‘Well?’

‘Yes, I’d definitely know your ear if I saw it again,’ he said, a little huskily.

‘And I’d certainly know yours,’ said Genevieve. ‘I don’t mean that at all in a nasty way,’ she added. ‘It’s just that they’re very visible.’

Noel nodded glumly. ‘What did you want to tell me?’

‘I have to go back to school.’ She pulled a face indicative of utter misery. ‘Mummy’s wired to say that London’s too dangerous and she can’t sleep until I’m back in Herefordshire. Will you write to me?’

‘Yes. Hang on a minute—’ He hurried over to the back wall, where a chicken was ineptly balanced, its head tilted, one silly eye contemplating the Heath beyond. Wary of the beak, he picked it up, disliking its prickly weightlessness, and tossed it back towards the summer house which he and Vee had converted into a coop.

‘I was thinking,’ said Genevieve, ‘that in four years’ time we can both go to Cambridge, and at twenty-one we can get married without my parents’ permission, though I’m afraid that I wouldn’t want sexual relations until I was ready to have children. Perhaps not until I’m twenty-six or twenty-seven. Would you mind that?’

He shook his head dutifully, though merely hearing her enunciate the word ‘sexual’ meant that he had to turn away, crouching slightly, and pretend to look under a bush for eggs.

‘Of course, you don’t have any parents, do you?’ asked Genevieve. ‘So perhaps you could marry at sixteen if you wanted to. I meant to ask you why you call your aunt Ma.’

‘It’s “Mar” – M A R,’ he said, ‘short for Margery.’ Except, of course, that her name wasn’t really Margery, it was Vee, and she wasn’t his aunt at all – just as his godmother Mattie, with whom he’d lived previously, hadn’t actually been his godmother. He didn’t have a family tree, he had a Venn diagram, in which none of the circles overlapped.

‘Oh,’ he exclaimed, ‘look!’ He pushed aside a swag of leaves; there were four eggs clustered in a shallow depression under the spotted laurel. Genevieve knelt beside him and reached into the hollow.

‘This one’s still warm,’ she said, holding it to her own cheek and then his.

Vee was watching from the kitchen window. She’d been noticing lately that girls liked Noel – and not just girls; grown women went out of their way to talk to him, and she thought it was maybe because when he wasn’t sounding like a junior member of the Brains Trust, he actually listened to people; he wasn’t just waiting to tip in his own comments, like someone off-loading gravel. Or maybe it was because he had a way of making them laugh. It certainly wasn’t his looks, God bless him.

The kettle was boiling, and Vee picked up the tea strainer and tipped the used leaves back into the pot. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a good, strong cup of tea – or, for that matter, a slice of bread that had a bit of spring to it, or a bun with icing, or a whole handful of currants instead of a guilty couple from a hoarded packet. A hopeful belief had been sustaining her that when the war ended (and it couldn’t be long now, the Allies snapping at the Siegfried Line) there’d be food in wagonloads again – but this idea had been squashed by Mr Jepson, who’d pointed out that Great Britain was up to her hair-roots in debt, and regretfully, in his opinion, there’d be rationing for at least another five years, so no end to the meanness, the blandness, the dismal substitutions and the counterfeits that fooled no one: sugar by the grain, sausages stuffed with bread …