The tale is sensationally melodramatic: while composing it, Waters recalls rubbing her hands at her desk, cackling demonically at its sudden drops and turns. The wonderful Fingersmith surely took the queer 19th-century pastiche as far as it could go. That Waters has decided to move her historical interests on is courageous, but not surprising. Her work is always rich in feeling, and clever, and precise. But the books are less theatrical, less formulaic than the labels make them sound Waters is not at all one of those writers setting out to profit from what Henry James called the ‘fatal cheapness’ of period fiction. They are indeed frissony, being peopled by young women just becoming aware of their sexuality, in scenarios involving much disguise and dissembling, and silky drawers with slits. The books are indeed pastiches: Victoriana as a queer theorist might perform it, with costumes by Judith Butler, prisons and madhouses by Foucault. ‘Frissony’, ‘pastiche’ and ‘lesbo-Victorian’ are all terms Waters herself has used in self-description – though generally not all of them at once – and they are both accurate enough and unfair.

The Night Watch is Sarah Waters’s fourth novel, her first to abandon the ‘frissony’, ‘pastiche’, ‘lesbo-Victorian’ theme developed, to great popular and critical success, in Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002). ‘“Nature triumphant over war,”’ one of the new friends declares, ‘in a wireless voice: for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radio – the new variety of wildflower they had spotted on the bombsites, the new species of bird, all of that – it had got terribly boring.’ It is as though one of those muddy, confused old photographs has come alive and started to talk. A sandbag splits, revealing its stuffing of earth, and bits of grass and flowers.

The tea is grey, and probably made from chlorinated water the powdered milk is lumpy they nonetheless engage in ‘the usual women’s quarrel’ over who should pay. Two women sit drinking tea on a pile of sandbags on the Marylebone Road. Early springtime, London, 1944: the Little Blitz period of suddenly redoubled enemy air-raids after the comparative lull that followed the Blitz proper of 1940-41.

The night watch by sarah waters