‘Yes, I have. I had a nice letter from him the other day. His battalion’s still in Lincolnshire, but they’re hoping to go overseas soon. They don’t know where yet. He says he’s very fed up with all the training. He wants to get out there and do something.’

‘Typical Roderick.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you worried?’

‘No. He knows how to look after himself.’

Amelia poured some more tea for both of them. She took a piece of cake, her third, then put it down again. Something effortful was clearly going on, Charlotte thought.

‘Of course I do worry about you – both of you.’ She was looking down at the table. ‘I wish you’d get married, Charlotte. Have you got a young man?’

‘Not really.’

‘It’s none of my business, of course. I just . . .’

‘Go on.’ Charlotte felt embarrassed by her mother’s obvious discomfort but thought that, having come unusually close to frankness, she should be encouraged.

‘I sometimes ask myself whether I really did enough for you when you were a child.’ Amelia’s face was tense with effort. Charlotte said nothing. ‘Perhaps I was not a very good mother.’

‘In what way?’

Amelia could go no further, and Charlotte, who could see the effort she had made, took pity on her. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, and patted her arm. She felt her mother’s instinctive flinch at being touched.

‘You say that, Charlotte, you say it’s all right. But I don’t really know what you think. I never have.’

‘It’s all right, Mama. It’s all right.’

Eventually Amelia said, ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘I don’t. Not usually.’ Charlotte had not even been aware of lighting a cigarette. It was Gregory’s fault.

‘Remember what your mother told you,’ the parachute instructor called leeringly to the women as they queued up to do their preliminary jumps from a fourteen-foot tower. ‘Legs together.’

‘I wonder how many times he’s said that,’ said Marigold, standing with Charlotte in the queue.

The next day they jumped from a plane. Charlotte was grateful for the dispatcher’s uncompromising shove; short moments of terror were followed by a feeling of powerless ecstasy as the canopy jerked open. The hardships of Inverie Bay seemed to have been worthwhile, and with the exception of one man who turned his ankle, they were all eager to go up again. Marigold told Charlotte that the final part of their training, in the New Forest, was arduous and dull, but in the exhilaration of jumping they treated this as a typical service rumour.

The next day Charlotte said goodbye to Marigold at Euston and took a taxi. The driver jerked and twisted sickeningly through narrow back streets to bring them out into Trafalgar Square; perhaps with her uniform and her suitcase at the station he had taken her for a stranger to the city, Charlotte thought, as they accelerated down the Mall. Office workers on their lunch break sat in striped deck chairs on the grass of Green Park where they threw bread to the scraggy ducks. London still functioned.

Would there be a letter from Gregory when she got back to the flat? He was not much of a writer. Apart from the occasional note left on her bedside table (what did he think when he looked at her vulnerable and asleep?), she had very little by which to recognise his handwriting. Surely, however, he would have the simple politeness to have answered her letter, even if it was just in a few lines.

When they arrived at the house Charlotte felt her fingers tremble slightly on the key. Perhaps it was merely from the exertion of hoisting her heavy case up the steps. Inside the hall she went rapidly through the letters for the first-floor flat on the old walnut dresser: there was nothing for her. Up in the flat, she sorted the papers, previous post and magazines on the hall table. She had an invitation to a gallery, a bank statement, a postcard from Roderick in Lincolnshire and a clothes catalogue.

She felt a descending bitterness and loss of hope that were out of proportion to the lack of a letter. She went into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa. This is a war, a historic emergency, she told herself, and he is flying dangerous machines; how high in the list of priorities does my self-righteously expected letter come? That was the logic of the situation; but, as her professor of French at university occasionally used to remark, what use is logic when faced with the power of truth?

Charlotte went to the kitchen to make some tea. It had relapsed in her absence, though not quite to the pure state of chaos that had once existed. Charlotte warmed the pot, set the cup ready, and poured the boiling water on the leaves before discovering to her extreme irritation that there was no milk.

She took her black tea through to the sitting room and looked through a day-old newspaper on the sofa. If he hadn’t rung by seven, she would get in touch with Marigold Davies, who was staying in some kind of hostel, and go out with her for the evening. The Times reported no good news from the Eastern Front, where Hitler’s armies continued to move into Russia. Charlotte put down the paper and went to the hall to get a book from her suitcase. It was cool and quiet in the flat, the noise of the turning pages loud in the gloomy sitting room. Charlotte had the sense of life happening elsewhere, while the carriage clock on the mantelpiece ticked off the passage of unfilled minutes. Occasionally she glanced up from her book to the black telephone on the table in the window; once she went over to it and checked that the receiver had been properly replaced. She laid down the book and closed her eyes.

