“How about you?” I said. “D’you believe in ghosts?”

“Of course. I come here to be near the ones who died.”

“In the hospital?”

“No, my own ghosts. From my own life.”

“Who are they?”

She acted as if she hadn’t heard; I was sure that she had losses greater than mine, of people she’d known and loved.

“Why were there Belgian refugees?” I asked, since she seemed more comfortable with her potted history lesson.

“When Germany invaded, they had to flee. A quarter of a million came here. Agatha Christie met one and invented Poirot.” She turned to me. “If you write a book, I can be your Belgian.”

“I’m not going to write a book.”

“But you love to read?”

“That’s different.”

“I love to read too,” she said.

“What do you love to read?”

“Thomas Mann, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Proust.”

“OK,” I said. “Maybe you will write a book then?”

She laughed.

After nothing more was forthcoming, I asked, “What happened to the refugees?”

“At the end of the war, Britain sent them back. The government gave free one-way tickets. Their story was forgotten. An old priest told me.”

“A priest?”

“He comes here a lot. He tells me things, then forgets, then tells me again.” She shrugged. “I feel sad for old men on their own.”

“Not old women?”

“No,” she said.

She took out a joint. I knew what she meant: it was easier to feel sad for people who weren’t like you. She lit the joint, had a toke, and passed it to me. I had a toke too.

As a layer peeled off the day, I noticed the trees differently. How magnificent they were, how old and dignified. While their leaves chattered high above us, I felt as if I’d slipped into an English storybook from my childhood. I put the flat of my hand on the knobbled bark of what Sabine said was a hornbeam; I ran my palm along it.

Sabine put her hand on the bark too, and then on top of mine.

“Come,” she said. “We need to go back. But first, the wishing well.”

The wishing well wasn’t what I expected. It was a squat dome-shaped concrete structure embedded with flints and quartz. Sabine said fifty years ago children would scratch a wish on a leaf and throw it in. She sat scribbling on her leaf; I tried to see what she was getting down but it was indecipherable. I simply wished for us to be friends.