For a moment, he was quiet. His Adam’s apple climbed and dived inside his throat. Then he said, ‘The coppers reckoned we were on a joyride when they pulled us over. That’s not true. I never even knew that car was stolen. It was all a big mistake, and Joy, she wasn’t really –’ He trailed off, in search of the vocabulary. ‘All I really mean to say is that we’ve put those days behind us, miss. I swear to God we have. We’ve never been more grateful in our lives for where we are.’

‘I know that, too,’ she said. ‘And so does Mr Mayhood. There’s no need to second-guess the rest of it.’

She didn’t want to prise open the subject of his past and stir it. No one had a right to wallow in another person’s pain. What she knew of Charlie Savigear’s life had been condensed into summations on thin sheets of paper, refracted through the phone calls Arthur had held with borstal personnel and then recapped for her. But certain details were immutable. And how could they not shape her attitude to Charlie and his sister? Surely she could recognize their hardships without lapsing into pity.

The fact was they were children when they lost their parents, and that was tragedy enough. She thought about this often, knowing how she’d mourned her mother’s passing, how that grief had spread throughout the fabric of the everyday. It must’ve left them feeling anchorless. The records said a single German plane had emptied out its payload over their home town of Gillingham one night – this was summer 1940 – and a bomb had struck the back end of the Savigears’ house. Their father (a sign painter whose deaf ear kept him from enlisting) and their mother (whose occupation was not cited, so a housewife) were sheltering beneath the stairs, and that was that. Either it was good luck or misfortune, depending on which angle she regarded it from, that Joyce and Charlie had been sent away to live with distant relatives six months before – maybe they were spared the bombs, she thought, but not the damage. It explained the troubles they got into later, even if it didn’t excuse them. Skirmishes with other kids, at first. Some petty thefts (apples from the greengrocer’s, cigarettes from a machine, a teacher’s bike). Receiving stolen goods (a petrol mower lifted from a garden shed). And then that joyride through the streets of Maidstone in a stolen car, which landed them in borstal. When she compared their history to hers, she felt something like vertigo.

Now Charlie pushed his hands into his pockets and leaned hard against the bench. ‘I can’t tell if Mr Mayhood likes us yet.’

‘Whatever gave you that idea? He thinks the world of you. He told me.’

‘Well,’ said Charlie, ‘we get on all right. But I’m not sure about it.’

‘About what?’

‘I don’t know how to put it. Our chances, I suppose.’

She noticed he’d been speaking in the plural. ‘Is it your relationship with him that you’re concerned about or Joyce’s?’