Six months earlier, Bernard and I had taken advantage of chance clear weather and had gone off one Saturday afternoon for a walk in a suburban park that Bernard knew. We had taken a picnic. That day, Bernard’s red-gold hair blew in the breeze like a mane, and the sunlight seemed to be caught in it, almost as though he were the source of the light itself. He had an easy, swinging gait that the uneven path could not frustrate. His voice was soft and relaxed, allegro ma non troppo, as Helen was later to say. “Look,” he would say, “just there,” and point, and I would spot a squirrel, still on the branches. Other visitors to the park smiled as they passed. There were some boys playing cricket and a group of teenagers with Frisbees and one young woman with frizzy hair and big kneepads who was trying unsuccessfully to roller-skate on the uneven ground. Many of the locals were drinking plastic pint cups of beer. Some of them had brought dogs. At last Bernard and I came to a quiet hilly end of things, and found a spot from which we could see no other people, and ate our sandwiches and fruit and drank, between the two of us, a bottle of white wine. Everything Bernard said that day seemed to me to be funny and intuitive, and we talked without thinking, the way I had talked to friends when I was a little boy. So we lay for half an afternoon, side by side, one of his legs crossed under one of mine, and watched the different faces of the park around us. It felt so slight: it didn’t occur to me then that this might be love, though I knew that I had never liked anyone more. The day, like Bernard himself, could not have been less dramatic, less interested in calling attention to itself.

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