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Kelly stared down at himself. His braid was fouled with dirt and there was blood on his shirt cuff. What a bloody silly thing to do, he thought, nearly getting himself killed just when they’d upped him to rear-admiral.

Smoke was lifting into the air beyond the houses ahead and, knocking the dust from his uniform, he set off again. His stride was firm and his face was grim, but inside he was more uncertain than he’d ever been.

He became aware of more policemen, then he saw an ambulance and crowds on the pavement, and he began to hurry. Unable to get through, he pushed his way past, only to realise with a shock that the crowd was round the address he’d been given. There was a whole area of flattened houses such as he’d just left, with a further fringe of damaged ones where the blast had been less violent. A string of vehicles, fire appliances and ambulances had arrived and what looked like hundreds of men were picking among the rubble.

From among the wrecked houses on the edge of the crater, an ambulance man was just helping an elderly woman away. She was bleeding from cuts made by flying glass, her clothes were torn and were covered, like her face and hair, with a mask of pulverised plaster and soot. The whole street smelled of smoke, old dust and fear. Slowly he picked his way along it until he found the address he was seeking. Like the other houses, it had lost its facade, and the interior looked as though it had been – through a shredder. The wallpaper hung in strips and windows and doors were missing. The walls were pockmarked with fragments of stone and hedgehogged with jagged daggers of glass, while in the street below there were sickening splodges on the pavement which a workman was covering with sawdust.

His heart cold, he pushed forward, and was just on the point of asking a policeman whether he’d heard what had happened to the occupants when he saw Charley. She was sitting on a low wall, her face black, her clothes covered with dust, and she was clutching a silver frame, which he recognised at once from three years before as the one which had held the photograph of the dead RAF officer. He stopped, feeling that he’d been wrong to come, but then his heart went out to her and as he approached she lifted her face. Tears had made two pale runnels through the dirt on her cheeks, and she looked dazed, but he knew at once that she’d recognised him. She didn’t seem in the slightest surprised to see him and he saw her expression twist into anguish.

‘Oh, Kelly!’ she said, as if he’d seen her only the previous day, as if she’d been in touch with him through all the empty years. Then, as he lifted her to her feet and put his arms round her, she began to shiver and her face crumpled and the tears came. ‘Oh, Kelly, Kelly,’ she whimpered.

‘Thank God you’re safe,’ he said.

She seemed to recover a little and after a while the shuddering seemed to subside.

‘I was at the back when it happened,’ she was saying. ‘If I’d been at the front I’d have been killed. Everything’s gone. There’s nothing left worth having.’ Her head moved as if she were shaking it to try to put her senses in order. ‘I’ll have to find somewhere to live.’

‘There’s Thakeham, Charley.’ His arm still round her, he began to lead her away and, when an ambulanceman approached, his expression questioning, he shook his head.

Leaving her drinking tea at the police station, he set out to find a car. There appeared to be no taxi drivers with enough petrol to go beyond the city boundaries, but in the end he found a car hire firm with a load of black market fuel and persuaded them with a colossal bribe to take him to Thakeham. Pushing Charley into the car, he put his coat round her and climbed in beside her. She said nothing, flashing him only occasional glances as she sat huddled beside him, still clutching the silver picture frame to her. It was a slow drive across London because the flying bombs were still coming in, and they were diverted half a dozen times. It was late when they arrived at Thakeham but Biddy was at the door the minute the car drew up. She asked no questions but, as she led Charley inside, she turned to Kelly, her eyes questioning.

‘Bombed out, Biddy,’ he said laconically. ‘She’ll be staying here until she can find somewhere.’

She nodded and vanished and he hurried to what had been his mother’s room to make sure it was in order. He could hear splashing from the bathroom next door and Biddy’s low voice.

His coat, smeared with dust and spotted with blood, lay on the bed. Alongside it was the silver frame Charley had clutched to her all the way from Harwich and he picked it up to put it where she could see it, wishing he could produce in her the same devotion she seemed to feel for this dead airman. But, as he turned it over, he saw that the face staring out at him through the cracked glass was his own, the press picture taken when he’d been to the Palace to collect his CB.

Deliberately he kept out of the way and Biddy, her face still showing her own grief, arrived soon afterwards to say that Charley was sleeping.

