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Nicky said his father had heard the gunfire on the night of the outbreak of civil war and had to leave for England the next day. It was hard to imagine any such thing now, as they made their way down
through tourist beaches bright and noisy with sun loungers and red and yellow umbrellas, with crowds of fair-haired people burned a deep pink.

Reaching the foot of Spain they came to a hot and deserted stretch of coast where the winds blew across from Africa. They slept on the beach, the salt never leaving their hair, the sound of the sea always under the hot wind.

At the beginning of September they crossed over to Morocco. With the last of their money they stayed in a tiny room in Marrakesh and wandered the narrow alleyways of the souks while calls for prayer rang out overhead. Their Indian leather sandals were hard and cracked now, wearing out, and they stopped to buy new ones.

She hadn't thought about the cut-off shorts, the halter-neck T-shirt. A man grabbed her breast and spat at her, shouted words that she didn't understand, but she could feel the scorn in his voice. When she turned back to look he flicked his head at her as if she were something disgusting.

Nicky bought a necklace made of silver and blue stones and she was still shaking when he fastened it round her neck. She gave Nicky a white cotton tunic that he wore almost every day, like a prophet, although the evenings were becoming too cool for thin cotton really. The tourists and the long-haired travellers with their guitars and beads were starting to leave.

It was time to go home to England, to streets swishing with autumn rain, grey skies and wet bricks glistening in the dark evenings, but they made toast in front of the gas fire, decided to continue their journey into the country of each other.

They would get married.

She didn't own a dress, just jeans and one old wrap skirt that she never wore. One stick of mascara and some dried-out old eye shadow. To
visit his parents she'd actually bought a dress. Which meant she'd had to buy tights. She wore the turquoise necklace Nicky had bought in Morocco. Holding on to the blue stone she hardly recognised herself in the glass, softer and more feminine. She wasn't entirely comfortable with that, but she'd give it a go.

Really, said the reflection, who do you think you're fooling? She went out to meet Nicky and his parents.

From the moment she arrived at Fourwinds Sarah loved the house. Alice had enveloped her in an effusive bear hug, saying, ‘Darling, we get to meet you at last.' And Ralph had brushed his unruly fringe back, a shock of grey hair like a professor, and twinkled a smile at her that was full of kindness. She felt welcomed, feted even. How marvellous her Birmingham accent was. Exactly how Shakespeare would have pronounced his vowels.

Nicky gave her a tour of the house, the rooms infused with stories about growing up there with his brothers. Ralph's study, with its walls of old books, was high ceilinged and looked out over the back lawns. In the drawing room was a grand piano scattered with music sheets, and a huge display of delphiniums and peonies. Nearby a cello and a music stand. Silver-framed photos of Nicky and his two brothers as schoolboys, Nicky looking deathly serious and good, arms pressed against his sides and face turned up to the camera. Bleached colour photos of the family on holiday in Greece and France.

It was only later, during a meal at a restaurant for the parents to meet each other and talk about the wedding, that they realised Alice and Ralph had met her father before, years ago.

‘Of course,' exclaimed Ralph, beaming. ‘Peter! One and the same. After all this time.'

It turned out that during the war Peter had been evacuated to Buxton and had stayed at Alice's parents' house. A wonderful house, her father had added. Alice's mother had been so kind.

Sarah had watched Alice's face register surprise and for a flickering moment, dismay. But then Alice had quickly regained her composure, smiled, pressed Peter's hands, said how wonderful to see you again. She had given her attention to the menu and suggested that they order. And that was it.

Sarah would have liked to ask a few questions, a lot in fact, but the topic seemed to have already slipped into the box marked ‘the years in the war which no one wants to talk about'. Sitting at the table, trying to follow the cross currents of conversation, she was left feeling puzzled and uncomfortable.

A few weeks after that, during a visit to Fourwinds to talk about wedding plans – who knew it was going to involve so many things to sort out, lists and lists of things – Nicky had found a box of old photographs, including one of her father. She'd seen so few pictures of her father as a boy; it felt like holding an archeological remnant from another age. She studied it avidly. It was taken in the garden at the Hanburys' old house: a skinny boy standing next to a young woman, Alice. She was in a deckchair, wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat, her face serious and pretty, a book open on her lap. The boy wore a vest and shorts, holding a spade straight up and to attention. It was somehow heartbreaking to see how good that child was being.

‘Peter worked so hard in the garden, always busy helping Maudey, our cook. Of course, your stepmother in a way.' Alice had said when shown the photo. She patted Sarah's arm, murmured, ‘Dear Peter.'

Looking at the picture again Sarah couldn't help wondering if her father was always going to be the boy who helped the cook in Alice's eyes.

And there it was. The past always intruding into the present.

She'd thought once they were married it would be just the two of them. They would carry on journeying into a newly minted world. That's what she had told herself. But now, as she sat in the rumpled
bed in the thick, country darkness that closed round Fourwinds each night, she saw how she had been mistaken. She had not reckoned on the way that dreams brought the past flooding back in. How she would would wake up, gasping for air, struggling to escape the night's slippage in time. In two days she would walk into the church –but the past would come with her, seeping in behind, refusing to leave.

She slid from the bed, the sheets damp with perspiration, shivering even though it was summer. The house was silent except for the hollow ticking of a clock in a wooden case.

If she told Nicky . . . If he really knew her . . .

She made a small groan, a grunt.

Her body had already closed her voice down, every nerve telling her body to go now, to keep moving. Leaving was the only way she could assuage the rising panic. It wasn't a thought so much as a compulsion. Feeling with her hands she found her clothes and pulled them on.

