‘Nothing,’ Doreen had said. ‘Not in our sector. I don’t know where they fell.’

Miles away, it had turned out – one in Stoke Newington and one in Southwark, the first landing harmlessly in a park, the second squarely on a block of municipal flats, killing twenty-two and injuring scores. There was a scientific explanation for the way the noise seemed to leap across the city, but the effect was to make the rockets feel ubiquitous, constant, inescapable. Winnie had heard yet another on her way to the restaurant – a thud that had shivered the pavement and sent every shop-window trembling so that reflections had scurried across the glass.

‘So what’s this important news?’ she asked. She wondered if Avril was expecting, though it seemed unlikely from the look of her, a green leather belt cinched tightly around the waist of her charcoal dress. Winnie herself had missed a monthly just after Emlyn had gone off to fight, and though it had come to nothing, she sometimes speculated on what would have happened if she’d actually been pregnant. Presumably she and the child would have gone to live with her parents for the duration, and she would never have discovered that she was capable of using a broom to dislodge an incendiary from a roof gutter while leaning over a parapet with someone holding her feet – nor would she have learned how to mend a stirrup pump, or win at Shove Ha’penny, or instruct a hall-ful of middle-aged men on ‘The Duties of the Incident Officer’, or to carefully collect in a bloodied canvas bucket the shreds and wedges of what had recently been a person.

‘Let’s order first,’ said Avril. ‘It’s on me, obviously.’

‘Thanks.’ Winnie, currently bringing home two pounds five shillings a week, had long ago swallowed her pride on that score.

Disappointingly, there was no plover, so she settled for ravioli followed by fried whitebait, her stomach giving an audible groan of anticipation.

‘Go on, then,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

Avril pursed her lips, enjoying the moment. ‘I’ve written a book,’ she said.

Winnie had to adjust her expression, from one of cynical expectation to one of genuine surprise. So many of Avril’s triumphs were not only irritating and apparently unmerited, but seemed framed specifically in order to annoy – ‘Mr Carson told me confidentially that the reason that I was so bad at secretarial work was that I was too clever and that was why he was going to promote me’ – but this was a concrete achievement.

‘A book? You never told me you were writing one!’

‘I don’t tell you everything.’

‘Oh yes, you do, usually in the most tremendous detail.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘Then how do I know about Clive’s birthmark? It’s not anything I would ever have asked you, but you told me anyway and now I can’t look at him without thinking about it.’

‘I think it’s probably better to tell people too many things than sit like a total clam-shell, refusing to give any details of your private life at all.’