Love in a time of war is not a new subject, nor is it always a well-written one. Few other situations offer such a reliable shortcut to big emotions, and novelists can sometimes get lost in the excitement of khaki-clad partings and poignant letters home. By setting her novel in a London transfigured by the first world war, Moggach at first seems to be following the form: brace yourself for women in pretty coats being brave at railway stations. But – pleasingly – Moggach’s story of a widowed landlady’s romance with a vulgarly irresistible butcher is refreshingly low-schmaltz and all but free of fancy dress.

As it turns out, it is hard for the lovers to get sloppy, anyway, as space and finances mean they’re rarely alone together. Moggach makes a lively inventory of the other inhabitants of the landlady’s grotty boarding house, all of whom have some kind of interest in the outcome of the affair. The maid, Winnie, is on particularly intimate terms with “the bodies upstairs” through doing the household laundry: each week she scrubs at their “most private secretions until her hands were raw”. Winnie, hard-working and humiliatingly aware of her economic vulnerability, finds the new romance alarming, although she is less confounded than the landlady’s teenage son Ralph, who is tormented by his mother’s sexuality and his own virginity into a wonderful Hamletish knot of adolescent disgust.

Like the recent novels by Ian McEwan and Sarah Waters, In the Dark successfully modernises the past. By focusing on life’s murkier undercurrents (that is, its more Freudian elements, which is in fact an oddly old-fashioned approach, not that it matters), the characters come to seem appealingly familiar. They may be wearing flowers in their buttonholes and receiving bad news by telegram: but they’re just like us, after all.

IN THE DARK by Deborah Moggach

Chatto £12.99 pp240

Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)

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