‘Then don’t,’ she said. ‘I know, anyway. I could feel it.’ They walked to her building. At the door he said: ‘Can we—’ She put a finger on his lips to silence him. ‘Go and win the war,’ she said.

Then she went inside.

(v)

When Daisy went to a Sunday service, which was not often, she now avoided the elite churches of the West End, whose congregations had snubbed her, and instead caught the Tube to Aldgate and attended the Calvary Gospel Hall. The doctrinal differences were wide, but they did not matter to her. The singing was better in the East End.

She and Lloyd arrived separately. People in Aldgate knew who she was, and they liked having a rogue aristocrat sitting on one of their cheap seats; but it would have been pushing their tolerance too far for a married-and-separated woman to walk in on the arm of her paramour. Ethel’s brother Billy had said: ‘Jesus did not condemn the adulteress, but he did tell her to sin no more.’

During the service she thought about Boy. Had he really meant last night’s conciliatory words, or were they just the softness of the drunken moment? Boy had even shaken hands with Lloyd as he left. Surely that meant forgiveness? But she told herself not to let her hopes rise. Boy was the most completely self-absorbed person she had ever known, worse than his father or her brother Greg.

After church Daisy often went to Eth Leckwith’s house for Sunday dinner, but today she left Lloyd to his family and hurried away.

She returned to the West End and knocked on the door of her husband’s house in Mayfair. The butler showed her into the morning room.

Boy came in shouting. ‘What the hell is this?’ he roared, and he threw a newspaper at her.

She had seen him in this mood plenty of times, and she was not afraid of him. Only once had he raised a hand to strike her. She had seized a heavy candlestick and threatened to bop him.’ It had not happened again.

Though not scared, she was disappointed. He had been in such a good mood last night. But perhaps he might still listen to reason.

‘What has happened to displease you?’ she said calmly.

‘Look at that bloody paper.’

She bent and picked it up. It was today’s edition of the Sunday Mirror, a popular left-wing tabloid. On the front page was a photograph of Boy’s new horse, Lucky Laddie, and the headline:

LUCKY LADDIE WORTH 28 COAL MINERS

The story of Boy’s record-breaking purchase had appeared in yesterday’s press, but today the Mirror had an outraged opinion piece, pointing out that the price of the horse, £8,400, was exactly twenty-eight times the £300 standard compensation paid to the widow of a miner who died in a pit accident.

And the Fitzherbert family wealth came from coal mines.

Boy said: ‘My father is furious. He was hoping to be Foreign Secretary in the postwar government. This has probably ruined his chances.’