‘Best leave her alone,’ she suggested. ‘She’ll probably be all right in the morning.’

He ate the meal she set in front of him without noticing it and slept badly, finally falling into a restless doze in the early hours of the morning. When he woke, he bathed, shaved and dressed hurriedly before going to his mother’s room. Charley was sitting up in bed, wearing a dressing gown belonging to Biddy. There was a piece of sticking plaster on her forehead and a red weal on her cheek. The ordeal had marked her and shadows like bruises lay beneath her eyes against the mask-like pallor of her features.

‘Hello, Charley,’ he said quietly.

She gave him an uncertain smile and he noticed that the silver frame was on the table near the bed facedown.

‘That’s a lovely shiner you’ve got.’

She nodded her smile tremulous and doubtful. ‘I’m sorry to be so much trouble,’ she said, avoiding his eyes. ‘I’ll find somewhere to go as soon as I can.’

‘No! Stay here. The place’s enormous and there’s nobody in it. Stay as long as you wish.’

He was cheating a little, trying to make her dependent on him so that she’d be unable to leave, but his hold on her was too tenuous and he was determined not to let it slip from his fingers again, especially after he’d seen what was in the picture frame that she’d clutched to her so determinedly.

‘I’m grateful for what you did,’ she whispered.

‘I’ve been looking for you ever since 1941,’ he said. ‘I even tried to find Mabel in the hope she’d know.’

Tears welled up in her eyes but she managed a smile. ‘You became an admiral after all, Kelly,’ she said. ‘I’m so pleased.’

‘We might have celebrated it together,’ he said gruffly. ‘But I didn’t know where you were.’

‘I knew where you were,’ she said. ‘Always. I knew when you were bombed in the Mediterranean. I was watching the signals in the Ops Division when Impi was sunk and I followed the fight against Ziethen and Müffling every bit of the way. I wasn’t supposed to read the signals but I did. I told them–’

‘Told them what, Charley?’

She was silent for a while. ‘I told them that I knew you. I was terrified.’

‘Why?’

He sensed an advantage and decided to have it out of her. He believed in himself and, confident now that he’d seen his own photograph in the silver frame, he was determined to push it to the limit.

‘Why, Charley?’ he persisted.

‘I thought you might be hurt.’

‘They can’t touch me,’ he said briskly. ‘I’m fireproof. But why should it worry you?’

She stared at him with enormous eyes, a black fear like a physical presence in her body. Before she could answer, he spoke again, forcefully, and with no sign of humility.

‘Marry me, Charley.’

She looked at him. ‘You sound as if you were on the bridge giving orders.’

‘I’m not on the bridge,’ he said. ‘But I’m trying to give orders. I need you. I love you. I’ve loved you all my life.’

She looked at him wonderingly and he had a sudden uneasy thought that, in all the years he’d known her, in all the years of telling her she meant something to him, he’d never managed to tell her that. His briskness dispersed.

‘I have a feeling,’ he said uncertainly, ‘that that’s something I’ve never said before. I’ve told you a lot of things – that I needed you, that I depended on you, things like that – but never that.’

‘No, Kelly,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t think you ever did.’

‘Well, I do, Charley. Now you’re here I want you to stay here.’

She still said nothing and he went on, almost desperately, feeling he was making a very bad job of it. ‘When you arrived last night, I happened to pick up the picture frame you brought with you – the only thing you brought. I thought you’d want it where you could see it, but then I saw it was me. Why, Charley?’

She hesitated for a moment before speaking in a whisper. ‘Because I loved you, Kelly,’ she said.

It didn’t make sense because she’d behaved as if she were totally indifferent to him. He’d been desperately jealous at Dover of the other men who’d been in her company, able to see her and talk to her while he was away at sea. He’d wanted to be brutal, violent, demanding that she be faithful to him, a late manifestation of passion that he could only guess had been held back by his ambition and his devotion to the Navy. He’d held it in check because he’d felt it would only have produced coldness.

‘Marry me, Charley,’ he said again. ‘There are such things as special licences and I couldn’t bear to lose you again.’

For a long time she was silent and he decided she was going to refuse him again and felt a surge of despair in the uneven stroke of his heart. Then her body trembled as if an electric current had passed through it and there was the sudden bright shine of tears in her eyes.