The days had been very full: the psychiatrist, the obstacle courses, the throwing herself from the hold of a slowly chugging plane . . . The extraordinary had become normal, or, if not normal, everyday. Some aspect of the past few weeks had stirred something unwelcome in her thoughts, though it remained just beyond the reach of conscious memory. With her head tilted back against the pimply nap of the sofa, Charlotte probed into the reaches of her mind.

She is in her childhood bedroom. There is the fender that wraps its iron mesh about the coal fire; there is the scarlet rug with its faded golden curlicues. There is a row of dolls propped up along the wall beneath the window. There is a blue-painted wooden bookshelf with a row of stories about witches, schools and ponies. There is the battered bed, beneath the deep and comforting eiderdown. It is night-time and she is playing in her dressing gown on the floor – puzzles or a book in the few minutes before bed. It is a fragile paradise.

She hears an awful noise. It is half shouting, half crying. She goes along the landing, through an open door. Her father is kneeling by a bed. He turns to her, and she is frightened by the tears on his masculine and warlike face. She is aware that at some invisibly remote level she may pity him, but in her child’s mind all she experiences is fear.

She goes to him. He has some agonising need. Then the picture, quite clear until this point, explodes and fragments: there is the sensation of betrayal and violation. It is physical pain to an extent, but stranger than that is the sense of borders crossed, a world tilted out of its true orbit.

What really happened she could never fully recall. The harder she tried, the more remote it grew, until it seemed to have happened at another time, in another life, in an existence where different rules applied. All she could be certain of was the intense reality of the incident; it was more real than any clear or normal recollection.

Charlotte opened her eyes again. She had lived for so long with this half-memory that it was part of the scenery of her mind. It had become assimilated, albeit in faint outline, into the person she was; and in long, uncomplicated passages of her life it was as unregarded as any other fragment of the past. What had presumably moved it back into the centre of her awareness were Dr Burch’s questions; but she was confident that she could let it drift away, that this most fully real experience could be successfully relegated once more to the shadows.

She took her teacup back to the kitchen. She just had time for a bath before the others came home from work, so she took her suitcase down the corridor to her bedroom and had squeezed it half-way through the door when her eye was caught by a piece of paper on the bed. It was a note from Daisy. ‘Dear C, Welcome back – I think it’s today you’re coming back. Someone called Borowski (?) rang and left this number. Could you ring him back? Love, Daisy.’

Charlotte took the piece of paper back into the sitting room. For two hours she had been sitting in the flat and never even thought to look in her bedroom. She lifted the receiver and waited for the operator. Her voice sounded distant but remarkably calm as she read out the number from Daisy’s note. It’s probably an invitation to a squadron dance, she told herself. It’s probably to ask if Gregory and I will make up a four at bridge or tennis; Borowski hasn’t been able to reach Gregory himself since he moved, so I’m the only way to get in touch. He’s probably just looking for Gregory, nothing to do with me at all . . . He’s ringing to say he’s dead, they’ve heard, they tried to reach me . . . In a curious way, the question of whether she became hysterical was almost a conscious choice.

The number was of the pilots’ mess, where a steward answered. ‘Flight-Lieutenant Borowski? You’re in luck, madam. I’ve seen him around this afternoon. It may take some time to find him, though. Do you want to hang on?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘All right, I’ll send someone.’

In the excruciating silence Charlotte heard each crackle on the line as the sound of Borowski’s happy step/funereal pace, as he strode cheerfully/plodded mournfully to the telephone; she framed offers of religious devotion in the event of Gregory’s escape – good works, church attendance . . . She made herself smile at the extravagance of her nunnish vows, because at root she was sure that such terrible things as she envisaged didn’t really happen to her. She needed just to concentrate and not give way to premature jubilation, not to tempt providence, until the all-clear sounded.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello. Is that Borowski?’ She didn’t know his first name. ‘It’s Charlotte Gray. I think you rang.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s right.’ Something church-like, decent, solemn, already sympathetic, in Borowski’s voice made Charlotte sit down suddenly on the hard chair next to the telephone.

‘Yes, Peter Gregory asked me to give you a call if . . . if, you know, if there were any mishaps or what-have-you. And, I just thought I’d—’

‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘It’s not very good news, I’m afraid. He’s gone missing. It’s a bit unclear. As you know, he’s with the Halifax chaps and I’ve only got this second-hand, but I gather he went down last week. They haven’t heard a squeak since.’

‘But . . . he told me you couldn’t crash a Halifax.’

‘He wasn’t in a Halifax. Apparently he was in a Lysander, which is a little single-engined monoplane. He’d been training on the quiet to do some pick-up. I don’t know the details. They’re tiny things. They can land on about five hundred yards of grass. They use them to pick up personnel. Agents, I suppose. He was a natural, having been in fighters.’

