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to séances with a woman in Farmouth who was a medium. Then she put on her navy suit smelling of mothballs and her navy hat with the duck wing and her white gloves and sat looking unfamiliar and important in the car next to Uncle Dick, who gave her a lift to the house where the medium lived. Joyce and Ann begged to be allowed to go too—they were mad at that time for Ouija boards and levitation at Amery-James—but Lil was dignified and immovable in her refusal.
    â€”It’s not a game, she said. It’s not for children.
    Vera’s anger at her was out of all proportion, as Uncle Dick pointed out.
    â€”It’s a bit of harmless excitement, he said. Poor old Lillie, she doesn’t get out much.
    â€”There are so many other worthwhile things she could get involved in. I don’t want her to be stultified out here. There are gardening clubs—she’s supposed to care about that—there’s the choir, the Women’s Cooperative Guild. But to lay yourself open to these charlatans, preying upon the weaknesses of the foolish, pulling muslin out from their stomachs and squeezing jellies in people’s hands and pretending to make contact with people who no longer exist, who have turned back into molecules of carbon!
    Vera never failed to mention that during the war Lil had been vaguely involved with something called the Magic Battle of Britain: they put up Cross of Light posters in the London underground and threw “go-away powder” into the sea, where it was supposed to mix with the salt to stop the forces of darkness from invading.
    â€”I don’t know what we even bothered with soldiers for, Vera said. Or artillery, or airplanes. All we needed was some old go-away powder. It was that simple. Just like the Queen of the Zulus believing she could make people proof against the white man’s bullets.
    In fact, what Lil reported back from her séances never seemed to involve the kind of dramas with ectoplasm and babies’ hands that Vera feared and the children rather hoped for. Her stories were decorous and poignant; it was possible that she censored them for Vera’s benefit. In the lamplight in the kitchen, once she had eased her feet out of her shoes and unhooked her corset, she told them about the sailor husband who had given his blessing to a second marriage, and the woman who had gone into a trance and imagined her dead father taking her into a lovely garden full of the scents of flowers in the darkness. When the woman said how she wished she could see it in the light, her father replied that if she saw it in the light she’d never want to go back.
    Lil never seemed to make any very satisfactory contact with Ivor. Sometimes he came near, the medium said, he was trying to reach through, but he was naturally shy, he gave way to the others, he didn’t like to push himself forward.
    â€”I said, That’s him! Lil told them. That’s Ivor. That’s him all over. Trust him.
    And so that was how Joyce came to imagine him losing his life on the beach at Dunkirk: holding back shyly, giving way to others.
    *   *   *
    Joyce was the eldest of the children. Peter, her cousin, clever and awkward, had a Choral Scholarship at the Cathedral School; he was the same age as Ann. Martin, her brother, was younger and went to the local Juniors in Farmouth. Martin was brown and wiry, gallant and handsome; Lil said she caused him more trouble than all the rest put together. He came home with his school cap pulled hard down to hide a deep gash in his forehead from when he’d been playing about with the tools in a car mechanic’s workshop near school; Lil had to soak the cap where it had stuck to the wound as the blood dried. He didn’t cry. He burned up a pair of trousers in the bedroom grate and told his mother he’d lost them so she wouldn’t see how badly they were ripped; she found the telltale scorched buttons. He made a parachute