‘Yes, Kelly,’ she said. ‘Yes. I want to. Please.’

He was bewildered. It was impossible, he felt, to understand women. If he’d asked her before the bomb had dropped, he felt certain she’d have refused him. Yet he knew she wasn’t just accepting him now because he was offering her a home and a measure of comfort. Somehow, the flying bomb had snapped some resistance, cleared some final obstacle that lay between them, exposing to both of them their need for each other.

‘Stay here, Charley,’ he said. ‘Don’t move.’

She looked up. ‘I hadn’t thought of going away,’ she said.

He went to his room and rummaged in his drawers until he found a small faded red box. He’d almost forgotten it and had never expected to use it.

Returning, he took her hand and slipped the ruby ring on her finger. It looked enormous and he saw her eyes widen.

‘Kelly, it must be worth a fortune!’

‘It probably is,’ he agreed. ‘It was given to me in 1919 by the Grand Duchess Evgenia Vjeskov when we fished her out of Russia. I thought then it would make a good engagement ring. It’s just taken a long time to arrive.’ He paused. ‘Christina never wore it, Charley. I never offered it to her.’

She seemed awed by it and she lifted her face to his, a lost look in her eyes, then the tears welled up and she flung her arms round him.

‘Oh, Kelly, we’ve been such fools!’

They went to the Lake District to see Mabel, the only relative in the world either of them possessed. Her husband had returned from India and was now running the local Home Guard. As she kissed him, Kelly saw there were tears in her eyes.

‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘why did it take you two bloody idiots so long?’

They were married a fortnight later at the Esher Registry Office. It was a quiet wedding because Kelly Rumbelo’s ship had gone to Trincomalee and Hugh said he couldn’t get leave. Since it was so soon after Paddy’s death, Kelly suspected he preferred it that way. Verschoyle was there with Maisie, Rumbelo and Biddy, whose face still wore a tremulous expression of her own grief.

In view of wartime restrictions and inability to get petrol, they spent their honeymoon at Thakeham, and almost immediately Kelly flew to Ramsay’s headquarters at Granville in Normandy. By September, with all the Channel ports captured, he was told it would be his job to make sure that all the demolished equipment was removed and the ports put in working order as quickly as possible.

‘Europe has to support itself as quickly as possible,’ Ramsay explained. ‘It’ll be your job to see that it has the port facilities to do so.’

It was Verschoyle, as usual, who put him in the picture.

‘They’re looking for an active, alert and determined senior naval officer for Germany after the surrender,’ he said. ‘Ramsay turned it down on the grounds that the man should be younger and fresher. I suggested you.’

By this time the army was moving swiftly northwards. Paris fell and, soon afterwards, Brussels and finally Antwerp. The perimeter of the German fortress was shrinking every day. By the end of the year they stood on the German frontier and Kelly was in Brussels with Archie Bumf and two Americans as part of the allied committee of recovery, and seemed to spend most of his time flying to and fro between there and London in an assortment of aircraft from old Dakotas to spanking new Liberators.

A Russian Order of Ushakov, first class, arrived, much to his astonishment.

‘Who’s Ushakov?’ he asked.

Latimer grinned. ‘Led the Black Sea fleet into the Adriatic in 1798,’ he said. ‘He must have been good. Even Nelson congratulated him.’

They’d set up headquarters in a large house just inside the French border, handy both for France and Belgium, and had just christened it HMS Darius, in accordance with naval orders that all headquarters must be ships, when Boyle discovered his parents-in-law at Ushant. For the next week he virtually disappeared as he arranged for them to travel to England. They were almost destitute, with all their possessions looted by the Germans, but they were in good health, even if hungry.

‘Perhaps they’re lucky,’ Kelly said dryly. ‘The hospitality since we landed’s been more than my stomach can stand.’

On Armistice Day, he stood behind Ramsay in Paris at a march past led by Moroccan troops with a large white goat, mounted bands, Scottish pipe bands, French horn bands, and an American band in which the big drum was mounted on wheels and pushed by the drummer. He was travelling long distances by air now, from the Bay of Biscay to the Scheldt, often in freighter Liberators which contained no mod cons and he had to lie in the bomb bays or on the floor. It was cold and congested and he was glad when the trips took him to London.