“I expect she had evacuees during the war, didn’t she?”

He looks suddenly up at me, a sort of flare in his blue eyes. “Three boys,” he says. “From Southampton, as I recall.”

“A lot of cooking, then, I expect. Maybe more children to feed.”

“Those boys were hungry all the time,” he says with finality. “Now let’s build up our fire, Vicar, and see if we can’t get a cup of tea out of this old lady.”

Over tea we talk of the machines of death we have known, specifically the calibers of various guns from the First and Second World Wars, and then he leaves for Upton Hall School with three pounds and a bottle of port. I wonder why he didn’t mention the child Matilda Rail told me about, the girl who was here in the war and then gone. Maybe Matilda had got it wrong, and the girl lived with someone else. But William had spoken so firmly of three boys. Widening his eyes, a warning lamp almost. Ellen did have this girl, I think. And William will brook no intruders into her private past.

I picture her turning from her solid-fuel range and putting a loaf on the table, turning it out from the tin, and a small girl on a stool sniffing the aroma, trying to tweak off a piece of crust. Darling, it’s too hot. Oh, please, just a little bit.

And then the child was gone.

—

Saturday dawns dry with bursts of mild sunshine. The party actually begins at about ten o’clock in the morning, when the extended families of the helpers, convinced the helpers won’t do a good enough job on their own, start to turn up. They crowd into the kitchen, tread on each other’s feet and sample the prepared foods until Mrs. Harper, purveyor of the sausage rolls, shoos them away with flicks of a tea towel. More people arrive at about eleven, bringing unasked-for but very welcome plates of sandwiches and unfamiliar bottles of drink, some half full and others dusty from long years on the highest shelf in their kitchens. By midday the house is full of people happily crunching crisps and shouting their news at each other across the already crowded rooms, so that the remaining guests arrive exclaiming, “Oh, thank God we’re not the first!” and plunge into a party already in full swing. I tell the children that not a morsel of food is to pass Bailey’s lips for the duration before releasing them to dart back and forth, low like swifts, offering the guests battered plastic cups of their nonalcoholic punch. It’s mostly flat lemonade and blue food coloring, and mine is ladled from the bowl by one of a strikingly similar pair of young girls whose low, straggling fringes remind me of wild ponies. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” I say, “but might you be twins?”