In the final section of Sarah Waters's The Night Watch (2006), which describes events taking place in 1941, Viv has her first encounter with Reggie, who at this point is in the army, attached to an Officer Cadet Training Unit. The dated sections of this novel are organised in reverse chronological order, with 1947 followed by 1944 and 1941, and so the reader is already aware that this meeting between a young single woman and a married man will develop into a relationship that, by 1947, when the novel begins, is proving difficult for Viv to sustain. Her initial conversation with Reggie takes place through the door of the toilet cubicle on a train, and, being told that he has lost his travel permit, she lets him in and shelters him from the ticket inspector. She is ‘self-consciously aware of the smallness of the space’ they are occupying but ‘like everyone else she'd had to get used to sharing odd spaces with strangers recently.’ Her pretence to the guard that she is alone in the cubicle immediately reminds the reader that her relationship with Reggie, here just beginning, will have to be conducted clandestinely. Throughout the novel Waters is concerned with how illicit relationships might have been conducted during the war; the conditions of wartime appear to facilitate such dalliances, offering opportunities for couples to be thrown together, as Viv discovers. But, as Viv also finds out, any apparent freedom comes at the price of an intensified surveillance of private life.