“Is it always like this?” She turned toward him. “I expected to be visiting some grimly sober institution. I was braced for gray wards and the smell of antiseptic. I expected to feel sorry for you, but I can’t remotely.”

“Not even slightly? Not even for having to suffer sentimental tenors? Do you know how much light operatic we must endure?”

“Poor Harry!”

“It’s agony. Can’t you possibly summon up enough pity to dance with me?”

She smiled slowly as she stood and offered him her hand. “I’m only doing this for the war effort.”

They danced just there on the lawn. Turning slowly. Feet faltering to the uncertain notes. The men on the steps whistled and shouted as they spun, but Harry didn’t hear them at all. He held on to her and the rest of it spun away. Edie shut her eyes and leaned her head back as she laughed. The flat of her hand was between his shoulder blades. Her laughing mouth was just inches from his own.

“What?” she said, as she opened her eyes and looked back at him.

He leaned the side of his head against hers and could feel her breathing. He breathed in her smell of soap and licorice, and the swoop of the orchestra strings, and wanted to tell her that he had never felt more exquisitely happy or more sad.

HARRY WALKED HER back along the driveway. He ought to talk to her, he felt, ought to keep it light and bright and her entertained, but he struggled even to find airy words now that she was leaving. The roses, along the path, had passed their best. The petals of the poppies had blown. He named lilies and foxgloves and delphiniums because of the need to keep on speaking, to keep on sharing, to have her eyes lift and meet his. He pointed out seed heads and leaf shapes and gave her the Latin names, all of these details already like a memory. He told her about the palm house and the fern garden and the espaliered apricot trees. Harry filled the space between them with all of these things, so that he didn’t have to tell her about the other places. So that her eyes were only full of the images that he had selected to show her. So that he didn’t have to speak Francis’s name again.