‘Oh. It’s a very nice day, isn’t it? Would you like to walk across the park, or would it tire you?’
‘No, of course it wouldn’t. I was just going to suggest it to you.’
They crossed Victoria Street and went down a narrow passage-way, coming out finally by St James’s Park station. Cauldfield looked up at the Epstein statues.
‘Can you see anything whatever in those? How can one call things like that Art?’
‘Oh, I think one can. Very definitely so.’
‘Surely you don’t like them?’
‘I don’t personally, no. I’m old-fashioned and continue to like classical sculpture and the things I was brought up to like. But that doesn’t mean that my taste is right. I think one has to be educated to appreciate new forms of art. The same with music.’
‘Music! You can’t call it music.’
‘Mr Cauldfield, don’t you think you’re being rather narrow-minded?’
He turned his head sharply to look at her. She was flushed, a trifle nervous, but her eyes met his squarely and did not flinch.
‘Am I? Perhaps I am. Yes, I suppose when you’ve been away a long time, you tend to come home and object to everything that isn’t strictly as you remember it.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘You must take me in hand.’
Ann said quickly: ‘Oh, I’m terribly old-fashioned myself. Sarah often laughs at me. But what I do feel is that it is a terrible pity to—to—how shall I put it?—close one’s mind just as one is getting—well, getting old. For one thing, it’s going to make one so tiresome—and then, also, one may be missing something that matters.’
Richard walked in silence for some moments. Then he said:
‘It sounds so absurd to hear you talk of yourself as getting old. You’re the youngest person I’ve met for a long time. Much younger than some of these alarming girls. They really do frighten me.’
‘Yes, they frighten me a little. But I always find them very kind.’
They had reached St James’s Park. The sun was fully out now and the day was almost warm.
‘Where shall we go?’
‘Let’s go and look at the pelicans.’
They watched the birds with contentment, and talked about the various species of water fowl. Completely relaxed and at ease, Richard was boyish and natural, a charming companion. They chatted and laughed together and were astonishingly happy in each other’s company.
Presently Richard said: ‘Shall we sit down for a while in the sun? You won’t be cold, will you?’
‘No, I’m quite warm.’
They sat on two chairs and looked out over the water. The scene with its rarefied colouring was like a Japanese print.
Ann said softly: ‘How beautiful London can be. One doesn’t always realize it.’
‘No. It’s almost a revelation.’
They sat quietly for a minute or two, then Richard said:
‘My wife always used to say that London was the only place to be when spring came. She said the green buds and the almond trees and in time the lilacs all had more significance against a background of bricks and mortar. She said in the country it all happened confusedly and it was too big to see properly. But in a suburban garden spring came overnight.’
‘I think she was right.’
Richard said with an effort, and not looking at Ann:
‘She died—a long time ago.’
‘I know. Colonel Grant told me.’
Richard turned and looked at her.
‘Did he tell you how she died?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s something I shall never get over. I shall always feel that I killed her.’
Ann hesitated a moment, then spoke:
‘I can understand what you feel. In your place I should feel as you do. But it isn’t true, you know.’
‘It is true.’
‘No. Not from her—from a woman’s point of view. The responsibility of accepting that risk is the woman’s. It’s implicit in—in her love. She wants the child, remember. Your wife did—want the child?’
‘Oh yes. Aline was very happy about it. So was I. She was a strong healthy girl. There seemed no reason why anything should go wrong.’
There was silence again.
Then Ann said: ‘I’m sorry—so very sorry.’
‘It’s a long time ago now.’
‘The baby died too?’
‘Yes. In a way, you know, I’m glad of that. I should, I feel, have resented the poor little thing. I should always have remembered the price that was paid for its life.’
‘Tell me about your wife.’
Sitting there, in the pale wintry sunlight, he told her about Aline. How pretty she had been and how gay. And the sudden quiet moods she had had when he had wondered what she was thinking about and why she had gone so far away.
Once he broke off to say wonderingly: ‘I have not spoken about her to anyone for years,’ and Ann said gently: ‘Go on.’
It had all been so short—too short. A three months’ engagement, their marriage—‘the usual fuss, we didn’t really want it all, but her mother insisted’. They had spent their honeymoon motoring in France, seeing the chateaux of the Loire.
He said inconsequentially: ‘She was nervous in a car, you know. She’d keep her hand on my knee. It seemed to give her confidence, I don’t know why she was nervous. She’d never been in an accident.’ He paused and then went on: ‘Sometimes, after it had all happened, I used to feel her hand sometimes when I was driving out in Burma. Imagine it, you know … It seemed incredible that she should go right away like that—right out of life …’
Yes, thought Ann, that is what it feels like—incredible. So she had felt about Patrick. He must be somewhere. He must be able to make her feel his presence. He couldn’t go out like that and leave nothing behind. That terrible gulf between the dead and the living!
Richard was going on. Telling her about the little house they had found in a cul-de-sac, with a lilac bush and a pear tree.
Then, when his voice, brusque and hard, came to the end of the halting phrases, he said again wonderingly: ‘I don’t know why I have told you all this …’
But he did know. When he had asked Ann rather nervously if it would be all right to lunch at his club—‘they have a kind of Ladies’ Annexe, I believe—or would you rather go to a restaurant?’—and when she had said that she would prefer the club, and they had got up and begun to walk towards Pall Mall, the knowledge was in his mind, though not willingly recognized by him.
This was his farewell to Aline, here in the cold unearthly beauty of the park in winter.
He would leave her here, beside the lake, with the bare branches of the trees showing their tracery against the sky.
For the last time, he brought her to life in her youth and her strength and the sadness of her fate. It was a lament, a dirge, a hymn of praise—a little perhaps of all of them.
But it was also a burial.
He left Aline there in the park and walked out into the streets of London with Ann.