Noel walked a few steps away and sat on the flat plinth of the Rockwell family tomb. The cold shot straight through the seat of his trousers, and he stood up again.

‘She was Mattie’s char? Working in Green Shutters?’

‘Yes. What’s she doing now? Do you know?’

‘She’s a nurse – a hospital sister, in Gibraltar.’ But he spoke distractedly, because the past had just been pulled apart and rearranged, so that his mother and Mattie and Vee were no longer separate links in a chain, but overlapping, and his godmother was talking to young Ida in the hall, while Ida stood mopping the same flagstones that Vee cursed daily (‘What I wouldn’t give for some nice, flat linoleum …’). And when he himself was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes and idly glancing out at a chaffinch in the apple tree, he was not only seeing just what Ida had seen at the same age but probably using the same potato peeler, possibly even with the same capability. He looked appraisingly at his hands – the right a little larger than the left, the nails narrow, the knuckles prominent.

‘I haven’t said something that I shouldn’t, have I?’ asked Winnie.

‘No. Not in the least.’

Though she could see from his face that a whole dish of thoughts was simmering away. ‘I could tell you some more about Ida and the Amazons if you’d like,’ she said. ‘Shall we walk a bit, though? I’m turning into an icicle.’ She let Noel lead, and he took her on an intricate circuit of the cemetery, so that her Amazon tales were interspersed with brief and fluent accounts of his favourite incumbents (‘… and he wrote “Abide With Me”, which Mattie always said had the perfect rhythm for when you were trying to crank a recalcitrant ambulance engine’).

‘You do sound like her, you know,’ said Winnie, as they re-joined the main path.

‘Do I?’ For a second, he looked startled. ‘Oh, you mean Mattie?’

‘Yes. In terms of your vocabulary, I mean – you don’t have quite her volume. My friend Elsie, the Wren I was telling you about, told me that when she has to give commands she always pretends to be Miss Simpkin. She says it gives her confidence.’

‘“Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.”’

‘Let me guess. Millicent Fawcett?’

‘I think it’s George Herbert.’

‘Do you know, I actually recited one of your godmother’s quotes when I met up with my twin before Christmas: “Say not the needle is the most proper pen for women.”’

‘Thomas Fuller,’ said Noel, back on firmer ground. ‘Is this the twin that Ida Pearse used to snub?’

‘Yes,’ said Winnie. ‘Unfortunately, it didn’t have a permanent effect.’

‘Is she a warden too?’

‘No, though she writes about them as if she were.’

‘In what?’

‘In a new novel called Tin Helmet. It’s doing terribly well, so she tells me. Reprinting already.’

‘Is it good? Should I read it?’

Winnie hesitated. ‘How old are you, again?’