Tomorrow they would go. The last trapful of them would be on its way down the avenue by half-past ten. He doubted very much that he’d ever lay eyes on Villiers Hadnett or the Camiers, or any of them, again. ‘There’s not a man can hold a candle to you’: the slur of her voice slipped through his lines of defence, her hand on his arm, her body teetering on the heels of her shoes, the banknotes yet again taken from the handbag. Grub Hineforth had gone down at Passchendaele too. He tried to remember his face. Was it he or Barmy Jessop who’d had a peculiar nose? ‘My soldier boy,’ she’d whispered, telling him she was keeping her voice down because she knew it was what he wanted. He’d had to take the money because she’d never have gone. He’d bundled it into a pocket and turned his back on her.

Again he steadied his thoughts, dragging any protection he could into his mind. ‘No, no, I insist.’ He paid for their tea and then they sauntered on the street since the afternoon was mild. He was staying in Davison’s Hotel, he said; he always stayed there, a family thing really. She had a pretty smile, and grey eyes that were a little nervous. In the teashop, when she’d taken her coat off, there’d been a tiny brooch, a single sapphire in a gold setting, pinned to the black material of her dress. A hat you hardly noticed—black also—was worn a little to one side. ‘I’ve often gone by Davison’s,’ she said. ‘Awfully nice, it seems.’ He told her how he’d stayed there with his brother, on the way back and forth to school in England, how his father had hired one of Davison’s waiters to become the last of their butlers. ‘We might dine together one evening?’ he suggested, and when they did so he told her about the worst day of his life, the day his sister had married an elderly solicitor and how an uninvited guest had become drunk in a way that seemed typical of life as it was nowadays. ‘How horrid for you,’ his companion murmured. ‘How horridly distressing.’