‘It didn’t last.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.

‘Did you marry, Vic?’

‘Yes, to Ella. We met after I got back from America. She died last year.’

Even now, their conversation is stilted. Despite the joy of being here with her, the tea warming his throat and the blazing fire beside them, he feels uneasy and he senses that she does, too. Bitterness hangs like a veil between them.

‘I thought you’d forgotten all about me,’ she says at last.

‘How could I ever forget you, Kath? I wrote again and again, honestly. You must believe me. I wrote to Bawdsey and your parents’ address,’ he says. ‘I even went to WAAF HQ in London when I got back from the US, I was that desperate to trace you. They said if I wasn’t a relative they couldn’t divulge any information.’

It had been his final hope, and he could still remember the dreadful despondency weighing over him as he’d walked away that day. ‘I came back here trying to find you, but your house had been bombed and though they reassured me no one had been killed, nobody seemed to know where you’d gone. Or perhaps they just weren’t prepared to tell this odd-looking stranger.’

‘Our house was destroyed by a doodlebug in 1944,’ she says quietly, not looking up. ‘We moved inland, to relatives in Stowmarket. But I went on writing to you, Vic, right up till the end of the war: to all of the American addresses, to HQ, to your lab in London. I even wrote to your father – I couldn’t find a proper address, so I just wrote to “Mr Mackensie senior, Tunbridge Wells”. I couldn’t believe you had just disappeared. And then when the war ended and there was still no news, I assumed you must have met someone over there and didn’t have the courage to tell me.’

‘No. No. NO,’ he almost shouts. ‘It wasn’t like that. Not like that at all.’ How can he persuade her, get her to understand how much he suffered, that terrible heartache, that interminable agony of loss? He looks up into her shocked face. ‘Oh, Kath. I missed you so much. But when you didn’t reply, I thought . . .’

They gaze at each other, each trying to understand how random acts of fate have broken them apart, leaving each of them thinking so ill of the other. How different their lives could have been. She leans across the table and places her hand on his, and he feels ashamed at the state of his bony fingers, the nails that need a trim – and, now he looks more carefully, aren’t even particularly clean.

Tears are now running unchecked down her cheeks. ‘How did we manage to lose touch like that?’ she says.

‘I loved you, Kath. So very much.’ His voice is thick, shaky.

‘And I loved you. That day we met again in the Round Garden . . .’ She grabs a napkin and wipes her eyes, takes a deep breath and straightens her shoulders. ‘Oh, this is stupid. It’s all so long ago.’