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Fred looked abandoned when Peter excused himself, but there was nothing Peter could do. He had to keep the girl in his sights. He found her on the balcony, seated on a folding chair with a group of other girls. Behind them the dark Thames was wavering with the pathways of light reflected from the windows.

‘May I join you?'

She looked around at the lack of chairs. Peter fetched another folding chair and manoeuvred it into the space between her and the balustrade. He sat down and balanced his meal on his knees.

‘Hope you don't mind if I say how nice you look in that frock.'

She looked down at it and frowned. ‘I shouldn't have bought it really. Now I've got no coupons left for anything else; can't afford to eat half the time.' She took a forkful of cold potato, ate it with relief in her eyes.

‘I think it was worth it. You look like Vivien Leigh in that dress, only prettier.'

She burst out laughing. ‘So what are you doing here then? I mean, what are you studying?'

‘I'm reading theology.'

‘You mean for the Church?'

He nodded.

‘Oh,' she said. He could feel her drifting away, unsure of him now. The band started a Glen Miller tune, ‘Little Brown Jug'. The music made him feel suddenly bold.

‘Would you like to dance?'

‘Don't mind me, I'm sure,' said the friend next to her.

She put down her empty plate, smoothed out her dress and followed him back in to the dance area in the main hall. They had an awkward tussle to get the proper hold and she giggled.

They had to shout out bits of information above the band's trumpets and saxophones. She lived by the sea. She was called Patricia and she was eighteen. She'd lost her father in the war. She was on a county scholarship, enough to manage on – if she was sensible.

He had no idea what to do when a jive started to play, but she knew how it went. She slipped under his arm, spun round and was back in his arms again. They stood up for every dance. By the time the slow part of the evening came, with the waltzes and smooching dances, they seemed to have travelled a lifetime together.

After the ball was over, in the small hours of the morning, he walked her home through the silent city, the first hint of a red-eyed dawn breaking at the edge of the darkness. She lived miles away. She took off her strappy heels – they were borrowed and rubbed her ankles – and she walked barefoot on the pavement. He gave her a piggyback over a short cut she knew through a bombsite and found the remnants of a garden blooming in the carmine-hued morning. He stopped and picked a bunch of sooty-hearted anemones for her.

Her digs were in King's Cross. You could hear the frightened lowing of the cows in the slaughterhouse yards nearby. She stopped
in front of a building that was still bomb damaged and boarded up on the top floor.

‘Well, goodnight then.' He took a tentative step closer and then he felt small arms go round his neck, a soft mouth nuzzling his cheek. When she took her arms away he didn't want her to stop.

‘Shall I see you again?' he said. ‘Soon?'

She thought about it. ‘Tuesday, lunchtime. Where you sold me the ticket.' Then she looked up at him, her eyes open and serious. ‘I know you saw me. I know you saw me take the book, and you must think I'm such a bad person. But don't you feel it sometimes; don't you think what's the point in being good any more, after all the awful things that happened?'

‘But you've got to believe that there's a plan in all this,' he replied, earnest and convinced. ‘That the future's going to be so much better.'

She frowned up at him. ‘I suppose you would say that. But it's nice, the way you say it.' She looked at him ruefully. ‘So, d'you promise me then, Peter Donoghue, that everything will get better?'

‘I promise.'

‘Perhaps I'll see you then. Tuesday.' She put her head on one side and stepped through the door, closing it slowly.

It seemed a risk that he might burst with happiness before Tuesday lunchtime. He waited in the green marble hall, groups of students coming and going. No sign of her. By two o'clock the hall had emptied, just a few stragglers running up the stairs, late for lectures. And still no sign of her. He missed his own lecture. By three he saw that she wasn't going to come.

No one had heard of a Patricia with long black hair. He didn't know her surname. No sign of her friend anywhere. What had she said she was studying? Had she said English, or Latin? How could
he not know? He walked back to her house, relieved to recognise it again. He was sure that she'd be there.

‘Looks like she's done a flit, that one,' said the landlady. ‘Owes me me rent too. When you find her tell her I want paying.'

Where could she be? As Peter made his way back to his room he cut through the bombsite once more and stood and looked at the anemones growing up between the bricks, the black pollen on their petals. He had to find her again. He already knew that he loved her.

CHAPTER 24

Barnstaple, 1949

After her mother's funeral it rained for two weeks, washing away any memory of the summer. They gave Patricia her old vacation job back at the telephone exchange. Everyone assumed she would stay home now. So, her first week back at the switchboard, she was there on the night of the Tenmouth flood; she found herself trying to put people through, their voices shrill and desperate as the river rose up in the dark and drowned the whole of Tenmouth village.

In the early hours of the morning she pushed her bike home in the moist dark, her arms shaking. She kept thinking: she had been the last person to hear those voices, before the flood carried them away into oblivion.

The house was in darkness when she got back. She went upstairs and stood outside her sister's door, hoping for some feeling of company. Queenie was asleep, her fourteen-year-old shape thrown across the top of the bed covers, still in all her clothes.

Down in the kitchen Patricia turned on the light. She put a match to the stove and stood next to the blue flame, feeling its small heat. Her mother's drab pinny still hung on a nail, the pink and grey flowers washed and washed to shadows. The pile of condolence cards on the edge of the dresser, each one bordered in thick black ink.

