Noel turned and picked his way through the ruts towards Green Shutters. When he arrived at the gate he looked round, but his father had gone.

‘I’m too fond of you not to tell you the truth,’ said Winnie, keeping her voice low, her expression warm, yet regretful. ‘We’ve known each other for nearly half our lives. You’re a decent man. There was a time when the only thing that I wanted was to marry you and to settle down and raise a family, but that’ – her voice shook a little – ‘that was before the tide of war swept us apart.’

‘Oh, give over!’ said her friend Elsie. ‘I can’t say that bit about the tide, Gordon’ll think I’ve gone nuts. But I liked what you said first, the bit about half our lives – hang on.’ She licked the end of her pencil and transcribed a few words on to the back cover of the Radio Times. ‘Go on, then,’ she said. ‘I need something about there not being anyone else.’

‘Why? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to pretend that you’ve met another chap and fallen in love?’

‘No, because I haven’t, and if Gordon asks me what this other chap’s called and where I met him, and what regiment he’s in and where he’s from, I’ll be stumped, won’t I? You know I can’t lie the way you do. Act, I mean,’ she corrected herself, over Winnie’s protest, and then grinned and turned her attention again to the Radio Times, her small, neat features sharpening with concentration. She was a petty officer in the WRNS and only a little younger than Winnie, but in her current pose – sitting cross-legged on a cushion, as close to the electric fire as possible, a blanket over her shoulders and Winnie’s beret pulled down over her ears – she looked about eleven, the same age as when they’d first met as fellow Amazons on a breezy hillside on Hampstead Heath. Winnie, who had been dressed in a Liberty double-breasted woollen coat with hartshorn toggles, could still remember the shock of noticing that Elsie, in February, was wearing a man’s jacket and no gloves, her fingers blebbed with chilblains. Poverty, before that moment, had been something that Winnie had read about in children’s stories – picturesquely smudged chimney sweeps and large-eyed matchgirls with a delicate pallor and long golden hair. She hadn’t realized that cheap food could make you spotty or a freezing flat could give you ugly hands; she hadn’t realized, either, that poor people weren’t necessarily ashamed of their poverty. If Elsie mentioned that she’d never tasted a tomato or been to the theatre or owned a brand-new item of clothing, she stated it merely as a fact; it was Winnie who’d found the admissions embarrassing, pointing up as they did the velvety ease of her own life. One week, she’d brought a tomato for Elsie to try, expecting wonderment, and Elsie had coughed out the half-chewed piece into her palm and thrown it into a bush. ‘Horrible,’ she’d said, cheerfully enough. The gloves had gone down better – a pair lined with rabbit-fur, which Winnie hadn’t ever worn because they reminded her of Benjamin Bunny – but their actual friendship had sprung not from patronage, but from an overheard remark.