‘What can I get you to drink?’ he asked.

‘Just a lemonade, please.’

The place was packed, but she was able to watch her companion’s progress all the way to the bar, his head bobbing above the others’ like a buoy. Most of the customers were GIs – they were so clean-looking, thought Vee, and so smart, their uniforms might have been made to measure, smooth fabric stretched across well-fed bodies, everything gleaming, even their skin, even their teeth. The few visible Tommies looked used-up by comparison, grey and juiceless, uneasily jingling the change in the pockets of their sagging khaki, trying to stop their girls’ gaze from wandering over to the Yanks.

Vee edged one buttock on to a window seat, taking a moment’s respite. As she’d waited, nervously, for the corporal to ring the doorbell, she’d wondered what would be expected of her over the evening ahead – would she be required to talk or to listen? Most men, in her experience, were either tongue-tied, so that conversation had to be pushed along like a stalled motor-car, or wedded to one particular subject to which they returned at every single opportunity, so that the main problem was not that of thinking of topics, but of remaining awake so as to make the right kind of appreciative noises during a round-by-round account of a boxing-match that had taken place in 1923. Corporal O’Mahoney (‘Call me Mario’), however, had not only talked non-stop from the moment he’d arrived, a stream of stories and jokes, but had peppered his speech with questions, so that she’d had to stay on the alert – no, ‘Hampstead’ had nothing to do with ‘Ham’ so far as she knew; yes, she’d often seen squirrels on the Heath; no, she had never killed and roasted one – and then the train had stopped in the tunnel just before Camden Town and the lights had first flickered and then failed and Mario had immediately started telling a ghost story about a haunted garment factory where mysterious weeping was heard and a sewing-machine whirred in the darkness, and his deep rasp of a voice was so compelling that when the lights in the carriage suddenly came back on, everyone was leaning forward with slackened jaws, and there was an actual groan of annoyance when the carriage jolted into the station. ‘Tell you the end on the way home!’ Mario had shouted towards the exiting crowd, and there’d been grins and waves.

‘Can’t you tell me the end now?’ Vee had asked, as the train doors closed again.

‘Haven’t thought of it yet.’

‘You were making it up?’

‘Every word. You ever see a ghost?’

‘No. Have you?’

‘Only a couple.’ And he’d headed off on a tale about a box of doughnuts and a set of footsteps in the snow, and Vee had realized that her nervousness had dissipated because she didn’t have to do anything, it appeared, only hold on to her hat and enjoy the ride.