‘I remember everything about that day,’ I said. ‘Every tiny detail. The smell and the texture of it, every second before and after the knock at the door.

‘I was in the nursery toasting bread. Cross-legged on the floor, a slab of butter ready on an old green china plate. It was September, but with the promise of autumn to come. The purple leaves on the copper beech were turning and there was condensation on the inside of the windows in the early morning. The fire had been lit for the first time since the previous winter and there was the bitter, musty smell of singed dust in the chimney.

‘On the wall above my bed was pinned a hand-drawn map of Europe printed by the Manchester Guardian. It was covered with red crosses, my attempt to mark each place the Royal Sussex Regiment had been – at least, where I imagined my brother’s division might be. Where George might…’ I stopped, the stab of memory too sharp.

Fabrissa waited. She seemed to have no need to hurry me or require me to turn fragments into a single, clear narrative. Her patience rubbed off on me, and when I found it in me to continue, the sequence of events was clearer in my mind and the words I needed came, if not easily, then at least less hesitantly than before.

‘I didn’t hear the knock at the door. But I remember being aware of our maid’s footsteps on the flag-stones in the hall. Florence always did shuffle and fail to pick up her feet. I was aware of the door being opened and mumbled words, too faint for me to make out.

‘Even then, I think I knew. There was something in the quality of the silence which shouted out that this caller was unwelcome. I stopped what I was doing and listened, listened to the silence. Then my mother’s clear, shrill voice in the hall. At the door. Yes, yes, I am Mrs Watson. And, moments later, a single word, so much the worst for being spoken so softly: “No.”

‘The fork dropped from my hands. I can see it now, falling slowly down, metal clattering on the hearthstone, toe, heel, toe, like a tap dancer, before coming to rest. The bread, so perfectly burnt on one side and raw white on the other. I ran. Sending the door flying back against the wall, I ran down the nursery stairs in my stockinged feet. On the same old dangerous turn, I slipped and lost my footing, cracked my shin. Blood started to seep through my sock and, absurdly, I remember thinking how I would be scolded for being so clumsy.

‘Down to the first landing, along the passageway where the carpet began. From the hall below, a sound that tore through me like a butcher’s knife. Not screaming exactly, more a howling, a wailing, the same word repeated over and over, “no, nooooo”, becoming one, single note.’

I stopped again, the memories too painful. I glanced at Fabrissa, seeking her reassurance and that she really did want to hear this.

She nodded. ‘Please, go on.’

I held her glance, then fixed my eyes back to the same spot on the table.

‘It was the fifteenth of September, did I say that? Almost two years to the day since George had enlisted. I had seen him once or twice, of course. He had been injured and sent home twice. A problem with his ears after a bombardment, not too bad. A bullet in his thigh the second time, again not life-threatening. ’

I shrugged, a casual gesture concealing the anger I felt with the doctors, with my father, for letting him go back to the Front at all, though I knew it was what he had wanted. It was a thin line between heroism and arrogance, and George had always walked it. We were the Watson boys. Nothing could harm us. He had believed in the myth of his own invincibility, whereas I? I had always felt the world was a dangerous place, waiting to spring its traps.

‘Both times, they patched him up and sent him back. But we hadn’t had a letter in a while, not since May. He was due home for a couple of days’ leave, so I tried not to be worried. Also, that summer I’d been ill with a serious bout of influenza, so I’d not been able to follow the progress of George’s battalion in the newspapers so closely.’

I stared at my hands, at the lines on them. They were no longer the hands of a child pushing pins into a map on the wall.

‘The worst of it was that no one talked to me. Not then. Not later. No one told me anything. When I got to the hall and ran to my mother, she lashed out at me, as if she could not bear to have me in her sight. Not hard, but I stumbled back against the hall table, sending a bowl of late pink roses in a crystal vase crashing to the ground. Water and glass and torn petals all over the rug. It was left to Florence to take me to the kitchen and dab iodine on my shin. She was crying. Her cap was all awry. They were all weeping, Florence and Maisie and Mrs Taylor, our cook. They loved him, too.

‘Mother shut herself away in the drawing room until Father came home. I could hear them talking behind the closed door. I pressed my ear against the polished wood, praying that they would know I was there and allow me in. Comfort me. But they didn’t. And although I knew that there had been a telegram and that everything was spoiled, nobody told me what it said. What, precisely, had happened to George. They simply forgot about me.

‘I was fifteen, but I stationed myself halfway up the stairs, as I’d done when I was a boy, watching the front door, my head resting against the banister, my arm wrapped around the spindles for comfort. I sat there for hours, watching the setting sun shine through the stained glass and throw beams of red and blue onto the flagstone floor.’

‘Willing George to come?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

Softly, gently, she reached out and covered my hand with hers. Her skin was cold, her touch insubstantial, so light, as if she were barely there. But I was overwhelmed by the understanding implicit in her gesture. Grateful for her care.

‘It was only some time later I learned the telegram said George was missing in action. I never understood why the news had taken so long to reach us. It had happened weeks before, weeks and weeks. The thirtieth of June. The Battle of the Boar’s Head, a place called the Ferme du Bois outside Richebourg l’Avoué. The day before the Battle of the Somme began. Missing in action, the telegram said. Not dead. So I was confused. I thought – hoped – that there was some doubt. Perhaps the Germans had taken him prisoner. Perhaps he was in hospital having lost his memory. I was furious with my parents for believing the worst so easily. For not holding firm to the idea he could be alive.

‘Later, they sent his things home through Cox’s. Damp and worn and rigid with mud, the smell of the charnel house and barbed wire and gas. His cap was missing. The garter badge and Roussillon plume he was so proud of were gone. But there was a waistcoat, stiff with blood, and his braces.’ I swallowed hard. ‘It was only when I overheard Florence talking to the ironmonger’s boy at the back gate that I realised George’s body had been so devastated there was nothing left to identify. Almost the entire Thirteenth Battalion, the Southdowners, was wiped out. They knew he was dead all right, mown down with his men. It’s just they couldn’t distinguish one body from the next.’

‘And so you became ill?’

I shook my head. ‘Not then, later. The breakdown, collapse, petit mal, neurasthenia, nerves, whatever you want to call it. It didn’t come out straight away. Not until I reached the age George had been when he died. My twenty-first birthday, in fact.’

‘You did not speak of your grief?’

I shrugged. ‘Who would have listened? Within a mile of our house, twenty, thirty families were in the same boat. The Battle of the Boar’s Head is known as “The Day Sussex Died”. Hundreds of local men, boys like George, went to war and never came back. There’s a plaque on the wall of the memorial hall in my home village listing some thirty men, of all ranks, who fell that day. The same thing in all the villages around us. And there was always another battle coming up behind, worse and bloodier and less inexplicable. I suppose I thought I had no right to make a fuss. That I was old enough to cope. Certainly, my parents thought so.’