‘Oh, Harold. Harold, my love. My love.’ Her tears flowed as her body embraced this release.

He looked down at her. His eyes held a question – an accusation. She lowered hers, the moment spoiled as memory flooded through her, enclosing her and prodding at her guilt as his movements became like the German’s had been: a deep, rough thrusting of her. This didn’t cause her pain, but neither did it rekindle the feelings she’d just experienced.

Harold rolled off her as his moment came upon him. She knew this was to keep his promise not to make her pregnant. And she knew it was a moment when she should be holding him, and praising him, but she was paralysed by other feelings now.

When he calmed, he lay on his back and reached for his jacket. His silence sliced through the air. She heard him fumbling and then the strike of a match. Sulphur stung her nostrils, before the more pleasant smell of his exhaled smoke wafted over her.

‘Who was it?’

The question tightened her stomach muscles.

‘I know there has been somebody. Who was it?’

His tone frightened her. ‘I – I was raped.’

Once again, that silence in which she could feel his anger.

‘Harold, I – I didn’t . . . I mean, it was terrifying, and painful and humiliating. H – he was a German soldier. He stank of sweat and beer, and cigar smoke tainted his breath. And I had the added terror of seeing one of his comrades grabbing Flors and—’

‘Good God! Flora was raped, too?’

‘No. Their commander came in, woken by our screams, and stopped them. There was supposed to be immunity from capture for the Red Cross workers, but the Germans didn’t care about such things. They had conquered Brussels and saw the world as theirs for the taking.’

The words poured out of her, and her body shook with sobs as they did so. Harold remained like a statue beside her, his only movement the deep inhaling of his cigarette.

Mags waited.

She wanted him to take her in his arms and forgive her. But that didn’t happen. He swung his legs off the bed, stubbed his cigarette in the base of a small ornament on her side table and grabbed his clothes. As he went towards her bathroom, he looked back at her, his face clouded with rage. ‘You should have told me.’

The bathroom door slammed shut behind him. Mags curled up into a ball and wept.

When Harold emerged, he said two words. ‘Goodbye, Mags.’

Mags stared at the closed door of her bedroom, unable to move for the weight of grief as everything assailed her: the rape, the loss of her mother, and, above all, her certainty that she had lost Harold. And after only just discovering the real him – the gentle man and the exquisite lover, qualities that far outweighed his petulance when things didn’t go his way. Or putting himself, and what he wanted, above all else, a trait of which she’d seen so much.