‘The marriage arranged between Mr Nicholas Deans and Miss Rosemary Paton will not now take place.’
I knew them both. I am remembering them now, and that astonishing August morning when I read the announcement in The Times, and then read it aloud to Mary, and we stared at each other across the breakfast table.
‘Nicky and Roma?’ cried Mary. ‘Darling, it’s crazy! Why, they were here only a month ago, jibbering with love! What on earth does it mean?’
I didn’t know. This was in 1937. Perhaps if I had known then, one of us might have done something. We didn’t know until two years later, when the Second World War was beginning, and Rosemary had married young Wayne. I am remembering it all now, because at breakfast this morning two paragraphs in the paper caught my eye. The first recorded a posthumous and extremely belated award to an airman who had died very bravely. I had just read this, and had it still in my mind as I turned to the ‘Forthcoming Marriages’. At the bottom of the column it said that the marriage arranged between Squadron Leader A and Miss B would not now take place. Nicky fought in the Battle of Britain, rose to be a Squadron Leader with a chest full of medals, and died as bravely as any of them. Somehow it brought it all back. There was Mary across the table, looking not a day older: the same table, the same china. I almost expected to hear her cry ‘Nicky and Roma? Darling, it’s crazy!’
2
Mary’s people had lived at Castle Craddock for hundreds of years. Her father was one of those survivors of the really old families whose founders had somehow been overlooked when baronies were being given out, and who were much too proud to accept titles from upstart Plantagenets and their successors. George Craddock, D.L., J.P. could look any so-called peer in the face, and down his nose at most of them. He became my father-in-law, and I got to know him fairly well. I admired him, liked him, and was rather afraid of him. In the way of wives, Mary used to tell me that he was very fond of me. Well, I wouldn’t say that, but he was surprisingly kind to me; particularly when it was broken to him that Mary and I loved each other. Nobody, of course, was good enough for Mary, but he may have thought that at least an unpretentious middle-class professional man was better than an upstart Earl. In any case, Mary could always get round him, even on such an important matter as her marriage.
I was a very young architect in those days, and, leaving out the ‘very young’, still am. By 1914 George Craddock had reluctantly reached the conclusion that horseless transport had come to stay. Nobody, of course, would want to rush about the country for pleasure in one of those contraptions, but for anybody who lived ten miles from a station they might be useful for shifting luggage, or even guests, from one point to another. So my firm was commissioned to turn an old barn adjoining the stables into a garage, with rooms for a chauffeur above it. My chief went down for the night, made his reconnaissance, and came back to draw up his plans. Then, luckily for me, he fell ill, and it was left to me to see his plans carried out. So, for the first time, I spent a night at Castle Craddock, and met Mary.
We have been married thirty-four years now, and I suppose I am a little more worthy of her than I was; by which I mean that I have done well in my profession, and that nobody could live with Mary for thirty-four years and not be a better man. But I still look across the table at her, and wonder how I dared to ask her to marry me. She was so young, and so old; so innocent, and so wise; so gay, and so serious; so simple, and so precious. I can still remember the agonies I went through when I knew that I was in love with her. I imagined myself telling her; saw her kind, pitying smile; heard old Craddock’s ringing laugh; read in The Morning Post next week of her engagement to the Duke of This or the Earl of That, and laughed bitterly myself at my own folly. Madness! Still, I suppose I should have had to propose to her anyhow, even without the assistance of Master Nicholas Deans. But I do not know whether, without him, she would have accepted me.
It was the last time I had come down professionally, the last day on which I could pretend that it was necessary for me to be there. There was, as always, company in the house, but on that last morning I had somehow managed to get her alone. We went for a walk. It had rained heavily for a week, but now it was fine and warm again, and if I hadn’t been so hopeless I should have been happy. We went down through the pines to the river. Normally it ran gaily and peacefully enough, and in very dry weather an active person could cross it jumping from rock to rock, but now it was a swirling yellow torrent, and only here and there was the top of a boulder momentarily visible in the foam. I told myself that, if only Mary would fall in, I could jump in after her, and we should both be drowned; and perhaps, if she wasn’t already in love with somebody else, we should still be together in Heaven, and—well, anyhow, we should still be together. It seemed bad luck on Mary to drown her like this, so I told myself that, if only we had brought one of the puppies with us, and it fell in, then I would jump in and be drowned, and that that was better than the misery which was all I could look forward to for the next fifty years. And I told myself that, if by a miracle the puppy and I came safely to shore, some of Mary’s love for the restored puppy would carry over to me, and she might even—well, you see the sort of state I was in. And it was while all this absurd, romantic, heroic, but not really at all heroic nonsense was going through my mind that Master Nicholas Deans obligingly fell in; and, as near as might be unconsciously, I went in after him. Who wouldn’t have done, with the mother shrieking fifty yards upstream, and his girl standing by his side?—particularly if she were already unhooking her skirt, the silly little idiot. I pushed her out of the way and jumped.
