Yvette’s and Célia’s parents departed this life in 1962, within months of each other. Their father’s funeral had turned into a memorial for them both. After the service Peter and I had loitered on the edge of a teeming gathering at Henri Negresco’s hotel in Nice while our children careened about on the promenade and Yvette and Célia entangled themselves blissfully in a net of old, old friends and long-missed cousins who had come from an alphabet of cities—Beirut, Adelaide, Montreal, Paris—to bid her parents farewell. The second purpose of their journeys being, of course, to catch up on years of news, at top speed and high volume, in the turbulent mixture of Alexandrian French and Egyptian Arabic that was the language of their youth. “My goodness,” said Yvette afterward, fanning her face, “it was lovely but I do remember why I was sometimes so desperate to be on my own.”

Maman had been sixty-eight, Papa seventy-two. Papa had smoked all his life and Maman always ate far too many cakes. Yvette was the first to say so. But she felt all the same that her parents’ lives had been shortened by exile.

I was glad for them, that they hadn’t outlived their daughter.

Tom and I have been for a nose around our old home, had a cuppa with the beaming, rock-climbing vicar I welcomed to the parish five months ago. He was well bedded in, he told us. “But there’s always a surprise around the corner,” he added cheerfully. “How about you? Enjoying the rural peace?”

—

Now Tom and I are walking along the path behind the school playground. Soon the lane widens and the trees grow tall. On a bank beneath the trees, in shade and sun, the primroses are flowering.

“What’s the time?” Tom asks.

I glance at my watch. “Ten to three.”

“I can’t believe it. After all that chugging through the Mendips, we’re still early.”

Picking her way along the lane from the opposite direction, huddled in a long black coat, is a woman of stunning beauty. Her black hair—rigorously black, these days—falls to her shoulders and she’s wearing enormous dark glasses. She doesn’t see us; she’s busy negotiating a puddle. Not a drop of water must touch the high platform soles of her shiny black boots.

“Look, Tom.” I start to smile. “So is she.”

Tom doesn’t need telling twice. He bounds forward with a delighted shout, he might be twelve years old. “Auntie Célia!”

Célia gives a scream of astonished joy. “Tom! Look at you!” He envelops her, his head bending to hers. I’ve always thought of Célia as tall, but for the first time I realize she was simply taller than Yvette. A different thing altogether.

She turns to me. “Darling James.”