‘Is he still at school?’

‘No, but he has tutors. He’s clever. They say he’s going to sail through his matriculation. The lady doctor who teaches him science said that he ought to study medicine, but the last I heard, he wanted to be an architectural historian, whatever that is …’ Vee could hear herself, clattering away unstoppably, like Mrs Arthur at the knitting circle, going on about her son’s accountancy exams, but it seemed as if, once started, she couldn’t stop boasting about this paragon that she’d raised, not that she’d ever have said any of this in front of him. ‘… And his Latin tutor says he’s a born linguist. And he can cook.’

‘He can cook?’

‘One of the lodgers calls him the Esc— the Escoff—what’s the word? A French chef who’s very famous.’

‘Escoffier,’ said Ida, pulling the name out of her past.

‘He’s making a big pile of eclairs today. For the victory celebrations. And he’s always quoting things, poems and Latin, and so on.’

‘Dr Simpkin did the same.’

‘And he reads all the time. Lives in the library.’ There was a pause. ‘Anything else?’ she enquired, lifting her chin pugnaciously, and Ida all at once knew exactly who this woman reminded her of: her own aunt – a scrappy fighter, fierce, protective and scorchingly proud of her charge.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Except – what’s he like?’

The question disconcerted Vee. You could never compare Noel to anything; it was like comparing a banana to a plate of chops.

‘He’s like … he’s like himself,’ she said, and as she spoke, she heard his voice calling ‘Mar?’ from somewhere in the house.

Ida looked startled.

‘It was his choice to call me that, it wasn’t my idea,’ said Vee. ‘Hang on,’ she added, ‘I’ll put him off.’

She was only out of the room for half a minute, just enough time for Ida to take a couple of steadying breaths; it had taken her three days to summon up the courage to visit the house. She had called on her family but had stayed in the nurses’ hostel at St Thomas’s, where she’d trained, and both of these circumstances had made her feel junior, shrunken. And London – London itself had been a terrible shock: nothing she’d read or heard about had truly prepared her for its battered, scabbed reality, every view scarred, every street knocked around, the population so used to the destruction that they scarcely noticed it any more, walking straight past, as if ignoring a drunk in a doorway.

‘I’ve told him it’s someone from the Methodist knitting circle,’ said Vee, reappearing. ‘He’s going to start on his baking, so I can let you out through the front door.’

‘All right,’ said Ida. There was a pause. ‘I was fifteen,’ she said.

‘I had a son at seventeen,’ said Vee. ‘An accident, like yours.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I brought him up.’

Ida dropped her gaze. The bird was singing on the roof again, like someone whistling in a waiting room. ‘I’ll go,’ she said.