What she did know, however, was that she would never betray his memory. Not again. It had been a moment of madness with a man she’d never met before and had never seen since, but the guilt of it burned her heart with a pain she felt would never ease.

She viewed these twice-weekly visits to her in-laws as her duty to Bertie, a duty she would bear for the rest of her life. She was still his wife, after all, always would be. Mr and Mrs Barton frequently referred to her as ‘our daughter’. Who else did they have, now that he was gone?

But conversation was always sticky. Ivy seemed as insubstantial as thistledown, liable to blow away at the slightest wrong word. Albert senior was unchanging, gruff and uncommunicative, but at least he was usually solid and predictable. But she could never have foreseen this moment, this little Thomas Cook brochure, their faces so solemn and expectant.

‘We’ve some good friends who went on one of those tours,’ he said, and she began to relax. Perhaps he was just offering her the brochure by way of conversation. ‘They’ve recommended it to us. They found their son’s grave, you see. It was difficult, they said, but it gave them a great sense of solace.’

‘Are you considering it for yourselves?’ she asked.

‘We’ve thought about it, but . . .’ He inclined his head fractionally towards his wife, who was silently dabbing her eyes with a lacy handkerchief. ‘We wondered whether’ – he paused a moment – ‘whether you might go on our behalf?’

They’ve gone barmy, Ruby thought to herself. Me, travel to the battlefields, by myself? Wander around the trenches looking for signs of him, along with a load of gawping tourists? It was not just crazy, it was slightly distasteful.

Albert was still talking: ‘To pay our respects, as a family. As we don’t have a grave, you know.’

Oh, she knew all right, only too well. Bertie’s body had never been found. That was one of the hardest things: not knowing how he died, not being able to imagine where he lay. She still had nightmares, fuelled by photographs in the Illustrated London News that she could only look at through half-closed eyes, about his body entangled with those of others, entombed and rotting in a muddy crater somewhere near Ypres. She turned back to the brochure, but the sentences swam in her vision. She loved Bertie, of course she did, and always would. But surely this was a step too far? How would she ever survive seeing, for herself, those places of horror?

‘My dear?’ Albert prompted. ‘Would you be willing?’

‘I really don’t think I . . .’ she began, and then ran out of words. Surely they could not be asking her to go, alone, to this terrible place?

‘You hear these reports, you know . . .’ Ivy whispered into the silence.