It was pure luck that Master Deans and I met, because I couldn’t have done anything about it if we hadn’t. I grabbed him, and found more than ever that I couldn’t do anything about it. I tried to take some small part in events with my left arm, but it hit one of those submerged rocks with a wallop, and that seemed to be that. If it is possible to be extremely happy and extremely angry and extremely frightened at the same time, then that’s what I was; or perhaps first one and then the other. Happy because now Mary would never forget me; angry with the river for being so damnably discourteous; and frightened because I was about to die and I didn’t know what it was going to be like. I’m afraid that I never thought of Master Deans.
Well, the river took a sudden turn, and we were washed up in a sort of little backwater, and we struggled out. By that time Mary, who could run like Atalanta, was ready for me, while Mrs Deans was still wringing her hands and crying a hundred yards behind. Mary didn’t say ‘My hero!’ or ‘Are you hurt?’ or ‘Is he dead?’ she took Master Nicholas Deans from me, turned him upside down, and said:
‘You’ll find the Craddock Arms down stream by the bridge. Tell them what happened, and ask them to ring up the house. They’ll know what to do. Then come back and help. You’d better bring a blanket with you.’
I didn’t feel much like running, and I had an idea that I was going to be sick in a moment, but I ran. And then I ran back with the blanket, and a double brandy inside me, feeling like somebody else, and wondering why his left arm looked so silly. Mary, who had been brought up to know everything that a young girl on a desert island, surrounded by wreck-survivors and wild animals, ought to know, was kneeling over Master Deans and pumping air into him in the most professional way. His mother had been sent up the hill where she could see the house, and told to wave to it when help began to come. She would have been a nuisance anywhere else.
‘Anything I can do?’ I asked.
‘Watch me,’ panted Mary, ‘because you’ll have to take over soon.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said, and passed out.
I had had a fortnight’s holiday coming to me; and I spent it at Castle Craddock; the first few days in bed, rather unnecessarily, but I didn’t mind because Mary looked after me. It is not quite clear how we became engaged. She said afterwards that it was she who proposed, and that it was when I knocked her down so brutally that she realised that she loved me. I suggested that the moment of revelation came not when I courteously motioned her to one side, but when Mrs Deans, who was a young and pretty widow, flung her arms round my neck and kissed me; and that that husky noise next morning, which she may have thought was a water-pipe, was me proposing to her. She said, ‘Well, anyhow, darling, I’m jolly well going to marry you.’ I suppose that in the ordinary way we should have seen too much of this Mrs Deans, who had been a complete stranger and now looked like being a friend for life; but the First World War was at hand, and life very soon left the ordinary. Mrs Deans was whirled back to London in a torrent of gratitude; Master Deans, being only two, said nothing of moment; and I married Mary, spent a short but ecstatic honeymoon with her, returned her to her father, and went into the Army.
3
My office was in Bedford Square. We had a flat above it, which I used when I had to, and which Mary and the children used as little as possible, preferring our cottage in Kent. She came up for a night in July 1935, so that we could celebrate the coming-of-age of our engagement— anything for a celebration was our motto. The always difficult question of whether to dine before the play or sup afterwards, or both, was solved by an invitation to a cocktail party at the Savoy, which fitted in very nicely. It was given by a Mrs Paton, who was a distant cousin of Mary’s. I didn’t know many of the people there, and was beginning to get a bit bored, when our hostess brought a middle-aged woman up to me, and introduced us. For once I caught the name: Mrs Fellowes.
After we had talked a little, she smiled at me and said, ‘You don’t recognise me?’
I didn’t and said so. I might have added that if I saw her again to-morrow, I shouldn’t. She had one of those faces which seem to be about a good deal.
‘Well, it was a long time ago that we met, and I’ve changed my name since then.’
