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Harry with interest.
    ‘It must be difficult,’ he replied solemnly. ‘But the soup’s fine.’
    ‘It’s scrumptious!’ Ronald called loudly. His mother sighed. Harry didn’t know why Muriel had had children; he supposed because it was the done thing.
    ‘How’s work?’ he asked his cousin to break the silence. Will worked in the Foreign Office, at the Middle East desk.
    ‘There could be problems in Persia.’ The eyes behind the thickglasses were troubled. ‘The Shah’s leaning towards Hitler. How was your meeting?’ he asked with exaggerated casualness. He had phoned Harry a few days before to tell him some people connected with the Foreign Office had spoken to him and would be in touch but had said he didn’t know what it was about. From his manner now, Harry thought he had guessed who the ‘people’ were. He wondered whether Will had talked about him in the office, mentioned a cousin who had been to Rookwood and spoke Spanish, and someone had passed the information on to Jebb’s people. Or was there some huge filing system about citizens somewhere, which the spies had consulted?
    He nearly answered, they want me to go to Madrid, but remembered he mustn’t. ‘Looks like they’ve got something for me. Means going abroad. A bit hush-hush.’
    ‘Careless talk costs lives,’ the little girl said solemnly.
    ‘Be quiet, Prue,’ Muriel snapped. ‘Drink your soup.’
    Harry smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s nothing dangerous. Not like France.’
    ‘Did you kill many Germans in France?’ Ronnie piped up.
    Muriel set her spoon in her plate with a clang. ‘I told you not to ask questions like that.’
    ‘No, Ronnie, I didn’t,’ Harry said. ‘They killed a lot of our men, though.’
    ‘We’ll get them back for it, though, won’t we? And for the bombing?’
    Muriel sighed deeply. Will turned to his son.
    ‘Did I ever tell you I met Ribbentrop, Ronnie?’
    ‘Wow! You met him? You should have
killed
him!’
    ‘We weren’t at war then, Ronnie. He was just the German ambassador. He was always saying the wrong thing. Brickendrop, we used to call him.’
    ‘What was he like?’
    ‘A silly man. His son was at Westminster and once Ribbentrop went to the school to meet him. Ribbentrop stood in the quad with his arm raised and shouted,
“Heil Hitler!”
’
    ‘Crumbs!’ Ronnie said. ‘He wouldn’t have got away with that at Rookwood. I’m hoping to go to Rookwood next year, did you know that, cousin Harry?’
    ‘If we can afford the fees, Ronnie, maybe.’
    ‘And if it’s still there,’ Muriel said suddenly. ‘If it’s not been requisitioned or blown up.’ Harry and Will stared at her. She wiped her mouth with her napkin and rose.
    ‘I’m going to get the steaks. They’ll be dry, they’ve been under the grill.’ She looked at her husband. ‘What are we going to do tonight?’
    ‘We won’t go to the shelter unless the siren goes,’ he replied. Muriel left the room. Prue had gone tense. Harry noticed that she had a teddy bear on her lap and was clutching it tightly. Will sighed.
    ‘When these raids began we started going up to the shelter after dinner. But some of the people there – well, they’re a bit common, Muriel doesn’t like them, and it’s pretty uncomfortable. Prue gets frightened. We stay at home unless Wailing Winnie starts.’ He sighed again, staring out of the French windows across the back garden. Dusk was deepening into night and a clear full moon was rising. ‘It’s a bomber’s moon. You go over, if you like.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll stay with you.’
    His uncle’s village was on the ‘bomber’s run’ from the Channel up to London; the sirens often went as the planes passed overhead, but they ignored them. Harry hated Wailing Winnie’s swirling howl. It reminded him of the sound dive-bombers made: when he first came home after Dunkirk he would clench his teeth and clench his hands till they turned white every time the sirens went