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finger, first one side then the other.
    “Utter tosh!” he declared to the wireless. “Atom bombs are over in a flash. Never even know what’s hit ’em. Not like the tortures those little yellow beasts inflicted on the poor ruddy POWs. If the Hun had dropped an atom bomb on us we’d be getting over it by now.”
    You silly sod, she thought; we’d all be dead. Perhaps that’s what he had meant: the dead were out of it, weren’t they? It’s the rest of us who have to suffer it all.
    “Do we have to talk about the war,” she said. “It gets on my nerves.”
    “Well, you had better get used to it, old girl.” He put on his doorman’s overcoat and checked in the mirror that the gold braid epaulettes where lying straight on his shoulders. “I’m afraid that this is the world we live in. Two world wars have given it to us, and we shall just have to get on with it.”
    Walter swept his coat sleeve across the peak of his cap before placing it on his head, tugging it into position fore and aft. He was presently engaged as a doorman – he preferred commissionaire – at Gamages, the department store. It was all he could get. Before the war he had been in insurance, but they were all Freemasons and his old firm hadn’t been prepared to take him back when the war ended. Or so he said. He’d never advanced much in all the years he was there, and she doubted that that was all down to the Freemasons. She wished he would find something in the insurance line: they were in arrears with the Provident. She could let it lapse, but it seemed terrible to do that.
    “I’ll tell you what, old girl,” he said, “it isn’t how I imagined my life going.” What did he expect, she thought bitterly, with his modest talents, his ill-formed opinions on everything, his fading Deb’s Delight looks?
    Walter put his foot up on the fender and bent forward to polish his shoe, furiously rubbing a cloth back and forth. She drank a cup of tea. It’s not his fault, she thought; he couldn’t help it that he wasn’t any longer the handsome boy in the immaculate blazer who’d laid himself out on the grass with his head in her lap. Canvey Island; the summer of 1925. It wasn’t his fault, but she blamed him all the same. They were both browned off, and disappointment was all they shared these days. It isn’t really anybody’s fault, she told herself. It’s everything . It’s the memory of before the war and during the war; and now they were after the war and instead of looking forward, she was looking back and she could not bear the mockery, the reproachfulness of memory. Walter had finished polishing one shoe and was putting his other foot on the fender, and she wondered if he felt the same as she did; whether he longed for all the things they could not have: hope, passion, tinned peaches, Pond’s Cold Cream.
    He kissed her on the top of her head.
    “Goodbye, old girl,” he said. Then he tilted his head to one side and said, in an exaggerated stage Cockney: “Now be-hiyive!” It was their little joke; a joke which, like Walter’s hair, had grown thin over the years. He wagged his finger at her in mock admonition . “Behive wifie–else I shall have to spank you!”
    She heaved a sigh of relief when she heard him close the front door behind him, releasing an immense knot of tension which she had been holding in her stomach without realising.
    Oh God, she thought. Could I possibly be any more miserable without him?

5
     
     
    I t was dazzling and hot as he walked from the flats towards the car, where his driver was leaning against the bonnet. She stood smartly to attention the instant she saw him, her wide attractive mouth forming a smile. She was an A4 Branch girl: pretty, well shaped, with a slight look of the actress Wendy Hiller about her. She had reddish hair that was tucked under her cap; her fresh complexion had a healthy smattering of freckles. When he was closer to her he could see that she had very fetching green eyes. He