‘Your dress too, probably,’ I smiled. ‘That makes a difference, you know.’
‘All the same, I recognised you, and you were in pyjamas when I last saw you.’
‘Coming out of the bathroom? With sponge?’
‘In bed,’ she said with an arch smile.
She was obviously enjoying the conversation. I wasn’t. Not with her, and on this particular day. I wanted to say, ‘Were you bringing my morning tea?’ but it would have been rather rude.
I said, ‘Sorry, I give it up.’
‘I used to be Mrs Deans.’
‘That seems to strike a note,’ I lied, ‘but I’m blessed if I can remember. Mrs Deans,’ I murmured to myself, hoping it would come back to me.
‘I suppose you’re always diving into rivers and saving people’s lives?’ she said, rather huffed.
‘Good Lord! Of course!’
I remembered her. I remembered suddenly that she had kissed me, had come into my bedroom to say good-bye, and that but for her, or the boy—was it a boy? Yes, I was sure it was.
‘How is he?’ I asked, as if he might still have a bit of a cold. With another flash of memory I got the name. ‘Nicholas, I mean.’
She beamed at me for remembering the name.
‘That’s Nicky over there,’ she said, nodding towards a young man and a girl standing by the serving-table. ‘Would you like to meet him?’
‘Very much.’ And then I hesitated. ‘I say, you haven’t told him?’
‘He doesn’t even know that he fell in. I thought it best not to say anything about it.’
‘I’m sure you were right. Let’s go on saying nothing about it.’
That was how I met Master Deans again. The girl to whom he was talking was Rosemary Paton. He had just been introduced to her.
Mrs Fellowes, fortunately, lived with her new husband somewhere in the North. Nicky was in London, reading for the Bar. He and Roma got engaged one week-end in our cottage. But for Nicky, Mary and I might not have been there, so it was only right that we should have helped him (if we did) to his happiness. We loved Nicky, and I think he loved us; the children adored him. Roma was a very nice girl, but——
It is a funny thing that whenever, at this time, I thought or said or wrote that Roma was a very nice girl, I always went on ‘but——’ and then stopped. Because I never discovered what the ‘but’ was. She was extremely pretty; she was intelligent and could see a joke; she was nice to everybody, and as considerate as a pretty girl is expected to be; she could ride and swim and play golf and lawn-tennis better than most; and I had never heard her say an unkind word about anybody. But—— But what? I couldn’t explain, except by saying that something seemed not to be ticking over properly, and I wanted to shake her until it came into play. T wanted to shake her.’ Was that it? That there didn’t seem to be anybody there? Well, that was as near as I could get.
Nicky was tall and dark and eager, with a thin sensitive face, and black hair which kept falling over his left eye and had to be tossed back, and he always seemed to have just discovered, or to be on the point of discovering, whatever exciting thing it was for which he was looking. When two people have been married for over twenty years, their life together, however happy, has a certain regular pitch which can strictly be called monotony. Nicky made a week-end an adventure; not only for himself, but for us. Even the servants—and Mary was always on happy family terms with her staff—used to light up when she told them that Mr Deans was coming.
In the holidays, when the children were at home, we could only manage one guest at a time. It was not until the Easter term of 1937 that Roma and Nicky came down together. They had met again in London a few weeks earlier, and it was obvious at once that they were madly in love with each other. When they came back from a walk on the Sunday afternoon and announced that they had just got engaged, we were a little surprised. In our old-fashioned way we had assumed that they were already engaged; indeed, we shouldn’t have been astonished to hear that this was their honeymoon. They had been embarrassingly devoted to each other all the week-end, and embarrassingly unembarrassed in front of us.
Well, we realised that we had lost Nicky for the time being. They came down again at the end of June, and, as far as they were concerned, we might not have been there. In fact, we began to feel a little like an engaged couple ourselves. They were being married in October, and were having a golfing holiday together in August.
They said good-bye to us on the Monday. They wrote their usual charming bread-and-butter letters. And we heard no more of them until that morning when I opened The Times and read that the marriage arranged between them would not take place.
‘Darling, it’s crazy!’ cried Mary. ‘What on earth does it mean?’
‘Some silly quarrel, I suppose.’
‘But you don’t make a quarrel public in The Times one day, and then announce next day that you’ve made it up.’
That was true. It was obviously more than a temporary quarrel. It was final.
