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acquiescing to another man’s life would be, in the end, any different?’
    She opened the car door. The children would be lined up inside the classroom, pent up like puppies, waiting for the hysterical moment of collection. Those twins, her and Dan’s children, whose needs were as valid as their father’s. Or hers. She got out of the car and locked it.
    â€˜Hiya!’ someone called.
    She turned. A girl in a pink faux sheepskin jacket was waving from the entrance to the school front garden. She was familiar, the wife of someone in Dan’s battery – Ros? Rosie? – someone presumably going through exactly what Alexa was going through right now. She smiled back, filled with a sudden rush of fellow feeling. Ros or Rosie shouted with forced cheeriness, ‘Nothing stops for the school run, does it?’
    Alexa put her car keys in her pocket and straightened her shoulders.
    â€˜Nor should it,’ she said, and laughed.

CHAPTER FOUR
    D an was stopped halfway up the battery offices stairs – deep-blue vinyl treads, paler blue walls – by the regimental adjutant, a spare and eager young man who gave the impression of being permanently poised to sprint somewhere.
    â€˜Part one orders are through, sir,’ he said breathlessly. ‘You’ll find them on your email. Leave starts in ten days, after regimental PT. A Friday, that is. Sir.’
    â€˜Thank you, Nick.’
    â€˜And the CO says we can sleep some of the boys and girls of 40th regiment tonight. He says why not? More bar profits.’
    â€˜Thank you, Nick.’
    â€˜And your BK is waiting to speak to you in your office, sir.’
    â€˜I know that, Nick, thank you. That’s why I’m on my way up there.’
    â€˜Of course. Sir.’
    Dan nodded to show that the exchange was over, and proceeded up the stairs to the battery command floor. It was soothing up there, an area of rigid protocols and hierarchies, where every man knew his duty and his place, and the walls were comfortably lined with photographs of every batterycommander the regiment had had since 1845, as well as those of more recent glories. Outside Dan’s own office hung a colour photograph of the latest regimental recipient of the Military Cross, complete with its blue-and-white ribbon: a modest young gunner of extraordinary bravery who was unable to articulate anything very much except that he wished to be left to get on with life as one of the lads and in no way to be made a fuss of. He could not, Dan reckoned, have stood more than five foot four in his stockinged feet, and was two months short of his twenty-second birthday. He had a mother in Parkhead in Glasgow and a brother in a young offenders’ institution, and no idea where his father was. The lieutenant in charge of the troop reported that the father hadn’t been seen in twenty years and that the mother regularly saw too much of the bottle.
    In Dan’s office, Paul Swain, his battery captain, was on the telephone. He was a thickset man in his forties, once a regimental sergeant major and now a late-entry captain whose own photograph, displayed modestly behind the door, bore the little silver oak leaf awarded for being Mentioned in Dispatches. He stiffened slightly in acknowledgement as Dan came in, said to his phone, ‘Yes. Yes, fully agreed. Sorted,’ and put the phone down. He said, ‘Gunner McCormack’s going to lose that foot.’
    â€˜Shit,’ Dan said.
    â€˜He’ll get less than nine grand a year for that as compensation.’
    â€˜Double shit. Poor bugger.’
    â€˜Sounds chirpy enough, though. Says he’s always got another foot.’
    Dan bent to move the cursor on his screen to access his emails. He said, ‘Let’s hope his attitude carries him through the next stage, poor blighter. I’ve just been in the gun park. They live, breathe and eat that hardware, don’t they? Everybolt gleaming. You’d never