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unfamiliar rooms, shouting their names, but she knew they had disappeared for ever and would never be found. She woke with a start and was relieved to see that at least the baby was still by her side in the great white snowfield of the bed. The baby. Ursula. Sylvie had had the name ready, Edward if it had turned out to be a boy. The naming of children was her preserve, Hugh seemed indifferent to what they were called although Sylvie supposed he had his limits. Scheherazade perhaps. Or Guinevere.
    Ursula opened her milky eyes and seemed to fix her gaze on the weary snowdrop. Rock-a-bye baby , Sylvie crooned. How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. ‘One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs,’ she said to Ursula.

War

June 1914
    MR WINTON – ARCHIBALD – had set up his easel on the sand and was attempting to render a seascape in watery marine smears of blue and green – Prussians and Cobalt Blues, Viridian and Terre Verte. He daubed a couple of rather vague seagulls in the sky, sky that was virtually indistinguishable from the waves below. He imagined showing the picture on his return home, saying, ‘In the style of the Impressionists, you know.’
    Mr Winton, a bachelor, was by profession a senior clerk in a factory in Birmingham that manufactured pins but was a romantic by nature. He was a member of a cycling club and every Sunday tried to wheel as far away from Birmingham’s smogs as he could, and he took his annual holiday by the sea so that he could breathe hospitable air and think himself an artist for a week.
    He thought he might try to put some figures in his painting, it would give it a bit of life and ‘movement’, something his night-school teacher (he took an art class) had encouraged him to introduce into his work. Those two little girls down at the sea’s edge would do. Their sunhats meant he wouldn’t need to try and capture their features, a skill he hadn’t yet quite mastered.
    ‘Come on, let’s go and jump the waves,’ Pamela said.
    ‘Oh,’ Ursula said, hanging back. Pamela took her hand and dragged her into the water. ‘Don’t be a silly.’ The closer she got to the water the more Ursula began to panic until she was swamped with fear but Pamela laughed and splashed her way into the water and she could only follow. She tried to think of something that would make Pamela want to return to the beach – a treasure map, a man with a puppy – but it was too late. A huge wave rose, curling above their heads, and came crashing over them, sending them down, down into the watery world.
    Sylvie was startled to look up from her book and see a man, a stranger, walking towards her along the sand with one of her girls tucked under each arm, as if he was carrying geese or chickens. The girls were sopping wet and tearful. ‘Went out a bit too far,’ the man said. ‘But they’ll be fine.’
    They treated their rescuer, a Mr Winton, a clerk (‘senior’) to tea and cakes in a hotel that overlooked the sea. ‘It’s the least I can do,’ Sylvie said. ‘You have ruined your boots.’
    ‘It was nothing,’ Mr Winton said modestly.
    ‘Oh, no, it was most definitely something ,’ Sylvie said.
    ‘Glad to be back?’ Hugh beamed, greeting them on the station platform.
    ‘Are you glad to have us back?’ Sylvie said, somewhat combatively.
    ‘There’s a surprise for you at home,’ Hugh said. Sylvie didn’t like surprises, they all knew that.
    ‘Guess,’ Hugh said.
    They guessed a new puppy which was a far cry from the Petter engine that Hugh had had installed in the cellar. They all trooped down the steep stone staircase and stared at its oily throbbing presence, its rows of glass accumulators. ‘Let there be light,’ Hugh said.
    It would be a long time before any of them were able to snap a light switch without expecting to be blown up. Light was all it could manage, of course. Bridget had hoped for a vacuum