‘Does he? There’s another year or two before you have to take that, isn’t there?’

She pushed open the gate of their own house, and glanced up to see Miss Zawadska raising her blackouts. She worked nights at the BBC canteen and lived arsy-tarsy to the rest of them, eating Irish stew for breakfast and coming home to a supper of porridge.

‘I bought some carrots,’ said Vee. ‘Though they look woody to me. Are you using up the rest of that liver?’

‘Yes, in a hot-pot.’

‘I’ve never seen a liver that thick before – when I asked if it came from a horse, the butcher pretended he couldn’t hear me.’

‘He should have said, “Neigh”.’

She sniggered. ‘What’s for afters?’

‘Apple charlotte.’

‘Very nice.’

As usual, there was scarcely any difference between the temperature outside and inside the house. There was generally enough coke for a fire in the drawing room and the kitchen, and Vee had found a cluster of stone hot-water bottles in the cellar, which meant that so far none of the lodgers had been found as a frozen corpse in the morning, but all of them wore coats in the house and Mr Reddish wore a deer-stalker hat, even during meals.

Vee filled the kettle and then started violently as a face appeared at the kitchen window.

‘Is Noel in?’ The voice was muffled, but imperious.

‘It’s your friend again!’ called Vee, over her shoulder. ‘I wish she’d come to the door instead of climbing over the fence, and if you’re out there, can you …’

‘Yes, I’ll feed the chickens,’ said Noel, already hurrying down the scullery passage, his heart beating almost as fast as when he’d heard the buzz bomb, though in a more pleasurable way. Genevieve Lumb was waiting for him outside the back door. She was wearing her blue school mac and a hair-slide in the shape of a bow, and her hair was in two short plaits, the ends fanning out like curtain tassels. Her eyelashes were dark and her eyes an unusual shade of brown; after considerable study Noel had identified them in an old paint chart as ‘burnt umber’.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘I have something to tell you,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘In a minute.’ Genevieve’s ambition was to write detective novels, and she liked to apply an element of suspense to her own conversations. ‘Did you hear the doodlebug?’

‘Yes.’ At times, her presence seemed to rob Noel of the ability to speak in sentences. ‘I did,’ he added, inadequately.

‘Three killed, apparently,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard that the V-1 blast is so bad that people can be blown to pieces and have to be identified by a piece of ear, or their foot. I don’t think I have very distinctive feet, but my ears are quite unusual. What do you think?’ She turned sideways and presented her left ear to Noel, and he leaned forward and examined its curlicues, the neatly rolled edge of the pinna, the velvety pinkness of the lobe.