One

'Kind of.' He told her about his work, how it was much like any other hard, risk-filled labour once you got beyond the technicalities. 'Saved my life, though,' he said.

'Fate throws us in or pulls us back,' Becky said.

Jane watched her in the candlelight. She was gazing into her mug as if she might find a solution there. Aidan's breathing was like the soft hiss of an oil burner. It was soothing. It was something to alight upon other than the tragic wail of the wind.

'Do you have anybody?' Jane asked. 'Anybody at all? We could check on them.'

She was shaking her head. 'Even if there were someone, I wouldn't go to them. I don't want to have to remember them dead for ever.'

'It might not be like that.'

'No, you're right. I hope you're right. For you, above all. But I can't hope. It's not in me.'

'Where are your family?'

'Abroad, mostly. I have relatives in Canada.'

'Quite a journey, if you decided to go looking.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Something tells me I'll have a little trouble booking a flight.'

They sat and digested this. It was another jolt; Jane hadn't considered what might have happened at the airports. All that fuel. It didn't bear thinking about.

Becky took a drink, the slightest sip; she'd done little more than moisten her lips. 'I remember one day, our teacher took us to the TV room. We were all excited. No proper lessons. We just get to veg out in front of the box. He put a tape in the machine and switched it on and left the room. He actually left the room. Everyone started monkeying around, and then the programme started. An atomic bomb going off. Mushroom cloud. Buildings turned to dust in the blink of an eye. Everyone went quiet. Sat down. Watched it. It was the mid-1980s. Cold War paranoia. Every siren you heard was a four-minute warning, every plane going over was filled with plutonium.

'There was a woman on the screen who looked like a piece of rubber that has been left too close to the fire. She was writing her story and it was read out to the camera by her daughter. How she became pregnant by an American. There were some living there in Japan before the war started. He was eventually interned. She never saw him again. The daughter was born a couple of months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The mother worked as a teacher. Towards the end of the war she moved around a lot. She was offered work at a school in Hiroshima.

'She left her daughter at home with her parents, who had moved with her too. They lived in a traditional wooden house near the mountains. Their house overlooked an island. I remember her talking about deer. About how they used to walk through the streets. The mother used to collect wood and bring back fruit for the family breakfasts. Every day she would walk miles to the train station and get a train to the centre of Hiroshima. On the morning of the bomb, she was helping to organise the morning assembly. There was a flash, and the colour of violet. And then she doesn't remember anything until she was aware of something dripping on her face. She thought she was in heaven. There was dust over everything. She could hear singing. Girls singing the school song. Later she realised it was because the children had been forbidden to cry for help. She was able to stand up. The school was gone. She had been standing half a mile from the nuclear blast. She was the only teacher to survive. She tried to save others but the voices singing went out one by one. Four children survived.

'She nearly died. She turned black and her hair fell out. Her nose bled constantly and she was unable to keep food down. All she wanted to do was drink water. She never spoke again. Her vocal cords had been seared together.

'I watched that programme and I could barely speak for a week. It felt as though I had experienced it. And now I have. I have.'

They finished their whisky in silence. Jane was all for pulling up the table and throwing down a mattress but Becky told him not to be silly. They undressed and climbed into the bed. It was cold. She moved against him, her head on his chest, and he was reminded of how long it had been since he had felt someone as close as this.

He somehow fell asleep with the maddening smell of her hair and a hot, chaotic thought of stumbling through limbs, trying to find where his face had landed while fire raged 200 feet high all around him and his son sang a song that turned to ash in his throat.