The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

I enjoyed reading Helen Dunmore's poetry and early novels and this was a welcome return - 239 pages is a good length - short enough to savour and reread. Isabel Carey, recently married, a young doctor's wife in a close-knit Yorkshire community in 1952, feels isolated and lonely in her new role. Her husband is busy and preoccupied, frequently on-call at night. Having found an airman's greatcoat in a cupboard in their rented rooms, Isabel uses it to keep warm. It is then that she starts to hear a tapping at the window...This ghost story is both plausible and fanciful as Isabel's life merges with that of an airman, 'one of many thousands of young men who were ripped out of life before their time'.
'His fingers tasted of nicotine and they trembled and steadied as they touched her, tentatively at first and then stroking her skin with infinite gentleness, as if he hadn't believed he would ever touch a woman's face again.'
In the author's own words: 'the danger is that she will be trapped between the two worlds, belong to neither one nor the other'. Even at the end of the novel there is a hint that the past may still continue to haunt her as 'down on the grass the greatcoat's heavy cloth rippled as if a night wind were walking under it'.