They gape at each other, wordless.

‘Whatever are you doing here?’ she says at last. There’s an edge to her tone, not entirely friendly. ‘It’s been thirty years, Vic, for heaven’s sake. You never wrote back to me, even when I pleaded. I thought you’d stayed in America and I’d never see you again.’

It is as though he’s been smacked in the chest. ‘No, you never wrote back to me,’ he gasps, trying to absorb what she’s just said. He’s become so used to accepting that she’d simply found someone else. ‘Oh my goodness . . . you mean . . .? No . . . I can’t believe . . .’

Abruptly she turns away, through the door into the kitchen, and for a long, fearful moment he thinks she has left for good, unable to face him. A deep ache of desolation creeps through his weary bones. All his attempts to find her were in vain, and now this. She never received his letters, and he never received hers. A whole life spent apart, through the vagaries of the wartime postal system. Such a loss of what might have been.

Then she is back, dabbing her face with a handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, sniffing. ‘It’s just so unexpected. Seeing you again.’

He cannot think what to say.

‘But really, what brings you here, after all this time?’ she asks now.

‘It’s a long and ridiculous story.’

‘I’ve got time to listen if you’ve got time to tell it,’ she says. ‘Let me get some more tea and make up the fire. There might even be a couple of slices of cake left.’

When they are seated and she has poured the tea, adding milk and half a teaspoon of sugar without even having to ask, he tells her about the newspaper obituary and his impulsive decision to make the pilgrimage from London to pay tribute to his old mentor, Robert Watson-Watt. And how, by the time he’d finally got here, the ferry had stopped running, and on his way back he’d seen the cafe and decided to come in just in case, and once he’d tasted the carrot cake he’d become convinced it was hers.

‘Ridiculous, of course,’ he says. ‘Forgive me, I’m such an old fool, but I’ve always loved your carrot cake.’ He lifts a slice from the plate and takes a bite, including the icing this time, munching with little murmurs of appreciation. Now at last she smiles, and he feels warmed by it. That little gap between her two front teeth, the one that first melted his heart, is still there.

‘And what about you?’ he asks. ‘You’re still baking wonderful cakes, at least.’

‘That, and being a mother,’ she says.

‘You have a child? How wonderful. Son or a daughter?’

‘A daughter,’ she says. ‘Vicky. She probably served you, earlier.’

‘Ah yes, a lovely young woman,’ he says. ‘Your husband . . .?’