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her, that one day this amazing isolation with her would come to an end, and the closer that they became the more completely they would have to part. He had thought, at the beginning of their parting, on the boat and the first few difficult days after it, that he must, he should, banish all thoughts of her; now he knew just how difficult it was to do that for more than a few hours at a time. It was not made easier by his relationship with Zoë, which had, he thought now, all the anxious courtesy of two people trapped between two floors in a lift – a kind of wary limbo that neither seemed able to overcome.
    Perhaps, he thought, he would feel better if he talked to someone about it: his thoughts would become clearer, he would be more able to deal with the situation. And the obvious person to talk to would be Archie.

THE GIRLS
    August 1945
    ‘I really wish we hadn’t asked him. He’ll eat up all our food and keep on wanting to go to the cinema. And he’ll probably be no good at all at painting.’
    ‘We can give him the easy bits to do.’
    ‘He actually asked me if we were going to pay him for working. My own brother!’
    ‘Oh, Clary! He was only joking. Are the sausages done?’
    ‘They must be. They’ve been in the pan for ages.’
    ‘If you’ll have a go at the potatoes, I’ll test them.’ Her arms were aching and the potatoes were still lumpy.
    ‘Poll, I think you’re meant to put butter and milk into mashed potatoes.’
    ‘We can’t. We’ve finished the butter, and we’ll need the marge tomorrow for sandwiches for Neville as well as us. And there’s only half a pint of milk left. We’ll have to stop having Grape Nuts for breakfast.’
    ‘And have black toast and bright yellow marge.’
    ‘It doesn’t have to be black if you watch the grill all the time.’
    ‘It seems to me,’ Clary said, when they’d doled out the sausages and lumpy mash and were sitting at the little kitchen table, ‘that cooking only works if it’s the only thing you do. Like Mrs Cripps.’
    ‘I expect we’ll get better at it as the years go by. And there’ll be more food to get good with.’
    ‘Not for ages. There are thousands of starving Germans.’
    ‘Noël says that masses of food that might have come to us has to go to them, and so rationing will get worse, not better. He says that bread will be rationed any minute.’
    ‘Oh dear.’ The pronouncements of Noël, Clary’s employer, relayed as gospel by Clary, were invariably gloomy. ‘Anyway, we have got our own house.’
    ‘Yes. Do you think it will stop smelling so queer, or shall we just get used to it?’
    ‘We’ll get rid of the smell. The whole place will be wonderful when we’ve finished with it.’
    The ‘house’ was, in fact, six rooms, two on each floor, of a small eighteenth-century house off Baker Street. On the ground floor was a grocer’s shop and in the basement an unknown region where the Green Brothers, who owned the shop, plucked and cleaned poultry. The feathers drifted up to the first floor of their part of the building together with a smell of singeing that added a dimension to the general odour of the place, a damp, rotting sort of smell. It had been in an appalling state when they took it, with plaster crumbling and old paint blistering off the window bars. Someone had written wild messages in pencil on various bits of walls and doors. ‘Hole house rotting,’ said one; ‘Hopless place,’ another. ‘Damp and durty,’ and so on. All true in a way, but six rooms for a hundred and fifty pounds a year seemed a bargain and what they could afford. The family was helping. Polly’s father was giving them coconut matting for the three flights of stairs and the Duchy had donated a large quantity of old carpet from Chester Terrace that was to be cut and fitted for their rooms. Clary had the first floor to herself, Polly the second, and the top floor was to be the kitchen and dining room. There had been a lavatory in a kind of passage