‘It is, Nell, and we’ve our work cut out to keep it looking good. I meant those employed here at the Hall, though Mr and Mrs Stellion have hardly any staff in the house now either. They tend to live a quiet kind of life these days. It’s livelier when their son and daughter are home. We need to keep up the old standards, though.’

‘Yes … Mr Arnold,’ Nell replied. ‘Now, what do you want me to do with these tomato plants …?’

Gina always found it easy to get out of her work on the farm, mainly by just not turning up to do it. The job was only vaguely defined and casual, the pay low, and she had long ago decided she would only work when it suited her. She’d watched Dora and Ellen set off up the lane to Grindle Hall in the early morning sunshine.

‘I’ll tidy up the kitchen, mebbe take the carpet sweeper through the sitting room,’ she’d said to Dora as her mother and sister left. ‘I’ll go along then.’ She did not specify where she’d be going along to.

‘You do that, love, but don’t keep Nancy Beveridge waiting. I know she likes those eggs collected early. Your dad’s been gone up there a while.’

Gina waved Dora and Ellen off, and promptly went to put another slice of bread to toast, thinking over her plan as she waited for the bread to brown. She spread it thinly with butter – Highview was not a dairy farm, so butter had to be bought from the village shop, and even with Gina, old habits of wartime rationing died hard – but then heaped the toast with Dora’s homemade raspberry jam. The supply of this delicious jam was running low now, and Philip had decreed it was to be eked out as a Sunday-only treat, but Gina didn’t care to be denied, especially by her father. There was no one here to see her; she would enjoy it while she could.

When she’d eaten this second breakfast, she rinsed the evidence of the jam off the plate, set it on the draining rack, then tied her hair back with a cotton scarf of the identical blue to the one Nell was wearing this morning, and which was actually another of Nell’s scarves made from the same fabric in her favourite colour. Nell was adept at cutting up old shirts and turning the fabric into pretty little things she could wear or use, and which Gina felt free to borrow without permission. Then Gina locked the cottage door, put the key behind the boot scraper, and set off up the lane just as Dora and Ellen had done half an hour earlier.