‘What does one do?’ I asked. ‘Write and sympathise? But with which? Presumably one of them wanted it, and one didn’t. One is glad and one is sorry.’
‘Well, we can’t just leave it. I could write to Marjory’ —that was Mrs Paton—‘but she may not know any more than we do.’
We thought it over.
‘I’ll write to Nicky,’ I said at last, ‘and you write to Roma. And we’ll just say how sorry we are, and make it clear that if it helps them to confide in somebody, here we are, and, if not, we shall quite understand. That sort of thing.’
So that was what we did. And Roma said politely, ‘Thank you very much, but I don’t want to talk about it’; and Nicky said, ‘It’s very decent of you and just like you both, but there’s nothing to be said except that I deserve to have lost her, and that it was I who broke it off.’
And what that meant neither of us knew.
5
We didn’t see Roma again until April, 1939, when Mary went to her wedding. I made some excuse of business. Whatever had happened, I was on Nicky’s side. So was Mary, of course, but Roma was some sort of cousin, and the Craddocks take their relations seriously.
‘How did she look?’ I asked.
‘Radiantly happy, and as pretty as ever.’
‘Glad to see you again?’
‘I don’t think she thought of it as “again”. It might have been two years ago, and she was marrying Nicky.’
‘H’m!’ I said; which meant—well, I don’t know what it meant, except that I never understood the girl.
We hadn’t seen Nicky. He had gone in madly for flying, had given up the Bar, and had got a job as a test pilot with an aeroplane company in the Midlands. We heard from him from time to time, but he didn’t come down to Kent any more. Not for lack of invitations.
And then, a week before war broke out, he invited himself. I drove in to meet him.
‘I had to see you all again before the show started,’ he said. ‘I shall be looking so beautiful in my uniform that you won’t recognise me.’
‘R.A.F., of course?’
‘Yes. How’s everybody?’
‘Grand. Longing to see you.’
‘Martin left school?’
‘You mean for good? No, another year, thank God. Elizabeth will want to be a nurse or something, I suppose. What a hell of a business.’
‘Oh well, it had to come.’
We had a delightful week-end, almost like old times. We sat up late on Sunday night, after the children had gone to bed. And then quite suddenly he said:
‘Let’s go down to the garden-house.’
‘Won’t it be too cold to sit?’ said Mary.
‘Then get a coat, darling.’
‘I think I will too,’ I said, ‘just in case.’
‘As a matter of fact, it’s damned hot,’ he shouted after us.
We sat out in the still night, one of us on each side of him, my cigarette-end glowing as I drew on it, his face clear cut suddenly in the darkness as he relighted his pipe. We were all silent for a little. Then he gave a long sigh.
‘I want to get this off my chest,’ he began, ‘before——’ He left it at that, and went on, ‘You two darlings are the only people I could tell it to, and I should like you to know the worst of me.’
‘Carry on,’ I said. ‘It won’t be as bad as you think.’
‘Pretty bad,’ he said.
I felt rather than saw Mary’s hand go out and touch his for a moment.
‘Well, here it is. I think we told you that we were going to stay with some people in Devonshire—your part of the world, isn’t it, Mary?—we were supposed to be playing golf, they were all mad about it. I drove Roma down. For the first three days and nights it rained without stopping. There we all were, and Roma and I couldn’t get alone, and it was general hell. On the fourth morning it suddenly cleared up. Everybody rushed to play golf, but we wanted to get away from them all, so we got into the car and drove off. We fetched up for lunch at a pub called the Craddock Arms. I don’t suppose you know it, but——’
‘I had a drink there once,’ I said.
‘Oh, did you? Oh well, then, you’ll have seen the river.’
‘I have.’
‘But not as it was then. It hadn’t been like that for more than twenty years, they said at the pub. It was just a raging torrent with waves spouting up on the rocks in mid-stream. We had Duncan with us—you remember Roma’s Scottie? He had been sitting at the back, as good as anything, all the way, and we took him along the river to stretch his legs, while they got the lunch ready.’
He stopped. The night was very still. We waited.
‘Have you ever frightened yourself with your own imagination? I mean by seeing something which isn’t there, so clearly that it is there and you’re terrified of it? Off and on all my life I have lain in bed, awake, and seen a river like that, and shuddered with fear, and thought, “My God, fancy falling in!” And there it was. Just as I had imagined it.’
