“Not your finest hour, Mum!” He laughed.

    Over the last few hours, Alexander had bravely tasted a smoked-mackerel paté without enough mackerel, an overcooked watercress and wild fennel soup, and a goose-liver terrine that smelled so odd that he refused even to touch it.

“It’s no use,” Audrey said. “I need a first-class dish, and for that I need more ingredients and more time.”

Movement in her peripheral vision made her turn to see the younger boys crawling into the pantry on a mission. “Out of there!” She shooed them away, then, exhausted, sank onto a chair.

“What am I going to do?”

Pulling over her bag, she took out the family’s ration books, her fingers flicking through the pages until she found the right week.

“All the rations are stamped except the tea. I’ve wasted our butter, meat, eggs, sugar, and flour allowances on a series of failures. Alexander, go into the pantry and tell me how much fresh food we have left?”

Alexander went in and called out. “There’s a rasher of bacon, although it’s got more fat than meat on it, a little milk, and…” There was a pause as he looked into various jars. “Dried haricot beans, but they need to be soaked overnight. And then there’s the stockpot in the hay-box.”

“Oh, I’d forgotten about that. It makes a lovely, deep stock, doesn’t it?” Her face fell. “But what can I do with stock on its own?”

“We have all those dried apples we made from the half-rotten ones last year.”

Nothing went to waste in Willow Lodge. Every last slice of edible apple was dunked in saltwater and dried in a packed oven, along with berries and apricots. They’d been overflowing with dried apples ever since.

“Anything else?”

Rummaging through the pantry, Alexander called out, “It looks like that’s all we have, I’m afraid.”

Audrey lay her head in her hands. “What was I thinking, reckoning that I could compete against the likes of Mrs. Quince? Even my ridiculous sister will beat me at the rate I’m going.”

    “You’re a superb cook, Mum.” Alexander came over and sat beside her, nudging her playfully. “Where’s your fighting spirit?”

“It’s run out. This war, your poor father, and now these dreadful debts, they’ve drained away any oomph I ever had.”

“There must be something.” Alexander got up and began to pace the room. He stopped by the window, looking out at the vegetable garden, and then beyond to the woods and the hills.

Suddenly, he turned around excitedly. “What about Rosebury Wood? There’s a wealth of wild food out there. Why don’t we go foraging?”

Ponderously, Audrey raised herself from the table.

“Maybe I’ve been thinking about this the wrong way around.” She came up beside Alexander, gazing at the lush, green wood. “It’s the one advantage I have over everyone else! If I win, it won’t be because of the everyday ingredients in here. It’ll be the ones I can find out there.”

Alexander grabbed her basket, and within minutes they were striding through the garden to the wood, the younger boys behind them, skipping and laughing. They’d been happier since Zelda had arrived. Ben had calmed down, and Christopher had even begun to sleep in his own bed at night. Maybe it was because she liked to joke and play pranks with them, or perhaps it was because she treated them like people. Then again, it could simply be nice for them to have another adult in the house, someone to help their mum. After the corset conversation, the two women had skirted around each other politely. Audrey felt an instinctive yearning to help the pregnant woman, but unless Zelda opened up to her, there was little she could do.

“What do you think will work?” Alexander mused as they passed oaks and elms, squirrels and birds busy gathering food. “The nuts won’t be ripe yet, but there are plenty of nettles,” he added, dodging some.

“We don’t have time to shoot game or fish.” Audrey trudged on. “No, it has to be something that’s ready and waiting for us, something we can pick.”

    And suddenly, as she came into a clearing, there they were. The answer to her prayers.

A line of mushrooms, some tall and long, others as wide as apples, squatting on a scrub of grasses. The cream-yellow texture of horse mushrooms, a slight whiff of aniseed as she picked them at the very base of their stems. Beautifully fresh, at their absolute peak, they had enough fleshy meat for a very hearty soup.

“Now, find some sweet cicely to bring out the aniseed. There’s some at the edge of the meadow over on the other side of Rosebury Wood.” She instructed the younger boys what to look for, and off they chased.