She picked up the kettle to fill it. The lino made a tacky sound as she moved, pulling at her shoe. She should mop the floor; that was
what you were supposed to do. A quick flash of anger, because what she was supposed to be doing was sitting in the library in London, studying her Latin poetry; untangling pentameters to see the shape of a tall figure as he walked up from the sea. How the girl looked up and saw his comely shape against the water, how she suddenly saw that she would love him.

She heard the creak of footsteps coming down the stairs. Queenie came in.

‘He was there again, Pat, down in the street. He stopped and looked up for ages.'

‘Don't be so soft. You're imagining it.'

‘Whoever he is he knows we're on our own.'

‘How does he know that, unless he knows us? Makes no sense. Now get you to bed, and this time get in your nightdress.'

‘Pat.'

‘What?'

‘Your accent's come back.'

‘I told you, Queenie, I'm not Pat now. I'm Patricia.'

‘You won't go back to London, will you?'

Silence. Then, ‘I won't go back.'

Patricia pushed the side-door bolt in place, checked the front door was locked, all the windows firmly shut. She lay listening to the dark for a long time, but as soon as she slept the front door was standing wide open again, even more thick dark creeping in like wet breath. She woke abruptly, her heart pounding; she could feel the damp air coming in from her dream. Then she had to go down to check the door was really locked.

In the morning the sky was dense and white across the window; she had to make herself get up. Queenie was in the doorway.

‘Pat, I bain't got no clean underthings left.'

‘Well, you got to get and wash them then,' she said, in that final
way that Mum had, hard at the edges, shifting and molten with old grief on the inside.

‘Look what I found,' said Queenie. ‘In Mum's bag.'

It was that letter from Dad, the last one, folded round a brown photo of two small girls, waiting all Christmas week for him to never come home. He'd been missing in action. Then declared dead. The photos found on his body.

‘Someone's got to get the shopping.'

She was still in her slip. It was October, but the weather had turned muggy and unseasonably warm. She pulled on a dress. Outside she put Mum's wicker basket on one handle of the bike.

In the covered market she looked for cheap things: the stewing end of mutton, pearl barley to make it go further. She had Mum's long purse, both her and Queenie's ration cards.

Outside the row of butchers' shops were chairs with huge bowls of clotted cream, crusted with buttery yellow on the top. She knew that taste, sweet, unguent and healing as ointment, but she hadn't got the ration points. And suddenly she was empty and poor, envious of a younger self holding on to Dad's hand as he said yes, get some cream to their mum, and the butcher ladled it up. To have on blackberry pie, like eating summer with cream on it.

‘Three dozen people gone at Tenmouth then,' the woman in front was telling the person next to her. ‘Nothing they could do.'

Patricia put the scrag end in the basket and walked out and almost collided with Mr Stanhope. He was there in front of her in his long, tweed coat, grey hairs sprouting in his nostrils.

‘Ain't you coming to see us then? Mary's in there.'

And against her will she was back in the narrow haberdasher's shop, Mary, his wife, yellow and sour and ill behind the counter. The same close smell, odours of camphor and formaldehyde from the rolls of cloth. The narrow passages behind the desk where he pressed close,
because she'd given in once – and then she was trapped; listening to his words, the old words that kept coming back like a dark tide. ‘You won't get no other job. I know what you're like now, don't I? But then, a girl like you always thinks too much of herself, see.'

Out on the pavement in the air again Mr Stanhope was pressing a bag into her hand. ‘It'll fit you,' he said. ‘And she bain't got long to live now. You'll never get enough at that exchange to keep the house.'

‘I knows it was you there, out in the street. You keep away.'

But he laughed.

On the bridge she stopped and when no one could see, ripped the paper open. A nightdress in slippery rayon, an ugly beige colour. She was standing on the bridge, the one in the poem that won the prize at grammar school and got her the scholarship to London, the poem about the places you leave behind. She was standing on the bridge and she was holding the nightdress, like an old skin. She held it away, out above the water. Thought of the restfulness of never waking, there under the cool water. She let the cellophane package slip from her hands, watched it track through the air, suddenly taken and tossed by the water. The roar of the weir loud in her ears.

The wicker basket cut into her bare forearm. She had to wait for Queenie to pull back the bolt on the back door.

‘I wasn't afeared,' Queenie said. ‘But you was a long time gone. What we 'aving for our tea then?'

‘How should I know?' snapped Patricia, slipping Mum's apron over her head. ‘You could 'ave at least washed the potatoes.'

She ran the water hard into an enamel bowl in the sink, the crackle of the metal vibrating. The branny earth rose like a scum and she swilled it round. ‘Leopold Bloom always carried a potato,' she said.

‘Is he your boyfriend in London then?' Queenie asked.

‘Ain't got no boyfriend.'

And she thought of her yellow dress, how she had danced with a boy once till the orchestra played the last song and she'd thought that perhaps something was beginning.

‘Your accent's come back proper,' Queenie said. She looked into the basket. ‘Oh, you ain't bought scrag again, 'ave you? It don't cook.'