‘So what was your wife’s name?’ asked Vee.

‘Della.’

‘Where did you meet her?’

‘On a tram, not long after the war – I gave her my seat. I was very young, and she was a few years older and she was worried that she’d never find anyone, like half the girls of her generation, I suppose – and I had a profession, and prospects.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘Delicate. Dainty.’ A porcelain shepherdess, he’d thought, the mud of the trenches still in his eyes. She had seemed like a miracle; he had thought that no one would ever want him.

‘And what happened?’

‘Oh …’ He’d never tried to frame it in words before; it was like using a rusty typewriter. ‘She was disappointed. I disappointed her. Time went by and we didn’t have the children we’d hoped for. And I worked irregular hours and it wasn’t as … as important a job as she’d thought. She felt I’d let her down; she was bitter.’ The missing ear, which hadn’t seemed to matter at first, had become the focus of her misery. ‘That’s the reason you never listen to me,’ she’d said. Shouted. Involuntarily, he placed a hand over the ugly crinkle of scar tissue. ‘I wanted a divorce, but Della refused – she said that she couldn’t manage on her own, that it would be humiliating. She said that people would either pity or despise her.’

‘Only rich women can get away with divorce,’ said Vee.

Jepson, startled, looked round at her. ‘But I would have made sure that she always had enough money to live on … Anyway, eventually I decided I couldn’t stick it any longer,’ he said, turning back again. ‘I told her I was going to move out.’

‘And is that when you were blackmailed?’

‘Yes.’

‘But who by?’

He made a harsh noise, like a heel scraped along the floor. ‘By Della. She said if I left, she would put her head in the gas oven.’

There was a shocked pause.

‘Do you think she would have?’ asked Vee.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Jepson. ‘Yes, she’d have done that.’ There had never been much of a gap between Della’s emotions and her actions. He had learned to expect violence in both: her knuckles jabbing at him in frustration – always the head, the ear. He thought with crawling horror of that moment in the kitchen at the Methodist Christmas party, when Mrs Claxton had shot out a hand and for a second it had been Della, and he’d cringed and covered his head, as he’d done so many times, for so long.

He wondered, now, how he’d endured it. There had, he supposed, been odd weeks of almost-normality, odd days of ordinary companionship, an occasional smile that had met with another; the years had slithered by and somehow he’d divided himself, so that at work he’d remained the dependable Jepson, diffident but well liked, and at home he’d been something hopeless and shapeless, a glove puppet playing the same character for every performance, Judy to Della’s Punch. And then, abruptly, it had ended.