Of course, there is green and there is space at Windsor, but there is something thrilling about the anonymity of the park, of pretending that they are just like any other couple. Philip rests his arm along the back of the bench behind her and his fingers graze her shoulder. He takes her to see Oklahoma! at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and he holds her hand in the dark. When he dances with her, he holds her close, and his nearness makes her hazy with longing.

Oh, Elizabeth knows it is tame stuff for many of her contemporaries but sitting close to him, feeling him male and solid beside her, is enough to make her blood beat low and heavy, to set up a fine quiver in her belly.

She longs to be married, but still her father insists that an announcement must wait and the strain is taking its toll on Philip who can be irritable and tense at times. So when he asks her if she will meet his mother, Elizabeth says yes straight away.

‘Is she in London now?’

‘She’s staying with my grandmother at the moment. Rather her than me,’ Philip says with a wry look. ‘Grandmama’s apartments are draughty and uncomfortable and she sits all day in her chair smoking and complaining.’

‘What about?’

‘Oh, everything. Mostly about her husband having to renounce his – and her – royal titles in 1917. It’s only been thirty years but my grandmother likes to collect grievances. My mother isn’t like that at all, so I’m not sure how long the visit will last! I may have to help her to find an apartment of her own.’

Chapter 36

‘How long is it since you’ve seen her?’ Elizabeth asks.

‘I was on leave in Athens during the war, in 1941, before the German occupation. She was living very simply then.’

Philip keeps his tone even. Talking about his mother always leaves him feeling … complicated. He hates the way he had to work up to mentioning her to Elizabeth. It is ridiculous. He is a grown man, and it is not his mother’s fault that she was ill. He knows that. He has always known that.

‘She sounds like an interesting woman,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I’d like to meet her.’

It stings that she keeps her tone carefully neutral. Of course she has heard that his mother is eccentric, mad. A crazy woman confined to a sanatorium. Her own mother will certainly have told her in an effort to dissuade her from marrying him.

‘You know my mother is going to be a problem,’ he says abruptly. ‘Interesting is a kind word to use. She’s not like other people. She’s certainly not like any other royals.’

‘I heard that she was amazingly brave during the war,’ Elizabeth says. ‘They say she fed people who were starving, hid a Jewish family from Germans, looked after orphans … How many of the rest of us would have done half as much?’

‘Yes, she would do anything for other people’s children.’

Philip stops, appalled at the bitterness in his own voice. Elizabeth hears it, of course. She turns to look at him, but he won’t meet her eyes. He scowls at a squirrel running up the trunk of a great oak. He doesn’t want to talk about his mother.

He isn’t going to talk about her.

‘I went to look for her one day when I was on leave in Athens,’ he hears himself say, ‘and I found her at a soup kitchen she ran. She had this scrap of a boy clinging to her skirts while she berated some man twice her size about the way he’d been treating him. The man tried to argue with her but she wasn’t having it. She threatened to have him arrested for cruelty and when he’d given up and gone away, I watched as she put her arms around that boy and told him she would look after him, that he would be safe with her. Mon petit chou, that’s what she called him.’

All at once, there’s a viciously tight block in Philip’s throat, and his mouth twists with the effort of swallowing it down. He’s still not looking at Elizabeth but he can feel her quiet eyes on his face.

‘That’s what she used to call me when I was small,’ he says. ‘My little cabbage.’

‘How sweet,’ she says and he can tell that she is smiling. ‘I can definitely see you as a cabbage. A rather naughty one, I suspect.’

‘I was very naughty,’ he admits, grateful to Elizabeth for lightening the moment.

‘Did she know you were there?’ she asks after a moment.

‘Oh, yes. When she saw me her face lit up, but I had to wait until she had arranged for the boy to be looked after. Then I took her out to lunch and she spent the whole time telling me what a terrible time the poor child had had, and how she would make quite sure he was properly cared for, and how sad it was that he was on his own. “He’s only nine,” she said.’

He breaks off again. Why in God’s name did he start this story? This isn’t what Elizabeth wants to hear!

‘You were only nine when you were sent to school in England,’ Elizabeth says quietly.

‘Yes.’ Philip lets out a long breath. ‘It was different, of course, for me.’

‘How?’

‘I had Uncle Georgie and Uncle Dickie to look after me, and I was fine,’ he insists. ‘I was a boisterous boy, very self-reliant even then. I could look after myself. That poor kid was starving and beaten. That never happened to me.’

‘I imagine boys of nine still need their mothers.’

‘I was fine,’ he says again, and he feels Elizabeth studying him.

‘You keep saying that.’

‘Well, I was,’ he says defensively. ‘I was like those children over there.’ He nods in the direction of a gang whooping and yelling around a cluster of trees. ‘When anyone tried to hug me or kiss me, I’d wriggle out of their clutches. I didn’t want any of that.’

He remembers playing outside at Salem one hot summer day until his sister Dolla had dragged him inside. She fussed around, making him change his shorts and brush his hair.

‘Please don’t argue Philip,’ she said tensely when he protested. ‘Mama wants to see you.’

But his mother hadn’t wanted to see him. Dolla took him to the sanatorium where Alice looked through him and played fretfully with the fringe of her dress. She barely seemed to know who he was while Dolla made determinedly cheerful conversation that Alice ignored.

‘Kiss Mama goodbye,’ his sister said at last. Philip didn’t want to. The woman in the chair was a stranger, not the sweet, loving mother he remembered, who gathered him up and tickled him and called him her petit chou. But Dolla insisted and when he leant reluctantly forward and pressed his lips to his mother’s cheek, he felt her flinch.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dolla said in the car on the way back to Salem. Her lips were pressed tightly together and he’d had the uneasy feeling that she was trying not to cry. ‘I thought it would help.’

Philip never knew whether she had thought the visit would help him or their mother, but suspected that it just made it worse for both of them. He didn’t get so much as a birthday card from his mother for five years after that.

He has learnt not to think about that day at the sanatorium. Easier to think about cricket or riding his bike instead. The memory is a bruise, one you forget until you press it by mistake.

Lost in his memories, he doesn’t realise he has stopped talking until Elizabeth’s hand slips into is. It is astonishingly comforting.