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father draw a clenched fist to his mouth. ‘What do you want to ask me, Dad?’ She wants to get this over with.
    But he meets her question with silence.
    ‘Go ahead,’ she prompts.
    ‘Do you think it was an accident?’
    ‘Mum didn’t leave a note, if that’s what you mean. The coroner had to record an open verdict. But if you really want to know …’ Hannah looks at her father, who now has his hands over his face. ‘I don’t think it was an accident.’
    By the time they reach Parsons Green, Edward’s eyes are closed. After they have circled the house twice, a parking space comes up a few yards from it. Hannah turns the engine off and jogs up the steps to open the front door. ‘Hello?’ she calls out. When the occupational therapist does not reply she repeats her question, scans the street to see where Niall has got to and then returns to the car. After insinuating an arm behind his upper back and another under the crook of his knees, she lifts her father out. His lightness is shocking, as if he is a Chinese lantern that might blow away.
    He does not wake up as she ascends the stone steps, crosses the threshold and carries on up past the ‘welcome home’ heliumballoons she has tethered to the banister. She has helped make up the bed in his old room, the bedroom he had shared with his wife for three happy years after they returned to England from Norway. They had met, fallen in love, had a child and married in Oslo, her mother’s home town. Hannah had been a bridesmaid, a three-year-old wearing a lily-of-the-valley hair garland. When her father’s diplomatic posting came to an end, this was the house they had bought together. When her mother died, it had passed to her.
    Hannah lowers her father on to the bed and sees her fingers have left an impression on his skin as if it were warm wax. As she draws a coat up around his neck like a blanket, he asks drowsily: ‘Frejya? Is that you?’
    Hannah lays the back of her hand on her father’s brow. ‘I wish it was,’ she says.

VI
    London. Early summer, 1940
    THE CHELSEA ARTS CLUB HAS ONLY ONE TELEPHONE, A 1920S BRASS candlestick set with a separate earpiece on a cord. As the porter hands it to Charles, he moves along the reception desk to afford him some privacy, a futile gesture given that the entrance is silent save for the tock-tock of an early Victorian longcase. Every word of both sides of the conversation can be overheard.
    ‘Charlie? This is Funf speaking.’
    ‘Hello, Funf.’
    Charles covers the earpiece and says in a stage whisper: ‘It’s Funf, the German spy.’
    Creases appear at the sides of the porter’s eyes, and these tunnel to the corners of his mouth in matching bands. Like everyone else, he listens to It’s That Man Again on the wireless. He knows all the catchphrases. Is in on the joke.
    In fact the caller is Charles’s friend and sailing companion Eric Secrest, a GP with a practice in north Kent and a fifty-seven-foot motor yacht moored at the Isle of Dogs. Eric is the only one of Charles’s friends who knows about his court martial, and the dishonourable discharge from the RAF that resulted from it.
    Charles suspects that some members of the club may know the truth, but none has raised it with him yet. As for his other friends,most seem to have accepted that the reason Charles is not protecting the retreating British Expeditionary Force in the skies over France is that he has been taken off front-line RAF duty for ‘medical reasons’ (kept vague), and has been given a desk job somewhere at the War Office instead.
    And at least Charles’s parents never heard about his disgrace. They had died in a plane crash when he was seventeen, old enough to ignore his father’s ambition that he should follow him into the diplomatic service. He is sure they would have been upset by the language used at his trial – ‘You have been found guilty as charged of gross indecency and conduct unbecoming an officer.’ The formality and Englishness