‘I turned it,’ she said. ‘I’ll give it a soak in a minute – you don’t happen to know where Noel’s off to?’

‘I don’t, I’m afraid. Would you like me to try and catch up with him?’

She hesitated and then shook her head. ‘No, thanks – probably better to leave him. He’ll come round.’

‘Morning, Mrs Overs,’ said Miss Appleby, clattering down the stairs, and then coming face to face with Vee and performing a double-take of music-hall proportions. ‘Ooh, can see you had a good time,’ she said, giving a distinctly sisterly wink before carrying on towards the kitchen, and Vee, rather stunned, turned and saw herself in the hall mirror, eyes like boiled onions, hat askew, her hair down at the back, no lipstick, a streak of powder on her neck, the skin of which was already blotchy with an incipient blush. ‘There was a V-2 on the railway lines,’ she said, rubbing at her throat. ‘I’ve been travelling all night, trying to get home, I knew he’d be worried.’

‘I thought it would probably be something like that,’ said Mr Jepson. ‘I said as much to Noel. As did Mr Reddish.’

‘I don’t know what Miss Appleby was implying,’ said Vee, though obviously she did; it had been about as subtle as a dropped fire-iron. ‘I’m not that type of woman.’

‘Of course not,’ said Mr Jepson. ‘And the corporal’s—’ He checked himself, his mouth staying open but no sound issuing from it, so he looked like a stuck film.

‘What?’ asked Vee.

Jepson unstuck himself. ‘Just that … well, I’m sure you know.’

‘Know what?’

It took a couple of attempts for him to answer, his voice creaking as it emerged. ‘That Corporal O’Mahoney’s not that type of man.’

For a moment she didn’t understand, too tired to connect two thoughts that didn’t seem to fit together.

‘I think there’s tea,’ said Jepson, rather hurriedly. ‘Would you like a cup?’

‘You’re not saying he’s a – a pansy? But he’s not like …’ Her mind jumped back to poor Ronald Cuffley in the village where she’d grown up, who’d never been like the other boys, a lamb among bullocks, and who after Eddie Clare had accused him of trying to touch him where he shouldn’t, had been pushed over and rolled in cow-pats, tripped, punched, smacked, taunted, week after week, year after year, until one day he’d drunk Brasso and his mother had stood in the road outside the church on Sunday and shouted at everyone that they were no better than the beasts of the field. ‘The corporal’s not like that,’ she said.

Jepson was silent. Vee removed her hat and looked back at the mirror, smoothing her hair.

‘Yesterday he got into a fight because of me,’ she said. ‘He thought someone had knocked me down, and he ended up being arrested. Does that sound like a pansy?’

Jepson looked down at the space where the hall carpet used to be. ‘The only man in my battalion to win an MC was an invert,’ he said, quietly. ‘But I really shouldn’t have said anything.’