She stepped lightly along the corridor and down the stairs, her hands pressing on the wall and the banister to take her weight. She took her jacket and bag from the hall, slipped out of the house and closed the door quietly. She walked on the grass along the drive's edge, making no noise.

The dawn was pink, tender as a rose. She glanced back at the house one more time, the sunrise deepening the red of the brick, the dark trees to the west stirring in the warm wind, graceful and waiting for the light to touch them. She didn't belong here.

She wanted to see Nicky so much that she wondered if a heart could give out with such longing, but her thoughts were like a high note, a distant warning bell, her palms were greasy with sweat, and all she could do was follow the unbearable need to keep on walking. She left by the side gate, a shadow slipping round the corner of the church.

CHAPTER 10

Oxford, 1940

During the night Alice was woken up by the drone of another convoy of bombers. She was so tired she hadn't even bothered to head down to the cellar with the other two girls. As always the bombers would be heading for Birmingham. If Hitler was hoping to annex Britain then he evidently wanted to arrive and find Oxford intact.

She woke some hours later and was struck by the whiteness of the light, the stillness. Even for February, the room was freezing. She stepped gingerly across the chilly floorboards and pulled back the curtain. It had snowed. The roofs, the streets, the spires, the whole of Oxford had been transformed into fragile planes of insubstantial white.

Outside the air was still, no sounds except for her shoes compacting the snow. She walked as far as Christ Church Meadow. Here the light was all in the land, the fields crystalline. Beyond a line of winter trees the fields merged into the duller sky with no discernible horizon. There was a quick movement and birds rose up from the branches in a cloud. She gripped onto the railings. The cold of the iron hurt her hands even through gloves. There was a sign on the railings: ‘These fields are private.'

She thought of Richard's room, the hours spent reading together, sitting on the floor in front of the little gas fire, and Richard would read something out and laugh, or explain a passage written by Toynbee
or Beveridge. She might give her opinion, read something out and then he'd smile and nod.

A wet cold was penetrating the leather of her lace-up shoes. Why had she walked down to this empty place? Of course, she knew the answer. The walls of Richard's college ran along the meadow. Richard might come down from his rooms and head towards town or to some lecture.

A light snow began to fall, making her blink. Then she blinked again, stood stock still, because coming along the path she saw Richard, not sure if she'd conjured him up. The fine snow was dusting his tweed coat – the coat he'd scrounged from his father's room of shooting stuff. She could feel the precise roughness of that old tweed under her palm.

He was enclosed in a conversation with a girl. They were almost alongside her before he saw her and drew to a halt. The snow had whitened his hair.

‘Hello, Alice.' He was, as ever, charmingly pleased to see her, and impervious and unreachable. A few more words – she couldn't take in what he'd said – and then he was gone, walking away.

She began to walk in the other direction, fast, as if she had a purpose. The snow was coming down quickly, veils of scrim catching across her face, fine as a girl's hair and melting wet on her lips.

She hated that pretty girl next to Richard, that small red smile. Lipstick on already at breakfast – the sort of girl who would feel at home with Richard's mother, who would know all the strange little rituals of a place like Amforth House.

She cut up through a cobbled street past Oriel and was back in town, the busy pavements and the indifference of morning bus queues. Most of the shop windows were criss-crossed with white tape now. In one the glass had been boarded over and painted with scenes of Oxford.

The pensive, magical Oxford of last year had gone; it was hard to recall those groups of gowned men walking in a leisurely, reflective manner through quiet streets. Now heavy traffic rumbled down towards St Giles, lines of lorries carrying troops or bulky machinery under tarpaulins. The pavements were crowded with a host of people evacuated from London; civil servants in bowler hats, servicemen in uniforms with the stripes of various regiments, RAF men in sheepskin jackets, Polish officers and Free French soldiers in sharp-cornered berets or kepis, gangs of girls evacuated from London colleges. A whole year's intake of men had disappeared, and soon Richard would be gone too.

She saw him suddenly, waiting to cross at the Cornmarket.

But it wasn't Richard, only her grief conjuring him from nothing.

Had it really all been nothing, the whole of last year? The breathless moment of sliding up the sash window of her room onto the night garden – her room that was placed so conveniently at ground floor level – climbing out and finding Richard there, waiting in the summer mists, going down to the boathouse, muffled laughter as they slid the punt out onto the water, silent and dreamlike. Then coming back in the morning, the sun golden on the perfectly still water, the boat gliding between the curtains of willows, arms tired after punting all the way out to Eton and back.

Or sitting next to Richard in New College chapel, the light through the east window painting blues and purple on ancient stone, the choir melancholy for the Nunc Dimittis, the whispered prayers together. They had shared that. And the ardent discussions about a better world in the sherry-warmed courts of professors in red cravats, daring them to think like communists.

And then came the journey in his father's borrowed MG, to his country house, the long gravel drive and the butler opening the vast door in the Palladian edifice. Richard's family had been away in
London. A maid in a white apron had served just the two of them at a long oak table in a room where gilt-framed oil portraits of Lyly maidens with their luminous silks and wetly red lips looked down on them. A long evening in the green damask ballroom, changing the record on the wind-up gramophone, emptying bottles of fizz, dancing a little, lying on the same sofa and talking – how they would build a shining future. Their rooms were close together on the same corridor. Perhaps it was being in that house, or simply being so sure of each other and sure of everything; but yes, she'd let things go too far that night; but then it had seemed as though only good and true things could come from being so closely bound to Richard.