He stopped again to relight his pipe. By the flame of the match Mary and I looked at each other.
‘We were walking up stream. Roma had let go of my hand, and was running in front with Duncan, pretending to chase him, and Duncan dodged and fell in. Roma shrieked, “Oh, darling!” All right, now tell me that a sensible person doesn’t risk almost certain death for a little dog. Go on. Tell me.’
‘He doesn’t,’ said Mary. ‘It’s sentimental and idiotic.’
‘All right. He doesn’t. It’s sentimental and idiotic. Human beings are more precious than little dogs, aren’t they? Their lives are more valuable. Aren’t they? More worth saving?’
‘One hopes so,’ I said.
‘One hopes so. So I did nothing. I just stood there. Damn it, I said calmly to myself, one doesn’t risk almost certain death for a little dog. Sensible, that’s what I was. Realistic. Not sentimental. Not idiotic. Not——’ he paused and added very gently, ‘not like Roma.’
Mary gave a gasp. I said, ‘Good lord, you mean Roma went in?’
‘Whipped off her skirt, and in like a flash. Roma! The girl I loved. Into that raging torrent. Now ask me what I did. Go on!’ he shouted. ‘Ask me!’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing.’ He said it so sadly, so gently, that we hardly heard it. ‘Nothing,’ he said wonderingly to himself.
Once more there was silence. Once more he put a match to his pipe. Once more Mary and I looked at each other in the flame of it; and she shook her head, meaning ‘Not yet’.
‘I told myself—I pretended to tell myself that there was nothing I could do. Roma was at least as good a swimmer as I, and I couldn’t have helped her. But of course it wasn’t that. I was terrified. You’ve read of people being rooted to the ground in fear. It was like that. I couldn’t have jumped for a million pounds. Oh well, that’s silly, Roma was worth much more than a million pounds to me. But if I were to have been shot for cowardice the next morning, I couldn’t have jumped. There wasn’t a muscle in my body over which I had any control. I can’t expect you to believe this, but——’ He broke off suddenly, shaking his head, as if it were beyond even his own understanding.
‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ said Mary, ‘of course we believe you. Tell us what happened to Roma.’
‘She caught Duncan up—you know what she’s like in the water—and collared him. They were close in shore luckily, where there weren’t any rocks and the current wasn’t so fast. The river swung round suddenly and they got washed into a little backwater. All danger being over, I became active. I was full of resource. I trotted up stream and fetched her skirt. I trotted down stream with it. And, at the grave risk of wetting the ends of my trousers, I helped them out.’
‘Did you wet the ends of your trousers?’ asked Mary anxiously.
Nicky gave a great laugh, and said, ‘Good old Mary, how I do love you two,’ and went on with his story, more quickly, more naturally.
‘Well, there we all were; Duncan frisking about and shaking himself, Roma wringing the water out of her hair, and I not knowing what on earth to say or do. And then, as soon as she had got into her skirt, she took my hand and said, “Come on, darling, let’s run for the inn. I shall have to go to bed while they’re drying my clothes, but we can have lunch upstairs if you don’t mind my not looking my best in the landlady’s nightgown. What fun! Or perhaps it would be nicer if I didn’t wear one at all. Don’t you think so, darling?” And she gave me a loving look, and squeezed my hand. It was uncanny. It was just as if I had been somewhere else when it happened, and had strolled up and found them on the bank.’
‘Poor Nicky. Horrible for you.’
‘Yes. Well, it was all like that. Tact. Perfect tact. Not once did she give a hint that anything out of the way had happened, that she had noticed anything, that there was anything for either of us to worry about. With one half of my mind I felt that it was wonderful of her to spare my feelings like this, and with the other half I wished to God she would jeer at me and call me a coward.’
‘It was difficult for her,’ I said, doing my best for a girl I had never really liked.
‘It must have been. But then the whole situation was impossible. There were times in the next few days when I could almost persuade myself that this was my old daydream come back, and that I was imagining it all. And then one morning I heard her talking rubbish to Duncan, and saying, “Did he fall in the river and ask his missis to pull him out?” or something like that. It had happened all right.’
‘So you broke it off?’
‘Yes. It would always have been between us. Perhaps if we had really had it out—I don’t know—but hushed up like that—and anyway a girl can’t be expected to marry a coward. Not when she’s as brave as Roma. That river —if you could have seen it! No, I couldn’t live up to her, she couldn’t live down to me. As soon as we got back to London, I wrote.’
