Noel kept his eyes on the muddy lane and mentally listed all the most mundane reasons possible for the delay, and then thought, for the twentieth time, about the V-2 that he’d heard, and wondered why she hadn’t tried to telephone, and was impelled to put on his slippers and go back downstairs to check if the line was working. He lifted the receiver, hoping for the silence that would explain Vee’s failure to ring, and heard instead the usual echoing crackles, and that was when he began to feel afraid, the feeling knifing out from the past, from a night half his lifetime ago, when Mattie had lost herself entirely and had unbolted the door and wandered into the darkness. The events that had followed – Noel’s removal to his aunt and uncle in Kentish Town, Mattie’s death in hospital, the new school, the evacuation to St Albans – had been compressed in his mind to a single blurred journey, like a train carriage diving into a tunnel, the view extinguished, the voices of strangers inaudible beneath the roar of the engine, the faces in the half-light as featureless as plates. And then, with sudden and perfect clarity, the recollection of seeing Vee, red-faced, running to catch a bus with an empty collection box in her hand while a man shouted threats at her from an open front door. That was when his second life had begun, flimsy and makeshift initially, before a slow tide had caught and turned it, pulled it gradually towards the solid anchor of the first, and the two had abutted, so that now Green Shutters was as much one as the other, and a clatter in the hall might be Mattie trying to juggle conkers or Vee dropping a box of cotton reels, and to find the door unbolted again, to find himself for the second time searching hopelessly in the dark, was hideous.

He replaced the receiver and knew that he wouldn’t sleep. A narrow strip of moonlight lay across the floor, bisecting the chessboard. Pushing the shutter closed, he turned on the light and set out the pieces – the pawns with their polished heads, the black king who bore the tooth-marks of a visiting dog, the rooks (or castles), into whose crenellated tops one could wedge a little finger, and wear like a Balinese dancer’s nails. He started by playing Mario and beat him by a fool’s mate in three, and then set himself up against Genevieve Lumb, and let her win. Mattie was always a more difficult proposition; she began with pawn to e4, an obvious Sicilian defence, but she’d caught him out before now. He turned the board again and studied it, elbows on knees, hands clasped to stop them trembling.

He was frying bacon when Vee walked into the kitchen, her footsteps inaudible under the sizzle. ‘I’m back!’ she said. ‘You won’t believe what happened!’ and Noel turned, relief flapping across his face, to be replaced almost instantly with something darker, and Vee knew straight away that she’d been wrong to predict that he’d be merely cross and worried, because it was far worse than that.