Vee, tight-lipped, returned to the dining room, where Noel was stacking plates.

‘I remember that I once took a young lady mushroom-picking,’ said Mr Reddish, back on his favourite topic. ‘It was very early morning, and the grass was thick with dew, and before we’d walked ten yards she gave a little scream and said that it was ruining her shoes, and that she wouldn’t go a step further unless I gave her a piggy-back. Well, you won’t believe me when I tell you that I carried her nearly a mile. I was sweating like a Trojan, up hill and down dale, and when we finally reached the field I set her down and she thanked me very nicely, I must say.’ He leaned back with the air of someone who’d just held an audience spellbound; none of his stories had any point to them.

‘My uncle died of a rupture after carrying a pig across a field,’ said Miss Zawadska. ‘Excuse me, I need to go to work. Could you save dessert for me?’ She rose, and there was the usual reverent pause as everyone watched her move across the room – beauty incarnate, a nipped waist and a full bosom, a face like a cameo, hair the colour of heavy cream; ‘the Madonna of the Vale’, as Mr Reddish called her, his tone wavering between sentiment and senile lust. Vee followed her out with a tray of dishes, and caught up as Miss Zawadska paused beside the hall mirror and adjusted a hair-grip.

‘You picked up your Red Cross letter from the hall table?’ asked Vee.

‘Thank you, yes.’

‘Won’t be too long now, maybe,’ said Vee. ‘Before he’s back, I mean.’

Miss Zawadska’s fiancé was a prisoner-of-war, captured just after D-Day; the photograph beside her bed was of someone as preposterously good-looking as herself.

‘I am not impatient,’ said Miss Zawadska.

‘No?’

‘He is safe now and we have our whole lives ahead.’ She smiled placidly, and Vee shifted the tray to get past and glimpsed her own reflection in the mirror, looking like the ‘before’ illustration in an advertisement for nerve tonic. She had never in her adult life looked forward to the future; there had always been something up ahead to be dreaded or dodged. The end of the war might mean less chance of sudden death, but there’d also likely be more housing available and fewer lodgers, and there was barely enough money for the bills as it was. Noel, as usual, was unable to see any difficulties. ‘I’m the sole beneficiary of Mattie’s will, and you’re my guardian. All we have to do is actually go to the solicitor and sign a few papers, and then you’d have access to the money.’

‘But what if he asked me questions?’

‘What sort of questions?’

‘About Margery Overs.’

‘He never met Margery Overs, so if I say that’s who you are, and you say that’s who you are, then why on earth would he think that you were someone else? She’s hardly going to burst in and declare that you’re an imposter.’