Outside, the brief thaw was over, the sky cloudless but the air like a clamp, the water in the gutters already beginning to freeze. Noel ducked into a café to buy a cup of cocoa and then came straight out again, having realized that his father had forgotten to give him the change from the half-crown, so that all he had left was twopence for the Tube. He took the District Line to Embankment and then fell asleep in the relative warmth of the Northern Line, waking with a start to find the train drawing into Highgate, which meant that not only was he on the wrong branch, but that a day which had begun with an imaginary visit to Vee’s grave had now deposited him just half a mile from the cemetery in question. It seemed almost an invitation, and one that slotted perfectly into his current mood; it was a while since he had been there.

A party of mourners was straggling up the main path and Noel stood aside to let them pass; they were an oddly disparate bunch, headed by an elderly lady with the profile of a Sitwell, and a vicar still wearing his surplice and carrying the Book of Common Prayer. Next came a knot of solidly upper-crust Wimbourne-types, discussing someone called ‘old Eggy’, followed by a silent group of working men, black armbands on their jackets, and then a middle-aged woman, arm in arm with a tiny, ancient father, both of them speaking Greek.

A few yards behind the others, a plump young woman in a grey coat and beret had stopped to read a tombstone. She looked up as Noel approached, and said, ‘Oh, I know you, don’t I?’ and offered a mittened hand. ‘Winnie Crowther – we met by the ruined church. I’m the warden who wrote you a letter.’

Wonderingly, he shook it. ‘Noel Bostock. You knew Mattie.’ And the trajectory of the day, which had started low, and had sunk even further, seemed to rise a little.

She was looking comically shocked. ‘Mattie?’ I wouldn’t have dared to call her that. She was always Miss Simpkin to us.’

‘She was my godmother. I was actually just about to visit her grave.’

‘Oh, may I come?’

Involuntarily, Noel glanced back up the hill at the other mourners.

‘No, I’m not strictly with them,’ said Winnie. ‘The grave-diggers took advantage of the thaw – one big hole, I’m afraid. I was here to pay my respects to an old chap who died in my sector.’

‘From a V-2?’

‘From the cold, as a matter of fact.’ There was a pause. ‘If you’d rather visit the grave on your own, then of course I won’t intrude.’

‘No,’ said Noel, quickly. ‘I’d very much like you to. I don’t know anyone else who actually knew Mattie,’ and he set off at an assured pace, taking a side-shoot off the main path that passed between ranks of tilting Victorian headstones and pausing beside George Eliot’s grave, on which someone had placed a mouldering copy of Middlemarch.