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breakfasted in her bedroom. And the children ate with the cook, under strict instruction that they could not talk to their father until after his
third cup of coffee and his second newspaper. He couldn’t remember when he last shared breakfast with anyone.
    The man in the blazer paused in his porridge to offer a hand to Troy.
    ‘Cockerell,’ he said. ‘Arnold Cockerell.’
    Troy shook the hand, which instantly resumed its porridge-shovelling, and sat down.
    ‘Troy,’ he said. ‘Frederick Troy.’
    ‘Gentleman of the press?’ Cockerell queried, through his last mouthful of oats.
    Troy had no ready lie. He heard, felt, the clank of cup and saucer, felt the splash of two sugars and the rattle of the spoon as Cockerell stirred his tea in the silence of Troy’s own
making. The last thing he’d ever thought he’d need was an alibi. What was he doing in Portsmouth at seven o’clock of a Wednesday morning?
    ‘No, no,’ he muttered. ‘Just a bit of a break really.’
    Pathetic, especially for a man whose profession necessitated practised skill with lies, but Cockerell seemed satisfied with the answer.
    ‘All right for some,’ he said, and Troy knew he was off the hook, knew what was coming next. With any luck all he’d have to do would be to nod occasionally through the
clichés.
    ‘I’m in sales myself,’ Cockerell began. ‘Just another working day for me, another early start. Still, it’s the early bird catches the worm.’
    Mary appeared at the table, balancing a large wooden tray bearing porridge and a pot of coffee for Troy and, almost beyond belief, a plate of kedgeree for Cockerell. The man’s digestion,
Troy thought, must be Edwardian. Who in hell could stomach porridge and kedgeree? For all he knew the man had started with a plate of devilled kidneys and worked his way down the menu.
    ‘Dad says to give you coffee not tea. On account of how you never drunk the tea last tune you was ’ere,’ said Mary. She plonked the pot in front of Troy and was gone. Troy
poured himself a cup and, as the aroma of a good dark roast wafted up, said a silent thank-you that Quigley knew how to make decent coffee. Cockerell had started on his plate of kedgeree. Troy
hoped it might shut him up.
    ‘During the war,’ Cockerell sallied forth with a beginning Troy had long ago come to dread as a preface to whatever rubbish might follow. ‘During the war …’
    The phrase rattled around in Troy’s brain. It stood for a certain type of man, a particular, though hardly peculiar, breed of Englishman. ‘During the war’—a phrase of
constant anticipation, heralding hours of harmless fun, yard upon yard of interminable reminiscence about the way things were.
    ‘During the war’—Troy looked across the top of his cup at the bearer of this piece of traditional English nonsense, wondering if he were true to type or if, by some God-given
miracle, he might just be a variation that he hadn’t encountered in the eleven long years of constant nostalgia since the war in question had ended.
    Cockerell was off on some train of his own about the ‘Yanks’ and ‘over here’ and how they always drank coffee and not tea and how he’d never understood how anyone
could start the day without a good cup of the leaf. Troy was not listening. He heard Cockerell’s words through gauze and cotton wool, but he saw the man quite clearly for what he was. Ever
since the war, the English had rehashed it endlessly. Many of those who survived the bombs and bullets had been destroyed by blue blazers with badges. They could be found across the length and
breadth of the nation. Propping up bars in RAF clubs and the British Legion. Yarn spinners and bluffers whose greatest hour had been square-bashing in Inversquaddie or nipple-greasing at RAF
Cummerbund, whose lives ever after would be in sozzled thrall to this one moment. Men who had foundered on the rock of a pointless nostalgia for the good old days, which, if viewed objectively,