‘Are you saying that’s what I do?’

‘Yes, absolutely. And if you bottle things up, they end up fermenting inside you.’

‘I don’t bottle things up. I just don’t tell you.’

Winnie’s voice was shrill enough to turn the heads of the diners at the next table. She took a hasty sip of wine. Every conversation with Avril was like this – a series of skirmishes interspersed with the odd, fragile truce. Their relationship now was almost indistinguishable from the one they’d had at ten, an unfriendly rivalry in which the balance of power was always Avril’s, though over the years, surreptitious kicks and deliberate sneaking had been replaced, on Avril’s side, with kindly condescension, and on Winnie’s with utter recalcitrance.

She could see her ravioli approaching. ‘So, go on, tell me about this book,’ she said, gripping her cutlery.

Avril lit a cigarette. ‘Do you remember the pamphlet I wrote about women at work?’

‘The one you interviewed me for?’ It was quite a pleasant memory: Avril sitting listening to her, making notes, refraining from criticism or contradiction, asking questions and then actually allowing Winnie to answer them rather than vaulting in with her own replies. The written account (succinct and surprisingly accurate) had appeared between that of a policewoman and a member of a barrage-balloon crew. ‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ she asked, her mouth full of pasta. ‘This is delicious.’

‘In just a minute.’

‘So did the MoI ask you to do a longer version?’

‘It’s not actually a Ministry publication. It’s a novel.’

‘A novel? What’s the title?’

‘Tin Helmet.’

‘A war novel?’

‘Yes. Of sorts. I was at a party last year and a man from Hatchards started saying that there were plenty of good first-hand accounts of the Blitz, but thin pickings fictionally. Have you read Greene’s Ministry of Fear?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, it’s all spies and spivs. Very good on the raids, but nothing with any soul or depth. So I thought, Why not give it a go? After all, when my short story was published in Isis, the editor said the prose was both luminous and excoriating.’

Avril seemed to be smoking with tremendous concentration, knocking off the ash with such assiduousness that a plug of smouldering tobacco fell on to the table. Winnie automatically doused it with a splash of wine.

‘You’ve made a hole now,’ she said, peering at the mess. ‘Someone will have to bleach and then darn that.’

‘The book’s about a female air-raid warden,’ said Avril. ‘Now don’t get hold of the wrong end of the stick,’ she added, as Winnie’s head jerked up. ‘It’s a novel, it’s not about you.’

‘It’s not about me, but it’s about a female air-raid warden? How many other female air-raid wardens do you know?’

‘It’s a novel, Winnie. The character is fictional.’

‘So you keep saying, but you seem awfully nervous about something.’

‘Well, I was worried that I’d get exactly this reaction,’ said Avril, lighting another cigarette. Her soup was beginning to congeal. ‘Obviously, I drew on your notes, and on what you’ve told me over the years. I wouldn’t want to be inaccurate.’