“A lance corporal? Frannie? Good God.”

“I’m sure that he’ll love giving you orders when you get back. He’s got leave, as well. This is what you get for being a good boy, you see. You should try it. He thinks that he might get home for a few days in September.”

“You don’t look particularly pleased.”

“Of course I’m pleased.”

Pickering was now conducting the choir as the men on the steps sang the chorus. Edie looked back and laughed, but when she turned toward Harry all the light had gone out in her face.

“How is he?”

“Francis?”

She nodded.

“Muddling along—as much as anyone else is. You know what he’s like: it’s never easy to know what Francis is thinking. Or, at least, when I try to read him I always seem to get it wrong. You’d think that we’d speak the same language, wouldn’t you? He writes to you, doesn’t he?”

“I get pages full of words but they don’t really say anything. It’s almost the same letter every time, like it’s a formula that he feels he has to send me. The same phrases. The same sentiments. The same not-quite-convincing cheeriness. Oh, I know that I shouldn’t complain. He’s kind, he’s caring, he never criticizes, but it’s like the model letter that a soldier ought to send his wife, and I can’t hear Francis’s voice in it. Like he’s disappearing. Slipping away. The voice in his letters isn’t that of the man who I lived with. It could be from anyone and I worry about that. You write to me more often than he does and I open your letters with more relish. That’s awful, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You’re a terrible woman. I shall endeavor to send you duller letters. In fact, as you’re such a perfidious floozy, I might stop writing to you altogether.”

“Please don’t,” she said. “But he is all right?”

“He is. Don’t worry. He’s just ready for a break. He needs a rest. Coming home on leave will do him good.”

“I do hope you’re right.”

Phrases of music seemed to hang over the water, as the mist clung to the lake in the mornings. The sun was warm on the back of his neck. A breath of air shifted a strand of hair across Edie’s cheek.

“Ever wish that you could just hold your breath and make it all stop—make it all stand still?”

“Yes. Right at this instant,” she replied.

The reflection of the house, bright in the early evening light, had the heightened color of an illustration from a child’s book. It looked like something that might disappear at any moment.