“Divorced, from a wartime marriage.” After a pause, he went on, “We were married in Cairo. Then I was off in the desert and she was posted to Colombo. Time went by, we could scarcely meet. She found someone else. So, for a while, did I. We assumed we’d grown apart—a usual thing. She wanted to remarry. When we met in London, the spring of’45, to arrange the divorce, it seemed for a moment that we might have managed it after all. Too late then, peace was sweeping us away.” He had scarcely thought of these things in two years. It was vivid, however, that single final day spent in London seeing lawyers, walking away together in the wet park, and at last making love in a hired room. The hotel, small and decent, had made no difficulty: their passports were those, still, of husband and wife. Oh, Moira, he’d said, our sad story. And she had shed silent tears not intended to change things. Her arched throat and spread hair, and the day dying in the wet window. The marriage was dissolved, evaporating along with its memories and meetings, and the partings of war; the letters increasingly laboured, the thoughts, kisses, regrets. The lawyers were paid. The true marriage, indissoluble, was simply the moment when they sat on the rented bed and grieved for a fatality older than love.

[...] As Gardiner had said, the Driscolls were disquieting as a symptom of new power: that Melba and Barry should be in the ascendant was not what one had hoped from peace. It did not even seem a cessation of hostilities.

Up here in the hills, the officer in charge is a medical administrator from the Antipodes. He and his consort make a formidable pair. They have a frail and remarkable young son, and a little girl who is a changeling. Seeing these young people, I am thinking that a child can be born fastidious into cruelty and can hold to reason and a sense of justice. There is, thank God, no explaining this.

Since the night of Gardiner’s death, the night of the twirling girls on Ita Jima, I rediscover memories distinct from war. Often of women, of my youthful loves—Aurora, Gigliola. Not so much Moira, perhaps because our story achieved, in London, that nearly ritual fulfillment. It is incompleteness that haunts us.

Damp English day, in which I’ve thought persistently of Aurora. My recurrent images of women appear less like memories than a means of restoring life to what has mattered and was passingly eclipsed by war. It is ten years now since she and I first met and were lovers; six years since I last saw her. I realise, too, that I now have a substantial past—which means that I am no longer young but have become more interesting to myself. I used to think that our story, hers and mine, was far fetched, even freakish; but see now that the experiment of love is itself aberrant, more often than not, and doesn’t lend itself to classification. A letter this week from Aurora, funny and charming, put me in mind of all that, and prompted a dream of her, with predictable result.

The mother said, “Aldred has a tender heart.”

The youth blushed. “Not tender enough, perhaps.”

Raimonda pushed a fugitive pea in his direction. “Tender enough. But reluctant to show.”

And this was a girl he had kissed with abandon.

“One was raised that way. Schools strict. Parents not demonstrative.” He hoped to end the discussion by eating a whole handful of peas.

Raimonda said, “That was their affair. Now it’s up to you.” The tone in which she said this, without rigour or rancour; almost in reverie.

Because of the kiss, she might have liked to consider the evening a turning point, momentous. But, with the ill-timed precision of women in such matters, only felt what was lacking. Something that either of them could have put a name to.

Helen was to go alone to her parents’ rooms, where Benedict would also be brought and lunch would be prepared. The Driscolls, man and wife, were leaving for some commemorative occasion—there was often an event of the kind, which they unfailingly attended, leaving Dench in charge. Thus, at the top of the path, Helen walked on by herself, straight into that other existence where she had less and less place. As she walked, she put her hand to her mouth to hold his kiss, and to her breast to enclose his touch.

The man, instead, went to his own room and to his table—to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction—the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life. Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he had discovered a desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her.

“Yes. And, like the earth, old and dirty. I got it back in a box of ‘effects,’ as they call it, when I was in England in’45. They’d been stored in Lincolnshire, in a barn near Branston where we spent the nights before the battle.” He said, “Getting the box, opening it, I myself as next of kin receiving the pitiful leavings of the deceased. Living the experience that my mother would have otherwise endured. This coat was the first thing, folded on top: like a body. A book, a few letters, socks, handkerchiefs, my good watch, a shaving kit—irrelevant overnight stuff. Through an oversight, I was alive to take charge of these relics, only lacking the letter from the colonel commending my valour. The colonel, who in fact had died alongside me in the action. Things, Helen, the sad silly evidence of things.” He said, “We’re told that possessions are ephemeral, yet my God how they outlast us—the clock on the bedside table, the cough drops, the diary with appointments for that very day.” And the meaning ebbing out of them, visibly.

There was, for instance, the compulsion to return to the calamity of Liu’s child—to deplore it yet again, or replay it with a happy ending. Getting away with something—the narrow squeak—is, he had always realised, a strong theme of life and art: powerful because it creates suspense. One never quite loses hope that Hamlet will discard the poisoned foil, that Juliet will awake in time, Cavaradossi rise up living, and the royal family escape from Varennes. The world loves long odds—Marathon, Lepanto, the Armada; Dunkirk. As to that, he thought, I’ve had my share of rescues, first by Crindle at Florence, then from Leith in the desert. And done little enough with the reprieve. Good fortune is a prodigy whose occasion one must rise to. Unpractised in such notions, I could not rescue Liu’s child, or save myself.