“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.