‘Marched?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s the middle of winter!’

Clive made a rather helpless gesture. ‘I didn’t know whether to tell you. There’s no certainty about this information, obviously, and, of course, it’s …’

Automatically, in the childish gesture always used at Post 9, Winnie found herself lifting a hand to her lips, and turning an imaginary key.

‘Thank you, Clive,’ she said.

He patted her arm. ‘You know that if I hear anything more … You’re going now?’

‘Yes. Say goodbye to Avril from me, will you, and congratulations and all that.’

‘I shall. You know, she thinks the world of you, Winnie.’

Even in her current state of mind she had to hold back a wordless puff of disbelief.

She arrived back at the flat hardly aware of having made the journey, and immediately took the old sewing basket and the suitcase from under the bed, and opened both, and sat back on her heels, staring at the bundles of letters. The one certainty – the one absolute certainty –she’d had about Emlyn over the preceding four and a half years was that he was safe: out of the fighting and behind a prison fence, and safe. She didn’t know when he’d be coming back, or how long he’d have to remain in the army, or what either of them would do after the war, or where they’d live, or what on earth they would have to talk about beside the advantages of parquet flooring over linoleum, but she’d always assumed that at the end of the war he’d be alive. And how entirely stupid that assumption suddenly seemed, as if there were rules in war, as if fairness came into it, as if a bullet in combat were the only way for a soldier to die. She’d heard dozens of stories of people losing sons or husbands in unexpected ways or stupid accidents, tanks swinging round during training, catastrophic parachute drops, traffic collisions whilst on leave, neglected colds in army camps that led to ’flu, but somehow that hadn’t intruded on the imaginary cocoon she’d spun around Emlyn. He’d been invulnerable, which had meant she could stow all those stifling letters under the bed, and turn away and do other things. It had been different at first: she’d had a Red Cross postcard when he’d been captured in France and then nothing at all for nearly two months, so that when his first letter had arrived from the camp, in July of 1940, it had been like a great gasp of oxygen after weeks of holding her breath; she had read and re-read it until the creases had pulled apart, and by then she’d memorized every sentence.

She started lifting the bundles from the suitcase, each layer older than the last, until she reached those early letters, handled so often that their written surface had the texture of felt.

‘Dearest darling, I can’t stop thinking about you, I can’t forget for a second that you’re not with me …’ The words poured on to the page, seemingly without artifice or hesitation; she remembered that, as she’d read, she’d heard Emlyn’s voice, and she tried to recall it now, but though she could have described its lineaments – a trace of a Welsh accent, a teacher’s tendency to over-pronounce long words (she had teased him about that) – the actual sound of it was lost to her. The phrases that had once turned her inside-out brought only a flat sadness.