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thinking about decisions, and the future, about how strange it was to be able to think about those things. There was going to be a future. He looked towards it, consciously, turning his mind away from the past the way a car’s lamps turn at a junction: illuminating possibilities, the road ahead, with beams of light that do not, cannot, show everything. As the car turns the lights are only ever shining straight on, out over – what? Another path, a path you won’t take and can’t know, that you glimpse in passing. It’s the future, it’s forward, but what forward entails, you can’t know. It’s shocking enough for now, after those years of orders and terror and imminent death, that forward even exists. He and Nadine had a forward to go into. They had choices. They had decisions to make. They had a degree of power. It was quite peculiar.
    He was hideously aware of her, lying beneath him, separated by the padded wooden shelf he lay on, rattled and thrown around by the train.

Chapter Two
    Locke Hill, Sidcup, March–April 1919
    After the wedding Peter, Tom and Rose returned to Locke Hill. Max the red setter ran up, tail floating, and put his nose in Tom’s face. Tom stood on the drive while his father opened the front door; then he stood in the hall, by a jug of white jonquils, while Peter, tall, slender, still in his overcoat, hurried through to his study. He watched Julia, his mother, shimmy down the stairs and across the hall.
    ‘Darling!’ she cried, to Peter’s back. ‘It’s roast beef! What luxury! Will you eat with us? Or – I suppose you’re tired – Mrs Joyce has made Yorkshire pudding?’
    She stopped at the dark, polished door of his study, which had fallen shut. All was silent.
    ‘I could bring your tray,’ she said. She was wearing lipstick. Tom watched her. He was nearly three years old and had been living with his grandmother and the nursemaid Margaret in another house; he didn’t know why. At Christmas he had been brought here; he didn’t know why. Now Eliza looked after him, and everything he wanted and needed was in the power of this Mummy and this Daddy, who he didn’t know, but who he understood were the important ones.
    He went and stood by Julia, uncertainly.
    ‘Or if you prefer I could coddle you an egg …’ Julia called gaily, fresh and nervous. ‘Or …’ Her chalk-white face stretched immobile and expressionless, and her blue eyes shone, wide and terrified. Tom didn’t know why her face didn’t move the way other faces did.
    The jonquils smelt beautiful. All winter Julia had been bringing up hyacinth bulbs in glass jars from the cellar – ‘heavenly smell, isn’t it?’ – or finding the first narcissi, or a sprig of early blossom from the orchard wall, and taking them in to Peter. Occasionally Tom, imitating her, would take a flower, and give it to Julia, or Nadine. They would say, ‘Thank you, darling.’
    Nadine had not come back after the wedding. Tom had not known why she and Riley were living in his father’s house in the first place, any more than he knew why he had not been, or why Nadine and Riley had not come back. He did not know what the war was, nor how even if people had a home they did not always feel capable of going there. Of the webs that had bound these adults together over the past years he knew nothing. That his father had been Riley’s commanding officer; that Riley had carried his father back from No Man’s Land; that Rose had nursed Riley; that Riley had deserted Nadine; that Julia had comforted Nadine and offered her a home. He knew that they were tangled up with each other, but he knew only with a child’s aeonic instincts, not as information.
    And he knew that though Julia was called Mummy and smelt right, she behaved wrong, and so it was best to go and sit with whoever was consistently kind. That was Nadine. He had liked to sit curled up against her, and when Riley came to sit there too, he didn’t make Tom go away.
    Riley’s face had