“She isn’t here yet,” Edmund said, swallowing a mouthful.

“I wonder what she’ll be wearing,” Albert said. He was a trim, dapper young man, who affected a monocle.

“Awfully hot, isn’t it?” Edmund said.

“If she wears anything like last year I’ll simply fall at her feet.”

They looked at each other with displeasure.

“You’re as besotted as I am,” Albert said.

Edmund broke off more cake.

Albert drank his tea, squeezing his eye around his monocle. “Probably won’t be either of us. Almost certainly. Except women do such odd things. That’s all that gives me hope.”

If Mrs. Simpson surveyed as from a pediment, Mrs. Laird was suggestive of a large ornamental gate. Impressive; attractive even, if you could see the attraction in heavy iron, manipulated by supreme technical skill. Violet was always trying to look past her, to get a proper view of things. She had given up on being properly seen herself. She hoped only to offer glimpses from behind the bars.

“Do you think they’re only flirting?” she said eventually. “Or is it love?” The band had finished and were preparing to start again. The couple were still holding each other, smiling and talking, his head sunk toward hers, hair hanging lankly, sipping at her forehead.

“Oh, one or the other, I expect,” Edmund said, his eyelashes beating, and his Adam’s apple dipping in his throat.

The band started, and the couple whirled away. Violet followed the woman’s red wrap as it licked around the man, like a flame licking at meat.

More people were coming to watch, and Violet was now standing at the edge of the wooden floor. She and Edmund were very near together. They were both aware of it, both watching the couple, not daring to take their eyes off them. Their hearts were fast, as though it were they who were dancing. The red wrap flew about, and the man and woman laughed as they whirled, their hands clamped tight together, disappearing behind other dancers and then appearing again.

Edmund stared blinkingly at the dancers again. He was the happiest he had ever been, and he needed to put an end to it. If the moment were drawn out, if he and Violet were to talk, he knew he would spoil it somehow. If only he could get away! He veered his head and saw Mrs. Simpson a few yards off. His and Violet’s fingertips were still touching. What on earth had made him do it? His great-uncle had been at Waterloo. Perhaps this was the last dreg of heroism left over. For a while longer he kept his fingertips there. Then he fluttered them in temporary, yearning farewell. He hoped Violet would understand that this was what the flutter meant. But oh God, he had not removed them. He had fluttered for nothing.

Violet knew it was a mistake, letting Edmund Bliss hold her hand. Not holding her hand⁠—only cradling her fingertips. It was most unlike him, yet like him all the same. This was how it would be, she told herself, to be married to him: a vague, tentative, fingertipping sort of love. If she ever married Edmund, it would mean she had become vague and tentative herself. It didn’t bear thinking about. She continued thinking about it as she searched for her mother, stopping to gaze all about her and seeing the couple from the marquee, the man with the wet dark hair and the cap that clapped at the seat of his trousers, and the woman with the red wrap that licked. The cap was placid on his head now, and the wrap lay quiescent. Violet saw that the man and woman were also altered: gentle, talking closely and quietly, him with his hands in his pockets, thumbs stretched on the outside, and her with arms lightly folded, head tilted back. Violet wondered about them again, with that guilty, jealous ache.

Violet did not think of Edmund being carried away. Already this buried hook of pain was what remained of him. She ran and seized the woman, falling on her knees too. The woman’s shouts pulsed into her chest and Violet began to sob, gripping tighter, squeezing her tears against the woman’s neck. She heard someone saying her name and stared up through the strands of the woman’s hair at Albert in his mustard waistcoat, stricken, his monocle trapped and blurred in his eye. The woman shouted again into her chest, wrestling in her grip, and Violet put her mouth to her ear, whispering. “Was it love?” she said. “Please, tell me, please, was it love?”