Daisy was sleeping with Boy again, on his occasional visits home. She had sworn she never would after catching him with those awful women in Aldgate. But he had put pressure on her. He said that fighting men needed consolation when they came home, and he had promised never to visit prostitutes again. She did not really believe his promises, but all the same she gave in, albeit against her inclination. After all, she told herself, I did marry him for better or worse.

However, she no longer took any pleasure in sex with him, unfortunately. She could go to bed with Boy but she could not fall back in love with him. She had to use cream for lubrication. She had tried to summon again the fond feelings she had once had for him, when she had found him an exciting young aristocrat with the world at his feet, full of fun and capable of enjoying life thoroughly. But he was not really exciting, she now realized: he was just a selfish and rather limited man with a title. When he was on top of her, all she could think about was that he might be passing her some disgusting infection.

Charlie said carefully: ‘I’m sure you don’t want to talk too much about the Rouzrokh family . . .’

‘No.’

‘. . . but did you hear that Joanne died?’

‘No!’ Daisy was shocked. ‘How?’

‘At Pearl Harbor. She was engaged to Woody Dewar, and she went with him to visit his brother, Chuck, who is stationed there. They were in a car that was strafed by a Zero – that’s a Jap fighter plane – and she was hit.’

‘I’m so sorry. Poor Joanne. Poor Woody.’

Their food came, and a bottle of wine. They ate in silence for a while. Daisy discovered that Mock Duck did not taste much like duck.

Charlie said: ‘Joanne was one of two thousand, four hundred people killed at Pearl Harbor. We lost eight battleships and ten other vessels. Goddamn sneaky Japs.’

‘People here are secretly pleased, because the US is in the fight now. God alone knows why Hitler was dumb enough to declare war on the States. But the British think they have a chance of winning at last, with the Russians and us on their side.’

‘Americans are very angry about Pearl Harbor.’

‘People here don’t see why.’

‘The Japanese kept on negotiating right up until the last minute – long after they must have made the decision. That’s deceitful!’

Daisy frowned. ‘It seems sensible to me. If agreement had been reached at the last minute, they could have called off the attack.’

‘But they didn’t declare war!’

‘Would that have made any difference? We were expecting them to attack the Philippines. Pearl Harbor would have taken us by surprise even after a declaration of war.’

Charlie spread his hands in a gesture of bafflement. ‘Why did they have to attack us anyway?’

‘We stole their money.’

‘Froze their assets.’