Then she looked around the woodland bushes, stooping to pick a few herbs. “Some marrow leaves to help thicken it, and a few sprigs of sorrel to complement that wholesome, meaty taste of the mushrooms.”

They began to walk back to the house, when suddenly she came upon a final prize. A fallen elm tree, half disintegrated with rot, presented the perfect environment to find one of the most treasured mushrooms of all: the chanterelle.

Taking her time, she trod carefully around, looking under fallen branches, even lifting the dissolving bark in one or two places, and just as she was thinking of giving up, she spotted them. Three perfect golden funnel-shaped hats were hidden inside a knotty hole.

“You’ll do nicely,” she said, carefully plucking them, placing them in her basket with the others, and with a little skip in her step, she led the way back to Willow Lodge.

“Get a small onion from the vegetable garden, would you, Alexander?” she said as she strode through the door, immersed in her imagination.

Inside the pantry, she found the rasher of bacon and the last of the flour, bringing them to the table to begin.

But a knock on the front door echoed through from the hallway.

“What now?” she said, striding through, wiping her hands on her apron as she went.

It was a man in uniform, his military motorbike behind him on the roadside.

    What was he doing there?

“Mrs. Audrey Landon?” he asked.

For a moment, she was speechless. Is this a déjà vu?

The memory of that first telegram—the one informing her of her husband’s disappearance over Düsseldorf—played again through her mind like a broken newsreel.

“Mrs. Audrey Landon?” he repeated.

She nodded, trying to back away as he handed her a small envelope.

It was a telegram.

A telegram! Why am I getting another telegram?

Her vision went hazy, and her mouth went dry.

“Is that all?” he asked blandly.

She forced herself back into reality. “Yes, thank you.”

Off he marched to his motorcycle, then with a low roar of the engine, he swung it around and vanished out of the village lane, away from her, away from the telegram that stayed clutched in her hands.

The sound of the boys fighting faded into the background, as it had that dreadful day. The countryside around her blended into gray. Only time ticked slowly on.

Her fingers trembled as they tried to get into the envelope, which she concurrently did and did not want to open. What could it be now? He was dead—or was he? Perhaps her dreams had come true? Maybe he was alive after all, in hiding in Germany? Was this telegram about to change her life?

She ripped it open.

PRIORITY CC MRS. AUDREY LANDON, WILLOW LODGE, FENLEY, KENT

THE INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS INFORMS THAT THE BODY OF YOUR LATE HUSBAND LIEUTENANT MATTHEW L. J. LANDON RVNR HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED. PERSONAL EFFECTS TO BE RETURNED.

+ HARRIS, ACTING ADJUTANT ++

    She gasped, the telegram crumpling in her hand, and she reached out to clutch the doorframe to steady herself.

A guttural cry came from the pit of her being.

Making her way back to the kitchen, she sat gingerly at the table, cleared the pile of mushrooms to one side with a sweep of her forearm, and started to cry into her hands.

The whole surreal memory of his death—or rather, the news of his presumed death—flooded back with a clean, prickly precision. The initial denial: He couldn’t possibly be dead, either presumed or otherwise? And then the desperate reasoning: How could a small piece of paper destroy her world? Surely a bomb or a fire or a fight, but not a series of typed letters on a slim sheet.

A week later, the letter had arrived. It was from his base, his flight commander, and it explained that his plane had come down over Germany, witnessed by an accompanying bomber. No parachutes were seen, and the plane descended from such a height that there could be no survivors.

“What if he fell into a soft bush?” Christopher had suggested, almost pleading it to be true.

“He could be hiding away in the woods,” Ben continued, “living off tree roots and cooking squirrels to stay alive.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she had said, and yet deep down, in her heart of hearts, she couldn’t help but yearn for it to be true. Maybe he did survive the fall. Maybe he was alive, perhaps wounded, staying hidden, and silently, slowly, making his way back to the English Channel.