That May was hot and restless. Great joy succeeded the victory over Germany but we would not be released from our service until the end of the summer. The driving pool was very shorthanded so they finally let me behind the wheel of a two-ton lorry. One afternoon I took some airmen from Heliopolis to the RAF base at Amiriya. The airmen slept all the way and bundled out in a hurry. I stood there in the slaying-hot wind at Amiriya, my skirt flapping over my legs and whipping sand in my eyes. Swearing at the sand, thinking I wouldn’t be overheard in the wind.

“Yvette?”

I stared wildly around.

“Yvette!”

A thin, pale, boy-like person was calling my name.

At first he hadn’t recognized me either. We found each other as if in the dark by voice and then by touch.

Oy, break it up, somebody said, braying, but we took no notice. He was nothing in my arms, he didn’t feel like him.

I was blinking from the sand. He was blurring in front of me.

—

Peter and Célia were at home. We didn’t have anything ready, we scurried around preparing a scrappy meal, but it didn’t matter, he only picked at it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t eat very much at one time.” His voice was the only thing that was the same, so I started to look away when he talked, to steady myself. Célia saw me do this and squeezed my hand.

At the end of the meal my mother made him up a little plate and left it on the side table with a fork. For once she did something matter-of-factly without fuss. “Tell him it’s so he can take a morsel when he wants to,” she said to me, and he said, “Tell your mother she’s very kind.”

“You can tell each other yourselves,” I said, smiling at both of them. “You’ll understand well enough.”

We sat with the blinds drawn against the heat, drinking hibiscus. The ice cubes clinked in the silence. Peter and Célia knew what was happening. So did I. Even in the warmth of the afternoon we could see the journey running like a film behind his eyes, the snow, the biting cold and hunger. We knew that every day he saw it again, and his friends died afresh. He had told us, “We didn’t have far to go, compared with some.” Another time he said, “Once I slept in three foot of hay. Never had a better night!” But it was unconvincing.

Célia gave me a significant look. She stood up and so did I. We took the cups down to the kitchen.

“Can you do it?” she asked me.