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Harry, who had worked near Dover as an engine fitter for the RAF, recalled watching Spitfires chasing the doodlebugs, trying to shoot them down before they reached London. “One clear night when it was fairly quiet I went out to get some air. Just a bit after that, I saw our lads coming in after one of the ‘D’s,’ firing at it.” It seemed to be headed in his direction, he said, but he couldn’t move. “Frozen to the spot, I was. Kept thinking I should run. But which way?” After a few suspenseful moments, the doodlebug passed over him, crashing and exploding just past some large trees. The next day, Harry said, he went to church for the first time in years.

Helen nodded as Harry talked, the way people do when they know exactly what the other person means. Then she said, “You know my husband flew alongside the Yanks on some of their bombing runs. In an RAF plane, as an escort. I’ve never forgotten something he wrote in one of his last letters, about watching your chaps take off in their Flying Fortresses. Dozens of them. Said it was like watching a great migration of cranes flying across the sky.”

Helen’s remark stunned me. Among other things, it meant Harry was not her husband. And now I knew who it was she’d lost in the war. I tried to process in my mind the information on which I’d based the assumption that she was married to Harry. But I was too flustered to do anything more than nod my head as Helen talked of her husband’s letter.

For some reason—I suppose to cover up my shock—I started telling Harry and Helen of my interview with a famous British neurologist who’d grown up in London during the war years. I was writing a profile of him, pegged to the publication of his book about the fascinating, sometimes bizarre, patients he’d treated. About halfway through the interview, he told me of being sent at the age of three from London to the countryside to escape the Blitz. As he described the physical and emotional abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his “caretakers,” he grew sad, then angry. My sense was he’d never forgiven his parents, two prominent London physicians, for what he saw as their “abandonment” of him.

“Alas, such things did happen,” Helen said. “I suppose war upsets all the normal things, doesn’t it? Tears families apart and all that. Life is never quite the same after as it was before.”

“Yes,” Harry said, “I believe that for the lot of us who lived through it, we’ll likely always mark our lives by before the war and after.”

We talked some more and then rose to leave. When Harry went off to the coatroom to fetch his umbrella, I summoned up my reporter’s nerve and asked Helen how she met Harry.

“We met here at the museum a few years back,” she said. “Sat next to each other in the café and just started talking. It seems we had a lot in common—the war and growing up in Kent, that sort of thing.”

I wanted to ask more, but didn’t. It was none of my business really. Instead, we said our good-byes and left.

Well, that answered one question, I thought, watching Harry and Helen hug good-bye and walk off in separate directions. They were not a couple; just friends. And yet, in a way, they shared something that made them a couple. Not their lives before the war or after the war, but the experience of what went on during the in-between years. I suspected a lot of Brits, the ones who lived through the war years, had the same invisible bonds. It struck me that it must be like the bonds that spring up between soldiers.

Once the long bony hand of War and Death touches you, I thought, its presence never leaves. War and Death. I understood that. Or I thought I did.

Before going back to my flat to change for dinner I set out to buy some shoes. The dinner with Shelby and his friends promised to be a rather grand affair and my wardrobe by this time was looking a bit forlorn. After going through my closet that morning, I decided a pale beige silk skirt, paired with a blouse of the same color, would do fine for the