

And before he has a chance to respond, she presses her lips to his cheek, and hurries out into the night.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jack

August 1939

July slips into August with days of smothering heat broken by thunderstorms that rumble up the valley, their progress accompanied by sheet lightning as dazzling as a photographer’s flash.

Jim walks the bristling fields of corn every day, running his hand over the bowed heads that slowly turn the colour of sun-scorched sand. He pauses periodically to break off the tip of a head, rubbing it between his palms before gently blowing across the fragments to separate the wheat from the chaff. He takes a teardrop nugget between his teeth and bites down, his eyes closed in concentration as he assesses the ripeness of the grain.

For days, he brushes his hands free of the discarded corn and mutters under his breath while studying the sky above. Then one morning, as the blossoming sun begins to test its building strength on the back of his neck, he takes a golden grain between his teeth, and a slow smile spreads across his burnished cheeks. As a flock of skylarks dance through the blue expanse above him, he rubs his hand across his unshaven chin and nods. It is ready.

Harvest comes as a welcome distraction. Gwen has done her best to suppress signs of her heartbreak, but Jack sees through her façade. Her broad smiles vanish as soon as she looks away and her hacks on Arthur now bite deep into dusk and see her return with bloodshot eyes.

Whilst her father seems oblivious to her silent suffering, Jack suspects Muriel has detected something is amiss, but Gwen rebuffs the housekeeper’s kind enquiries with irritable comments and snapped denials. To Jack, Gwen confides nothing more, but when her father walks up the yard with a spring in his step and announces they will begin harvesting that day, she whispers, ‘Now we’ll be busy – we won’t have the energy to think of anything else,’ and her relief is tangible.