‘Do you know any more? Is he alive?’

‘I’m afraid I really don’t know. As I say, it’s all second-hand. What you should do is try and talk to the people where he’s based. It’s a bit tricky because the work they’re doing is all so hush-hush, but they’re perfectly nice chaps. The squadron leader’s someone called Wetherby, I think Greg told me.’

‘If he hadn’t crashed, then he would have come back, wouldn’t he?’

‘Not necessarily. I don’t suppose he’d have enough fuel. I doubt whether the range is much more than four hundred and fifty miles, even if you strip off the arms and armour and whack on another tank. So if for some reason his man didn’t turn up and he couldn’t refuel, then he’d be stuck.’

‘No wonder they wanted him to learn French,’ murmured Charlotte. ‘He never told me he was doing this.’

‘You must try not to worry. He’s a hell of a good pilot. Got the luck of the devil, too. I should think he’s most likely drinking too much local wine with some farmer waiting to be picked up tomorrow by another plane. They’ll do everything they can to get him back, you know. They won’t want to leave a pilot of his experience over there.’

‘But what if he’s crashed?’

‘Well, that’s a different matter. I wish there was more I could do to help. I’ll try and get in touch with his people, if you like. Who’s his next of kin?’

‘He hasn’t got any. He’s an only child.’

Charlotte tried to say goodbye to Borowski, but the words would not pass her throat; she put the receiver down, but in her blurred vision missed the cradle, so it slipped from the table and dangled by its plaited brown cord with Borowski’s anxious voice twirling in the bakelite earpiece as Charlotte sank to her knees and laid her head on the floor.

Half an hour later Daisy Forester let herself into the flat and called out to see if anyone was there. She had had a long day at St James’s and was looking forward to a bath, a change out of her hot clothes and whatever the evening might offer. When there was no answer, she turned on the water in the tub, then went to her bedroom and undressed. A minute later she emerged in her dressing gown and was on her way into the bathroom when she noticed a suitcase sticking out of the door of Charlotte’s room at the end of the corridor.

‘Charlotte?’ She padded down to the open door. ‘Charlotte? My God, what’s the matter? Tell me.’

‘He’s . . .’ The words were squeezed singly through the air-lock of her throat. ‘Dead. He’s . . . crashed . . . Oh, Daisy . . . it’s not fair.’

‘Take it easy, Charlotte. It’s all right. Calm down, now. Calm down.’

Charlotte clung to Daisy’s shoulders while Daisy stroked her hair. ‘Gently now, gently.’

Charlotte looked up again and Daisy saw the passivity of grief yielding in her expression to something more violent. ‘It’s not . . . fair. I so loved him . . .’

Although Daisy found her eyes damp with the depth of her sympathy, she simultaneously felt detached. Perhaps it was to do with having Charlotte’s body in her arms: her failings seemed enclosed by Daisy’s grasp. Fond though she was of Charlotte, she had always viewed her as unstable: the way she had fixed herself on this obviously damaged man, the way her unquestioned education afforded her so little protection. She was a little intimidated by Charlotte’s self-possession, but she felt sorry for her because she was so vulnerable.

Charlotte began to wail again, and Daisy was reminded of a poem she could not place . . . A woman wailing. It was frightening because it was so elemental; the noise she made as she pulled herself away from Daisy’s embrace and threw herself back on the bed was atavistic.

‘Now, come on, Charlotte,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to stop this, you’ve got to calm down. Now come on.’ She lifted her up again and held her jaw quite firmly so Charlotte had to look at her. When Charlotte tried to wrench her head away, Daisy shouted at her. ‘Stop it!’

Charlotte’s face for a moment filled with hatred, then softened. ‘I can’t,’ she sobbed, but did then seem to drift off the pitch of her emotion, back into a more manageable grief.

Over the minutes, stroking her hair, holding her hands, Daisy elicited the story as far as Charlotte could tell it. As soon as she could see that there were some grounds for hope, however unsteady, Daisy switched all her efforts into encouraging Charlotte to believe that Gregory was alive. She proposed practical ways of finding out: telephone calls they could make, letters they could write, friends they could ask to contact other friends.

After a quarter of an hour she coaxed from Charlotte the first twitch of a timid, bloated smile and felt a great relief that this hurdle was behind them, followed by a guilty foreboding of the qualities of patient friendship that the long weeks would demand.

‘Now I’m going to make us both a nice big drink,’ said Daisy. ‘You stay here. I won’t be a minute.’

On the way to the kitchen, she felt a sogginess in the carpet under her bare feet where the water had trickled from the forgotten bath.