Also, the weather was so very cold. In the end Richard would drift back to the house, and Christopher to the stables. Neither was sorry to go his own way. The boy would be building up memories peculiar to himself. The father had his own of that kind. He could not add to them and, in his case, he found he most wanted to be with his wife back in the more recent life his leave had let him find again, which now tasted fresh to his lips as the fruit off the tree.

So it came about that he did not see as much as he might of Christopher, partly because he had dropped into the old way of doing nothing which made a background to every memory of the place he had, and partly because he found he could not, this time, leave his wife alone.

When he had been training, days at the office were long, evenings brief by such time as he got back from work. At that period, when his life lay ready to hand, he had not bothered, had taken the companionship of wife and baby for granted. Now that he was back in this life only for a few days, he could not keep his hands off her, now that he did not see her every evening, rather mocking, aloof, as gentle as he had been curt always, the touch of her white rose petal skin an unchanging part of what his life had been before, her gladness that she was with him a promise of how they still had each other, of the love they had had one for the other, and of the love they would yet hold one another in, the greater by everything that had gone before.

Because of this, and by the fact that she had not been with him for so long, he could not leave her alone when in an empty room, but stroked her wrists, pinched, kissed her eyes, nibbled her lips while, for her part, she smiled, joked, and took him up to bed at all hours of the day with her, and lay all night murmuring to him.

It is unnecessary to say how Christopher spent the days. Actress was there all the time. He had his own jokes with the men about the place, who were of an age to have been a part of Richard’s youth as well.

In this way the time for father and son passed quickly. Neither was much with the other, the one picking up the thread where the war had unravelled it, the other beginning to spin his own, to create his first tangled memories, to bind himself to life for the first time. But for the wife it was complete in itself, for she had both of them, together again.

So it came to the morning of Richard’s return. His wife went with him for a stroll before the car came to the door.