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request from Stephen, technically the senior of the twins (‘by ninety seconds’, as Claire always put it) and Stevie was ringing from Yorkshire asking for his sister-in-law’s last address. She knew at once he meant the address of his twin-brother’s wife, Margaret, and that his call had nothing to do with the funeral of his other sister-in-law, Rachel, or the wreath that had somehow gone astray. Her twin sons and their wives had always operated as a foursome, ever since their marriages in the early ’thirties and long before that Stevie and Andy had seldom been seen apart, having gone to school together, skylarked through the ’twenties together, and finally, to their father’s unspeakable disgust, gone back into the scrap business together. They had also prospered together and had made, she suspected, quite a pile of money before rushing into the R.A.F. at the outbreak of war. She had admired them for this, despite Paul’s rumblings to the contrary. They were both young men obsessed with flashy sports cars, golf, old-boy talk, jars of wallop and polkadot scarves, so that they seemed to her tailor-made for the R.A.F. and would have moped behind desks for the duration, despite their mastery of modern business techniques and their innumerable shady contacts in the world of scrap metal. Now, at last, they were separated. Stevie was on a conversion course to heavy aircraft in Yorkshire, and Andy, if anything the more dashing of the two, was in Egypt with his fighter squadron, whence he wrote illegible letters reminding her of the letters she had once had from him at school.
    There was, she thought, a curious urgency in Stevie’s voice and also an unusual reluctance to enter into a chatty conversation. He was fit, he said, and unlikely to go on ops for months. He was also missing Andy whom he referred to as ‘the old clot’, but what he wanted right now was his sister-in-law Margaret’s London address. He didn’t say why and she didn’t ask him because it would have seemed an unnecessary question. She gave the telephone number and then Stevie asked how everybody was and whether they were going to rebuild Rumble Patrick’s farm ‘after old Jerry’s flying visit’. She had begun to tell him about the current family dispute concerning Rumble’s proposed enlistment but she didn’t get the chance to finish. The pips went and Stevie snapped, ‘No more change. Carry on regardless …’ and the line went dead.
    She came away slightly puzzled. He hadn’t mentioned Rachel being killed but only the farm and although, taken all round, he had sounded his brash, breezy self, she had sensed a certain tension that disturbed her a little. She decided then that he had been lying about his prospects of going on operations and this comforted her, for somehow she never worried about the twins’ chances of survival. They had already survived half-a-dozen car crashes, two light aeroplane crashes and one drowning when their home-made boat overturned in the bay. It would, she reminded herself, take more than Hitler to bring stillness to The Pair.
    In one respect Claire was right. In another she was as wrong as she could be. Stevie had told her the truth regarding his prospects of going on operations. His conversion course would confine him to base area flights for some weeks but Claire’s instinct had not been at fault. The tension, conveyed over the wire, had nothing to do with flying, or his enforced separation from Andy. It was the result of a profound shock administered by his wife who had just left him, threatening never to return.
    The rift between them had been widening over a period of eighteen months. The first crack showed shortly after the twins had turned their backs on money-making and enlisted in a barrage balloon unit whence, by pulling a fistful of strings, they had transferred to a fighter-pilot course completed in time to enable them to harry the Luftwaffe through the final fortnight of the Battle of Britain.