Lilian no longer wanted to run away or to be something different. What had she been thinking of? Looking back, amused, a little condescending, she saw an altogether younger person. A rather foolish one, at that. She was just a regular girl from Boston — how could she have expected to hold and to understand someone like Walter Vail? Of course, he would never have understood her either. Gathering in her was the sense that the man down on the rocks, the one she’d watched sit cross-legged on the beach, the one who carefully rolled his napkin into a sausage after dinner, was someone she could understand. And he could understand her. It was as if their ancestors’ proximity in King’s Chapel yard gave them a sort of affinity. That familiarity had once made her recoil — she smiled to herself — but now she saw the sense of it: instinctively, they knew one another. In these past few days she’d spent with him, she’d found she met herself, the girl she’d been long ago, the one Arthur would have sprayed with the garden hose or sat with up on the gabled roof.

Are they still fishing? Marian cried from the open hallway, moving at a fast clip toward the kitchen. She threw out questions like lines, not caring to reel them in.

What a nice quiet way he had. His lack of self-awareness was so like a child’s. Because of this she felt she could trust him thoroughly. He was certain, like a rock against this shore was certain, as solid as a brick in the sidewalk on Beacon Street. The day before they’d motored inland past the stables of Hamilton and the marshes of Ipswich and Gilbert Finch had sat near the window letting the wind blow on his face, enigmatic, at peace. Lilian had noticed that the boys who’d been abroad didn’t talk about it much. Gilbert Finch had gotten to France only at the end of the war. He did say he didn’t know how the other fellows had lasted so long. It was all she had heard him say on the subject.

Thinking of him, the warmth fanned through her again, stirring her dormant self, her real one. Her knitting needles lay, useless wooden sticks, on her lap. She stared down at him and fixed in her mind the notion that he would save her. Suddenly it was her last hope.

It was in this way, musing and alone, that Lilian Eliot decided her fate.

28 • A small kiss

28 • A small kiss

THE NIGHT he asked her to marry him was a June night in the back garden of Fairfield Street. There was a fog from the river. The light from the drawing room doors fell across them. Gilbert Finch held Lilian’s hands in his own large soft ones. She had just said yes.