I sat straight down and he made a few sketches. But there wasn’t really enough time left, what with the walking and the kiss, and so we talked about him. He lived in Holborn, in a flat with three friends. The bath was in the kitchen. When they wanted to cook, they put a board over the bath and chopped up their potatoes and onions on it. Holborn was still pretty bomb-damaged, he said.

“So is Alver Shore.”

“Yes.”

He put down his pencil and leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

—

Later that evening James said, “Will you come to Evensong, Yvette?” I said, “Of course.” We went to the church and I sat near the door so I could encourage latecomers inside. It was comforting to pray surrounded by others, our lips moving, our voices indistinguishable one from the other. I could shut my eyes and imagine myself in a cathedral, a vast metropolitan congregation where I knew no one, where I was subsumed into a nameless crowd. Perhaps I could find a Catholic church, a place where I was not known. Perhaps I’d even go to Confession. I hadn’t missed Confession at all since I’d joined the Church of England. I’d never got on very well with it. Try as I might, I could never think of myself as particularly sinful, especially after being told that this very idea was a sin and therefore worthy of confession. It was not a sense of sin that called me to Confession, rather, a longing to speak from my heart into a comforting darkness.

—

The following week Philip met me at the top of the lane and took my hand.

“Philip, we’ll be seen!”

“Nobody knows you.”

“They’ll say to your mother, I saw Philip with his new lady friend. They seemed very taken with each other.”

Quickly Philip released my hand. He had no aptitude for subterfuge.

—

Hollandaise-yellow dollops of sunshine. A violet shadow of a mountain, heated rock, and parched thyme. Ruby glimmers on the belly of a carafe of wine. Olive-green olives and olive-green olive leaves, and in the middle an olive-skinned girl, cross-legged in a buttermilk blouse and dark blue sailor trousers. I told Philip the trousers were made out of my mother-in-law’s tablecloth. “She hated it, so she was glad to see it cut up.” I’d spent weeks on these trousers, laying the pieces out over chairs, letting tacking threads trail onto the floor, sticking pins into the arms of the sofa. James, pulling a pair of pinking shears from under a cushion, had implored Saint Anne, patron saint of seamstresses, to come to my aid before he suffered grave injury. This was a long time before Catherine.

“These colors,” Philip said. “I’m trying to give you back the Mediterranean.”