‘Of course not.’ Daisy fetched a cushion.

‘London society is respectable,’ Eva went on. ‘Don’t imagine I approve of it. I have been excluded often, and poor Jimmy is snubbed sometimes for having married a half-Jewish German.’

‘That’s awful.’

‘I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, whatever the reason.’

‘Sometimes I hate the British.’

‘You’re forgetting what Americans are like. Don’t you remember telling me that all the girls in Buffalo were snobs?’

Daisy laughed. ‘What a long time ago it seems.’

‘You’ve left your husband,’ Eva said. ‘And you did so in undeniably spectacular fashion, hurling insults at him in the bar of Claridge’s hotel.’

‘And I’d only had one Martini!’

Eva grinned. ‘How I wish I’d been there!’

‘I kind of wish I hadn’t.’

‘Needless to say, everyone in London society has talked about little else for the last three weeks.’

‘I guess I should have anticipated that.’

‘Now, I’m afraid, anyone who appears at your party will be seen as approving of adultery and divorce. Even I wouldn’t like my mother-in-law to know I’d come here and had tea with you.’

‘But it’s so unfair – Boy was unfaithful first!’

‘And you thought women were treated equally?’

Daisy remembered that Eva had a great deal more to worry about than snobbery. Her family was still in Nazi Germany. Fitz had made inquiries through the Swiss embassy and learned that her doctor father was now in a concentration camp, and her brother, a violin maker, had been beaten up by the police, his hands smashed. ‘When I think about your troubles, I’m ashamed of myself for complaining,’ Daisy said.

‘Don’t be. But cancel the party.’

Daisy did.

But it made her miserable. Her work for the Red Cross filled her days, but in the evenings she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. She went to the movies twice a week. She tried to read Moby Dick but found it tedious. One Sunday she went to church. St James’s, the Wren church opposite her apartment building in Piccadilly, had been bombed, so she went to St Martin-in-the-Fields. Boy was not there, but Fitz and Bea were, and Daisy spent the service looking at the back of Fitz’s head, reflecting that she had fallen in love with two of this man’s sons. Boy had his mother’s looks and his father’s single-minded selfishness. Lloyd had Fitz’s good looks and Ethel’s big heart. Why did it take me so long to see that, she wondered?

The church was full of people she knew, and after the service none of them spoke to her. She was lonely and almost friendless in a foreign country in the middle of a war.

One evening she took a taxi to Aldgate and knocked at the Leckwith house. When Ethel opened the door, Daisy said: ‘I’ve come to ask for your son’s hand in marriage.’ Ethel let out a peal of laughter and hugged her.

She had brought a gift, an American tin of ham she had got from a USAF navigator. Such things were luxuries to British families on rations. She sat in the kitchen with Ethel and Bernie, listening to dance tunes on the radio. They all sang along with ‘Underneath the Arches’ by Flanagan and Allen. ‘Bud Flanagan was born right here in the East End,’ Bernie said proudly. ‘Real name Chaim Reuben Weintrop.’