The phantom lover

Driving past several long abandoned second- world-war airfields in East Anglia last year I was struck by how spooky they seemed, just like the decommissioned army base that used to exist near me. Places where people have not only lived and worked but which form the background of wartime drama, and from which men went to their deaths, are bound to be haunted, and in Helen Dunmore’s short novel, it is an airfield that once saw Lancaster Bombers fly out into the night that forms a ghostly scene.

Isabel is newly married to a doctor, Philip, and the two have moved to Yorkshire where he is now a GP. It is the early 1950s, the country is still redolent of wartime hardships, ration books, nasty linoleum in rented flats and nosey landladies. It is the landlady who walks up and down the flat above theirs who causes the first intrusion into what should be a blissful early married life.