It was, to him, an encounter of sudden intimacy in this public place; the angle of her head, her posture, her hands. He watched as a man – soused and staggering, every careful step an acknowledgement of the spinning earth and its axial tilt – fell into the vacant chair opposite her, giving Helena a slow, marinated gaze until his head fell, weighty as a curling stone, and slid across the table. John and another onlooker jumped up to help at the same time and, between them, dragged the man to the back of the pub to sleep it off.

She continued to read and he was almost asleep when Peter heard her say, ‘I missed her more than ever this time. Everywhere we were made me think of her, I almost thought I’d see her if I turned my head.’

He was fully awake now.

‘Sometimes I think I see her too,’ Peter said, ‘out of the corner of my eye. If you can see a feeling.’

‘Yes, I think you can.

Doctors turned to ice with emotion. The nurse who fell asleep in the middle of an operation. The infant put back together after hours of surgery, only to be killed by a bomb that fell on the hospital a moment later. The father who kept a scrap of cloth tied with a string around his neck, filled with teeth, proof his son had existed, though Mara knew he would never be sure they were his son’s. The same man who watched his shoes being stolen from his feet by someone who thought he was dead.

VI: River Orwell, Suffolk, 1984

“Above all, shared desire, with its unfathomable, inexpressible peace. The hope implicit in their days and nights together.

James was suddenly, utterly, exhausted. He should have foreseen this. Everyone loved Roland. James loved him. For the first time since their trip to Lochnagar in the purple Lamborghini, he felt himself to be alone in the world. Nothing had changed since he was a teenager. He hadn’t, after all, left himself behind. Slowly, he reasoned his way through the matter at hand. Perhaps if he’d been less reasonable, he’d still have her. “Well, if Alice and me didn’t match up, that doesn’t mean you and her shouldn’t try. It’s a question of compatibility not… possession. It’s not like I’ve got any claims on her.”