“GOD, GEORGE, I nearly died,” Ruth said, setting the kettle on the stove. “The fifteenth, you said. Next week.”

“I wangled an early. The demob officer was a bloke I’d been in Africa with. I thought it would be nice if I got here today.”

“Is that where you’re come from? Africa?”

He laughed. “No. Aldershot. Mind you, it took about as long. The ruddy trains. The buggers treat you like dirt.”

“Do they? Clem, let go of my leg; there’s a good boy.”

“He don’t know who I am,” George said. “He’s scared of me.”

“He’ll be all right. That’ll take a bit of gettun used to.”

“Palestine,” George said.

“Palestine?”

She half remembered it from a newsreel. Her and Chrissie in the dark of the Regal, fag smoke wreathing in the beam of the projector. A huge hotel with its side blown off by a bomb. Jewish terrorists. How could there be Jewish terrorists? They were all skeletons. The main feature had been The Best Years of Our Lives.

George lit a cigarette with a brass lighter that flipped open to the flame.

Dear God, Ruth thought, who was he? He was different, somehow. Like he could get angry any minute, or something. She would have to sleep with him tonight. With her mother listening. She couldn’t do it. She wasn’t ready. The thought of it made her feel faint.

“Jerusalem,” he said. “Bloody mad hellhole.”

To her, Jerusalem was a song. A sort of hymn.

He could not persuade his son to sit on his lap. Ruth poured weak tea. The cup trembled in her hand, chinking against the saucer.

“So, love, where’d you get the car?”

She blushed, not knowing why. “I’ll tell yer later.” She lowered her voice. “That ent exactly new. Painted up.”

“Nowt wrong with that,” George said. He looked at his son. “Now then, young man. I’ve got a present for you, too. Would you like to see it?”

Clem looked up at Ruth for guidance.

“Another present, Clem! Thas nice, ent it?”

George pulled the kit bag to his chair and untied the complex knot. He rummaged theatrically inside it.

“Is that it? No. Is that it? No, that’s not it neither. Ah, here we go.”

He produced an oddly shaped package wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. He held it toward his son, who still lurked behind his mother’s skirt. Ruth picked her child up and carried him to the table and sat him down on her lap.

“Whatever can this be, Clem, that Dad’re brought yer? Shall we undo it?”

The newspaper had photographs of foreign-looking men on it, and the writing was black wiggles and dots that looked a bit like music. Ruth imagined, madly, that her husband must be able to read it.

George’s present for his son was an exquisitely carved wooden camel.

“It opens,” George said. “See?”

The camel’s hump was brass-hinged. George reached across the table and lifted it, revealing a hollow slightly larger than an eggcup.

“See? You can keep your sweets in there. Or money.”

Sweets, Ruth thought. Clem dunt know what they are.

George fished in his trouser pocket. He brought out a silver sixpence and dropped it into the hump.

“There you go, lad,” he said. “That’s got you started. It’ll all add up.”

“What is ut, Mum?” Clem asked.

“I’ve got something for you, as well, Ruth,” George said, reaching into the bag again and producing a small soft package.

“What is it?” she asked stupidly. She was like a child, too.

“Well, why don’t you open it and find out?”

It was a silk shawl, diaphanously white, embroidered along its edges with green and silver threadwork. At each of its four corners was a tiny seashell. It was perhaps the most useless thing you could give to a red-haired woman who lived in Norfolk and was saving her clothing coupons for a new winter coat.

“I spent a whole afternoon haggling for that with a nig-nog in Cairo. I wore him down in the end, though.”

“Thas beau’iful, George.”

She held it against her face and wept. It smelled whorishly of foreign parts.

“Now what are you crying about, lass?”

“Nothun. Sorry. I’m sorry, George. Just I wunt expectun you. You give me a shock.”

She’d planned things for his return. A sign on the gate saying, WELCOME HOME GEORGE. A strip wash at the sink, then a touch of makeup and her better set of underwear. Clem in his Sunday clothes. A bottle of beer or two. She’d been more or less promised a half shoulder of pork. And he’d mucked it all up.

She wiped her face on her sleeve.

“It’s just we hent got nothun in for tea. Our rations all run out yesterdy, and we can’t get nothun till tomorrer. All we’re got is two eggs and the last of the bread. What mother’ll say when she get home I can’t imagine.”

“Don’t worry yourself. Look here.”

From the bag he produced two shiny canisters, unlabeled two-pound tins.

“One’s Spam; t’other’s corned beef. I can’t rightly say which is which.”

Later, Clem turned fretful.

“Thas all the excitement,” Ruth said untruthfully. “I’ll take him up. Say night-night to yer dad, Clem.”

