She ponders. “I don’t believe I’ve eaten chickpeas. Though I’ve never met an ingredient I didn’t like.”

“They’re from the health food shop in Waltham.”

“I haven’t been in there.” She sounds rueful. “How unadventurous of me.”

I tell her about the creaking roof, and Stan Rail’s insistence on giving me his card. “Maybe he knows something I don’t.”

“I’ve never trusted this house, James. Do talk to him, and be careful.” She puts Bailey down on the floor. “When I was an assistant at the village school I gave lessons to Stan Rail. And his brother Ernest. Ernest was a scrap of a child. Clever. I remember trying to explain algebra. If 2a equals 10, what is a?” She clasps her knees, “My example featured twin lambs, together weighing ten pounds. What then does a single lamb weigh? Only Ernest got it. He’s a shipping accountant now, lives in Alver Shore. It’s a place down on the coast . . .”

“I know Alver Shore. It was my first parish, in 1946.”

“Good heavens. And there was I thinking you were a stranger from afar! Have you been back?”

“No . . . no, it hasn’t even occurred to me.”

I remember what I said to Frobisher. A far cry.

“Too long ago, perhaps.”

“Yes.”

“It still has that brutal seawall, which I rather like. Anyway, Stan’s just as sharp as Ernest now when it comes to figures. Doing very well for himself by all accounts!”

I look at her graceful interlaced fingers. The only ring is on her right hand, a dark blue stone set in silver.

“Matilda Rail is their mother, of course.”

“Yes.”

“I met her on the day of the flood, when we sandbagged Church Walk. She told me about your school assistant post.”

“So she saw us from her window.” Ellen fails to smother a grin. “I bet she called me Calvert.”

“Ha. Yes, she did.”

“Matilda, goodness. She had so many children that her youngest was still at school during the war. Long after my days as teaching assistant.”

“Yes,” I say. “Bobby.”

Something has tightened in her face. She looks younger, but not happier.

“So she told you about Pamela, then. The girl I had in the war.”

“Yes.”

I shouldn’t have mentioned Bobby. I’m about to apologize when she starts talking, turning away from me to look out of the window where darkness has fallen.

“Pamela and Bobby used to draw hopscotches in the road with lumps of chalk they brought back from the railway embankment. Precious few cars back then. They spent hours and hours hopscotching. Sometimes they stole away up the hill to the anti-aircraft battery. This was toward the end of the war, when there was nothing left of the battery but barbed wire, but all the same it was expressly forbidden . . .” She looks back at me. “I should have expected someone to come for her in the end.”