She does not look around again as she continues up to the house, but as she reaches the steps she hears his cough, faint on the wind, and knows that he is still there, watching her safely in.

Chapter Fourteen

Jack

June 1939

A gentle tapping at the window rouses him. He has been awake for much of the night, haunted by the memory of his fist pummelling flesh. For the past week, his nightmares have pursued him into consciousness and he cannot outrun them pacing the tack room’s cobbled floor.

For the first time, he appreciates why the war-destroyed men his mother favoured would wake up screaming in the night. As a boy, he would bolt up in bed, wide-eyed and petrified, his heart thudding in the dark, and then through the paper-thin walls he would hear his mother soothing them, as one might calm a baby, until their sobs subsided. In the morning, dues paid, they would shuffle down the stairs, unable to meet his eye as he watched them leave – always via the back door to the yard, where they could slip out without being seen. His mother, still in her grubby nightgown, would tap a cigarette from the box on the table and tell him how it was her bit of kindness, comforting fellows such as these.

‘They’ve seen things, done things, Jack, that stay with a man, play on his mind. War casts long shadows … especially at night.’

He failed then to appreciate the damage inflicted upon those tortured souls, but since the night he fled, he has come to understand the extent of their suffering, for now he too is haunted by things he can never unsee, by things he cannot undo. His sense of disconnect from the man he was to the man he has – over the course of one night – become is profound. He always feared it was in him, that seed of violence. He could almost feel its insidious roots penetrating every aspect of his being, leaching the goodness from his soul, waiting for that moment when it would finally break through his epidermis and unfurl in all its dark glory to dominate his landscape and blight his future with its deadly shade.

The tapping comes again. He rolls over on the unforgiving camp bed and squints up at the window from under heavy eyelids.

Gwen stands outside, her arm raised across her. She grins and points to her wristwatch, then beckons him. Jack feels for his own watch, laid out on the apple crate, and seeing the hour he curses and throws back the covers. He glances again at the window, relieved to see that Gwen has withdrawn, affording him some privacy as he pulls on his trousers and snatches his shirt from the back of the chair.

She is leaning against the stable wall, fondling Kip’s ears when he finally emerges.

‘Your foot back to working order I take it?’ he says.