Then Mary said an odd thing. Or so I thought at the time.
‘Did Roma know what you were talking about in your letter?’ she asked.
‘Well, you see, I’d been finding it difficult to be as loving as I had been. I always had that moment in my mind. You can’t make love when you’re thinking of something else all the time. Roma actually thought that I was falling for another girl there. We did have a silly quarrel about that, a girl I’d hardly spoken to. In my letter I just said that, after what had happened, it was obvious that we couldn’t be happy together. She may have thought that I meant the quarrel.’
‘I’m sure she did,’ said Mary. ‘How do you feel about Roma now?’
‘Do you mean am I still in love with her? Not a bit. I expect it was mostly physical, you know. One gets over that more easily.’
‘That’s good. Now, Nicky, John has something to tell you. But I think that before he begins I should like to say something about Roma. It’s only lately that I have got her clear in my mind, and in any case it wouldn’t have done any good talking about it before. You thought that Roma was being tactful—sweetly, unbearably tactful. She wasn’t. Tact means considering people’s feelings, and Roma has never found it necessary to do that. Rosemary Paton is the supreme egotist. She is the centre of her own stage all the time, and everybody and everything else is just a cue or an audience or a property for her. You didn’t exist for her at all when Duncan fell in, except as an audience in the wings. It never went through her head for a moment that you were a coward. You weren’t on in the great dog-rescuing scene, so how could you be brave or not brave? And what did it matter to her if you felt this or that off-stage, so long as you were there on your cue, and played your part properly, when the love-scene came on? Roma’s whole world is Rosemary Paton—and you are well out of it.’
So that explained Roma; explained that ‘but’ which used to worry me. I saw it now. She was a dead woman in a dead world of her own.
‘I daresay you’re right,’ said Nicky indifferently. ‘That’s Roma. But I’m where I was.’
‘Well, now John is going to tell you where you were twenty-five years ago. Go on, darling.’
I had known that this was coming, and had been wondering how to deal with it. No friendship between men can survive the knowledge that one has saved the other’s life.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now listen, Nicky, because this is important, and really quite simple. You say that all your life you have had terrifying visions of a river, that you recognised this as the river you’d always imagined, and that physically and literally you couldn’t have gone in whatever the moral compulsion?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s natural enough. When you were two years old, you did go into that river, at, I should say, that very spot, and the river was pretty much as you saw it more than twenty years later. Terrifying.’
‘You’re mad!’
‘No, it’s a fact. And if you like to observe that the world is a very small place, or the arm of coincidence a very long one, you may.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Your mother talked about it that day we met you.’
He turned to Mary.
‘Is this true?’
‘Of course, Nicky.’
‘Why should my mother talk about it to you?’
Before she could answer, I said:
‘Because Mary was there. Your body came to shore in that same backwater. You were dead, Nicky. I don’t suppose you knew, but Mary lived at Castle Craddock when she was a girl. She found you there dead, and she restored you to life.’
Mary gave a short hysterical laugh and said, ‘Don’t be such an idiot, Johnny. Of course he wasn’t dead.’
‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘Who knows what happens when the drowned are restored to life?’
Nicky gave a great sigh, squaring his shoulders as if he were easing them of the burden which he had been carrying for two bitter years.
‘So you see,’ I went on, ‘when your mother met Mary again after all that time—well, naturally, when I was introduced to her, she was full of it. We talked of nothing else. And she told me that she had thought it better not to say anything to you; and, like a fool, I said that I was sure she was right. But of course we were desperately wrong. You’ve had the thing gnawing away inside you all these years, and known nothing about it. So, my dear Nicky, wash out the idea that you are, or were, a coward; or, if you insist, you must give us much better evidence than you have given us to-night.’
There was a long silence this time, a very long silence. It was lighter now, or perhaps I was getting more used to the darkness. I could see Nicky’s face. He was looking up into the sky, with that eager look which he always used to have, as if he were on the verge of discovery.
He turned to Mary.
‘Did I say thank you nicely at the time,’ he said, ‘or was I too young?’
‘A bit too young, Nicky.’
‘Then I’ll say it now. Thank you, darling.’ He picked up her hand, kissed it, and let it go. ‘You’ll see. I won’t let you down.’
He didn’t. He didn’t.