The boy clung to her and tried to hide his face in her shoulder. George wondered if he should kiss the child’s head; while he hesitated, Ruth turned away toward the stairs.

“Good night, Clem,” he said cheerily. “Sweet dreams.”

Left alone, George made a recce of the home he’d never lived in. Thorn Cottage was smaller and darker than he’d remembered. It was permeated by the heavy, sweetish fumes from the sinister-looking paraffin heater that stood in the hall. The kitchen, like the rest of the downstairs rooms, had electricity, but the cooking was still done on a black cast-iron range built into the brick fireplace. The floor was covered in green linoleum, worn so thin that it seemed no more than a cracked coat of paint over the slate slabs beneath.

The front room — the “best room”— was a grim and crowded museum of Victorian furniture. A framed photograph of a young woman and a soldier stood on a heavy sideboard next to a threadbare stuffed squirrel inside a glass dome.

The parlor had only two armchairs, one on either side of the hearth. On each sat a ball of wool transfixed by knitting needles.

It seemed to George that every mark in the place — every scar on the skirting boards, every nick and chip in the stair treads, every dent in the dull brass doorknobs — was a trace of dead people he had never known and wouldn’t have wanted to. Dim presences to whom he had no connection. Who frightened him. This place was old and poor. It was not the bright new world he had been told he was fighting for. He had come home to the past, a past that wasn’t even his own. He felt, suddenly, panicky and claustrophobic.

He went out into the back garden. The colder air went to his bladder, and he pushed open the outhouse door. It clattered against an obstacle, a galvanized metal bath hung on a hook. A speckled spider had spread her net within it. Relieving himself, he noted that the bog roll was newspaper scissored neatly into rectangles the size of ten-shilling notes and hung on a nail.

He went to the end of the garden and surveyed his new and awful domain. The hedge had grown wild. Things he presumed were edible protruded from weeds. A fork with a broken handle angled into black soil. Two rusted upturned buckets.

He lit a cigarette. The last of the sun slanted onto the roof. The thatch was ragged and greened by moss; below and to the left of the half-ruined chimney, a sheet of corrugated iron had been slid in to slow a leak.

He pulled on the ciggie and straightened himself.

Discipline. Drill.

“Men all present and correct, Sarn’t?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ready to kick the shit out of Jerry, Sarn’t?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. Carry on.”

Men in burned-out tanks who’d come apart like overcooked chickens when you tried to pull them out. You threw up and then you dealt with it.

“Burial detail! Over here!”

They’d fought — he’d fought — for sex. To capture the brothels of Benghazi and Tripoli from the Italians, the Germans. Then take the tricks learned there home to wives and girlfriends who were starving for it. Unless the ruddy Yanks had been there first.

Ruth had got heavier; there was no denying it. She’d slumped, somehow. Having the boy, presumably.

Two months ago — no, three now — he’d been in a back-street bar in Cyprus, being served miraculously cold beer by a gracious Egyptian prostitute wearing see-through trousers and a spangled bra.

“You’ll not be getting much of that in Norfolk, lad,” he told himself — correctly, as it turned out.

As the light died, he heard footsteps on the path. His mother-in-law, a shade or two darker than the gathering dark, came around the corner of the lav.

“Ayup, Win,” he said.

She turned, lifting a hand to her chest and stumbling as if a sniper had got her.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s George, Win.”

She peered as he walked toward her.

“George who?”

“George your son-in-law.”

“What’re you doing here?”

He flicked his cigarette away and said, “It’s nice to see you, too, Win.”

The can that Ruth opened was the Spam. She fried slices of it in a bit of lard with an onion and served it with a boiled potato each and tough garden cabbage.

Win said, “You’re cut that Spam thick, Ruth. That wunt see us out the week at that rate.”

At ten o’clock, Ruth pretended she needed him in the kitchen.

She said, “I’m gorn up to bed, George. Give us five minutes.”

He went outside and smoked another cigarette. When he went back indoors, the cottage was intensely dark and utterly silent. He groped upstairs, clutching the wounded banister. In their bedroom, the light came from an oil lamp the shape of a faded yellow tulip. Clem was asleep in a cot within reach of Ruth’s arm. She wore a flannelette nightdress buttoned almost to her throat. Her glowing hair aroused him. When he began to unbutton his trousers, she turned the lamp out.

(This became their unvarying nightly ritual: she would go upstairs and get into bed while he smoked a last cigarette. In almost forty years of marriage, he would never see her completely naked. And, in time, he grew glad of it.)

In the morning, Clem stood in his cot, gazing with baffled horror at the dark stranger in his mother’s bed.