‘And we’re here now. Better late than never,’ he says, with a wry laugh.

In the distance there is the sound of a church bell. He remembers it from his first years here, before they were silenced during the war. It chimes seven.

‘Heavens, is that the time?’ she says, glancing round the empty room. ‘I’d better lock up. Where are you staying tonight, Vic?’

He hesitates, reluctant to admit that his absent-mindedness has left him effectively destitute. ‘Well, I planned to stay at the Manor, but when I found the ferry was closed I went to a bed and breakfast place. And then I discovered I’ve left my wallet at home, back in London. God, I’m such an idiot.’

‘Then that’s quite simple.’ In her smile he sees the girl she was back then: the halo of flaming curls, the freckles on her nose. ‘I have a spare room. We’ll light the fire and open a bottle of wine, have some supper, if you’re not too full of cake?’

‘I can think of nothing I would like more,’ he says.

An hour later he is full of scrambled eggs and they are sitting companionably either side of a roaring coal fire in her small terraced house, well into their second glasses of wine.

He asks after her brother and she tells him how Mark’s plane had been so damaged he’d had to ditch, then was captured and spent the rest of the war in a PoW camp. ‘I wrote to you about all of this,’ she says.

He ignores the jibe. ‘So he wasn’t that straggler, after all? Or anything to do with the IFF?’

‘No, thank heavens. All that guilt disappeared just as soon as we knew he was safe.’

‘What a relief, Kath. Did he come back safely?’

‘He’s an aeronautics engineer in Southampton, happily living with his partner. He’s always said he’d like to meet you and shake your hand some day, because radar saved his life more than once.’

‘I’d be honoured. He and his fellow fliers saved our country.’

They watch the flames for a few moments, remembering those desperate, dangerous days, when everyone’s future hung in the balance.

‘What about you, Vic? I hope you’ve had a good life?’

He tells her about his time in America, his peacetime work for the Met Office on radar for weather forecasting and his most recent job developing microwave technology. ‘I got caught by one of those new radar speed guns last year,’ he laughs. ‘And wished we’d never invented the ruddy thing.’

She asks about Ella, and he tells her they were happy for twenty years, and how he has found himself so lonely since she died. ‘I’d rather given up on life, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘But meeting you has been a real tonic. I’m going to pull myself together from now on.’

‘Did you have children?’

‘We hoped for it, but it never happened.’ He shakes his head. ‘By the time we got together we were both a bit over the hill, I suppose.’