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and spotless, her chestnut hair sleek and shiny and held in place by a natty little hairband. The coat she wore was a tiny perfect copy of her mother’s coat, and on her feet were the kind of shoes Princess Elizabeth might have worn—smart and shiny with little silver buckles on top. Nancy looked at her own child, who was dressed in clothes salvaged from bombsites. But Emily was asleep, dead to the world as the world tore itself apart above her, and what did it matter if her face was dirty?
    Nancy leaned her head back against the wall of the tunnel, feeling some small part of her unwind, and wondered if Joe’s ship had sailed yet. She closed her eyes as an immense weariness overcame her and somewhere in the space between dreamingand not dreaming she saw a vast gunmetal-grey warship slip silently away from the dockside and out to sea. The ocean was gunmetal grey too and the sky—indeed, her very dreams were gunmetal grey. She saw the ocean, smooth and calm and safe, a haven, and the horizon, towards which the ship sailed, was a place of calm serenity.
    A baby began to scream and she sat up. She would not sleep, it was too early yet and, besides, she did not even know if Joe’s ship had sailed. Not that it made any difference—Joe had gone and she would not see him again perhaps until the end of the war, if he made it that far.
    The fact of his departure was a sharp ball of pain inside her that came and went, sometimes no more than a dull ache and other times catching at her throat and taking her breath away. At this moment it filled her up, squeezing the life out of her, but after a moment or two it lessened.
    Joe had left that morning, three months’ rest and recuperation ending abruptly with the arrival of his recall papers for his new ship just when she had got used to having him around. His ship was due to depart on the evening tide and where it was headed she had no idea and she doubted Joe did either. His last ship had been torpedoed somewhere between Iceland and Greenland and he had spent three days adrift in a lifeboat. The entire ship’s company had died, he had said, dozens of men, though neither the papers nor the wireless had reported it. He had been picked up by a passing merchant ship and spent a fortnight in a hospital at Liverpool, then they had sent him home to recuperate. That had been October. Joe had been at sea three years. She had worried that they wouldn’t know each other, or worse,wouldn’t like each other. They had been married so short a time before his call-up that they were still getting used to each other when he left. She worried that what he had gone through—three days adrift in a lifeboat, the ship’s company lost—would affect him. But hadn’t she witnessed dreadful things herself? Limbs blasted across a street, burnt torsos belonging to people she had once known, a baby burned black in a fire . . . So then, they were neither of them the same people they had been when they had met and married. But it worried her all the same.
    Joe had come barrelling along the street one afternoon in October in his sailor’s uniform with his kitbag over his shoulder and a big grin on his face hiding whatever uncertainty hid beneath, and Nancy had imagined a hundred times what that moment would be like, what they would say to each other, but it turned out there was nothing to say for she had burst into tears and run at him. That had surprised her, that surge of emotion. Where had it come from? There had been no warning of it. She had not cried when he’d left nor at any time since, even when she’d heard he’d been torpedoed but was safe. It had not seemed real. She had felt—nothing really, only a sort of dull amazement.
    Yet there she was in the street, holding on to him and sobbing.
    But later, after she had run out to him in tears, he had stood in the kitchen not knowing what to do with himself, taking up so much space and neither of them finding the right words. The distance between them