‘I won’t.’

‘You’ll hate me.’

‘Listen,’ she said, sharply. ‘I doted on Donald so much I thought he was perfect, and then you came along and all I looked for were faults. Which is why I know there’s no badness in you. Not a speck of it. There isn’t anything I could hate. So tell me.’

And if she hadn’t demanded that, if she hadn’t made him tell her everything – every last scrap – then what would have happened, four weeks later, when Noel found that item in the North London Press, while searching for a suitable article to translate into Latin?

Vee had been making the bed in Miss Appleby’s room when she’d looked up and seen him in the doorway, a statue with a newspaper in its marble grip. She’d sat him down on the bed and he’d pointed mutely at the item, a six-line report on a body discovered after a rocket strike, confirmed by a police investigation to be a deserter from the Royal Navy, a Lieutenant Simeon Foster, aged thirty-four, who had absconded while owing ‘considerable sums’ in gambling debts, and who’d been on the run and living illegally in a ruined building. God forgive her, after the first shock she’d felt a rush of relief as strong as a downed brandy.

Noel had said nothing, and after a moment she’d sat down beside him, and had rested her hand on the back of his head, and they’d stayed like that, not speaking, while a band of pale sunlight had edged slowly down the chest of drawers and across the faded rug, illuminating the stain that a previous lodger called Mr Lomax had insisted wasn’t anything to do with him, despite the fact that it exactly matched his hair-dye. And then Noel had stood, rather stiffly, and said that he needed to clean out the chickens, and Vee had said, ‘Do you want me to keep that for you?’ and he’d nodded and handed her the newspaper. She’d folded it carefully and put it in a shoebox at the bottom of her wardrobe.

And it was then that she’d wondered what would have happened if he’d kept his secret – whether it would have been the start of a slow retreat, with Noel finding less and less to say to her until one day she discovered that everything in his life was a closed door, with her knocking from the other side, a cup of tea in one hand and a clean shirt over her arm – and she went into Mr Reddish’s room, which had a window that looked on to the back garden, and she stood and watched as Noel swept out the summerhouse with careful efficiency.

Spring

1945

It was early May, but so warm that Vee had wedged the back door open, and as she’d done so, a swallow had hurtled in, twisting along the scullery passage before doubling back towards the garden, passing her face so closely that she’d felt the rush of air across her cheek. Her shriek had served instead of a dinner-gong.