During one of my first trips with Sébastien, before I knew very much about anything, I was at an airfield, watching a group of pilots walking out to their aircraft. There’s a word in Arabic Papa taught me: tabaghdada. It means, “to behave like someone from Baghdad,” that is, to have a swanky, swaggering air about you. That’s how I thought the pilots would carry themselves. Swinging their shoulders, with a bit of braggadocio. But when they came out, it was shocking. Not only were they desperately young and slight; they also walked like schoolboys, with quick straightforward steps. They were cowled in their helmets, straps dangling as if they’d forgotten to do them up, their heads hanging so low that their goggles, pushed up onto their foreheads, caught the early morning sun. Mechanics greeted them when they reached their aircraft. Taller, burlier, their faces in shadow, the mechanics might have been the fathers and the pilots the sons. Those hanging hooded heads, those crowns of goggles: the pilots looked as if they were walking to the executioner’s block.

It was all to come, my dalliance with Sébastien, the Second Alamein, and then finding James and our love bursting into being: but I remembered that small moment, how it chilled me. And only now, in my kitchen at Alver Shore, did I realize what I had failed to understand at the airfield. That for James and for so many others, it was no block the pilots were heading for. It was an altar.

What he said was true. He was the same man. Just a different kind of sacrifice.

Everything carried on outside, the dog barking next door and the men shouting and shoveling at the end of the street as they cleared the bomb damage, and the gulls crying overhead. The noises of peacetime. I stood quietly with my hand on James’s shoulder.

“Is it going to be all right?” he said, without moving his head.

I said, “Of course it is.”

The time ran so fast. Soon it was 1947, then 1948. We didn’t want to start a family until James had finished his curacy. We couldn’t even afford a dog. We protected ourselves, though it went against the grain of our desires. In the autumn of 1949 James became a vicar, took over from the previous incumbent, the elderly Mr. Jenkins, and so there was a little more money. On Boxing Day of that year we got careless, or rather we refused to be cautious, and I conceived. I was fit as a mare by then. I thrived along with the baby, jumped at every kick. When I got heavy with her we named her Catherine after Saint Catherine, who was of Alexandria, of Egypt, like me.

Don’t ask me how I knew she was a girl.