Vee followed her towards the front door, Ida halting involuntarily beside the small framed photograph on one of the drawing-room bookshelves; Noel, the same age as when she’d last seen him, sitting on a bench with Dr Simpkin. It was like a ruled line across her past; she’d had a life before those two, and a life after, and the second was infinitely better.

‘Is your boat today?’ asked Vee.

‘Yes. Ten o’clock this evening.’

‘And when do you come back for good?’

Ida shook her head before she spoke. ‘I won’t. Gibraltar’s my home now. I have a little house there with my aunt.’ She thought of the balcony, draped in sunlight, the slice of sea that swayed between the houses opposite, the great rock, like a whale breaching above the rooftops.

‘You’ve no family in London?’

‘Yes, I have family but … they think I’ve got above myself.’ Two days ago, she had visited her parents’ flat and had spent all afternoon sitting in the kitchen, her siblings bobbing in and out, two brothers that she’d never met before, her mother visibly older but still pretty, still dispensing affection for only as long as it pleased her, still poised to deride anything she viewed as pretension: advice gained from a book, for instance, or a word she hadn’t heard before, or an interest or an ambition that reached beyond her own experience. Ida had been told about bombs and babies and fiancées and celebrations, but no one had asked her any questions, so that anything she’d said about her own life had had to be pushed into the conversation, and had sounded like boasting. By the end of the visit, she’d hated the shrill brightness in her own voice, so different to the way that she usually sounded.

She pulled her eyes from the photograph, and saw behind it the spines of a row of labelled box-files: NOEL, GEOGRAPHY. NOEL, CLASSICS. NOEL, HISTORY. NOEL, RECIPES. NOEL, CHEMISTRY. NOEL, POLISH.

‘Thank you,’ she said, impulsively. ‘Thank you for being a mother to him.’

She held out her hand, and after a surprised second, Vee shook it, and then Ida continued briskly into the hall, and opened the front door with the double tug that it had always needed.

‘Wait,’ said Vee, but the word stuck in her throat so that Ida couldn’t hear it.

‘Wait,’ she said again, just before the door closed. ‘Wait there a moment.’ There was a pain in Vee’s chest, as if she’d been cracked in half, but she turned and walked down the passage towards the kitchen. Noel was weighing ingredients, and he stood and listened to her with a spoon drooping in his hand, a trickle of sugar falling unnoticed on to the table.

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s here?’ His eyes were huge. He made an abrupt movement as if to head to the door, and then swayed back.

‘What does she want?’

‘Nothing – no, it’s not like that, not money or anything. She came to check if I was looking after you properly. To see if I passed muster.’