Noel and Vee exchanged a brief and inadvertent glance.

‘What did you do today, Mr Jepson?’ asked Vee, recovering herself. ‘Any news for us?’

She still couldn’t bring herself to call him by his first name in front of others, though she supposed that at least half the house was aware that they went to the cinema together nearly every Saturday evening. Last week, while leaving the Regal arm in arm, having seen Blithe Spirit, they had bumped into Mrs Claxton from the Methodist knitting circle and Vee had felt instantly like the Whore of Babylon, but Mrs Claxton had been perfectly pleasant and had told Mr Jepson that she was a regular reader of the North London Press and that the Kwik Krosswords were currently much too difficult. ‘I shall pass that on to the relevant department,’ Gerry had said, and he probably had, since reliability was one of his qualities. He also listened when she spoke, remembered what she said last time, paid for the cinema tickets, and loaned her a clean handkerchief during the sad bits; there was not one single, solitary thing about the situation that Vee was used to. She sometimes felt like a Hottentot walking out with a missionary, except that Jepson was also surprisingly cheerful. When Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit had begun one of her ringing, dramatic pronouncements, he’d whispered, ‘Mr Reddish,’ and she’d nearly dropped her ice-cream.

‘It’s been an interesting day,’ Jepson was saying. ‘I went to interview a soldier who’d been captured at Dunkirk, and who’s only just arrived home. He was in a camp in Poland, and just at the point when liberation began to seem likely, all the prisoners were suddenly forced by the guards to evacuate the camp and head towards Germany – they had no warning at all, it was midwinter and some of the men didn’t even have proper boots, only rough slippers.’

‘Frostbite and worse,’ said Dr Parry-Jones. ‘There must have been deaths.’

‘Yes. A great many. This young man was lucky, in a way. After weeks of the most awful conditions – they had to sleep outdoors, in the fields – he collapsed by the road and was found by someone decent and taken to a German hospital. He was eventually flown back a week ago.’

Lieutenant Emlyn Crowther had looked thin but not moribund, his deprivations more visible in his actions than his appearance – his rounding-up and consuming of every single biscuit crumb on the plate, his use of the coffee mug as a hand-warmer, his stillness, as of someone trying, desperately, to hoard every scrap of energy.

‘Did he have a sweetheart waiting?’ asked Miss Appleby.

‘A wife,’ said Jepson. ‘A nice woman. She was a full-time warden until last month.’

‘No children?’

‘No. I think they’d only just married when he went away.’ Jepson had stayed with the couple for over an hour, and what had struck him most was how careful, how polite, they were with each other – there’d been none of the verbal shorthand of the long relationship, no comfortable slide into mutual memory. It was as if they were on adjacent ships in a convoy, conversing in semaphore.