“Dearest Célia.” We embrace tightly. She smells deliciously expensive. Peter is doing very well indeed. Her cheek is wet with tears.

“Oh, damn, waterworks already,” she says in pure Australian.

Célia has flown to Bristol from Paris, and will return this evening to continue her stay with some cousins in the 16th arrondissement. “You couldn’t keep me away,” she says, taking off the sunglasses and dabbing at her face. “Don’t tell me,” she goes on, catching my eye and smiling. “I’m the spitting image of Aunt Monique now. My cousins can’t get over it.”

Her face, softened and shadowed and elaborately made-up, is almost identical to the glamorous creature who had whisked herself discreetly out of her flat in Cairo during the war, so that Yvette and I could be together alone.

“Célia, you are incomparable.”

We all turn to look at the bank of primroses. The trees are still bare but they lean out over us, so that we, as well as the flowers, are caught in the moving shadows of their branches.

“Right,” says Tom, and opens his rucksack.

—

The funeral had been a hideous blur in which our only concern, mine and Célia’s, was to get Tom through the day with minimal addition to his suffering. Ten years ago, or almost. Now the air is fresh, the sun shining. We’re all older. We’ve all learned how to do that seemingly impossible thing, namely, to live without Yvette.

“I don’t want to speak English,” Célia says. “It won’t sound right.”

“Don’t, then,” I say softly.

“L’Eternel est mon berger: je ne manquerai de rien,” Célia begins in her old, Alexandrian voice, the one she had when I met her. “Il me fait reposer dans de verts pâturages, il me dirige près des eaux paisibles . . .”

The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. I picture Yvette coming into the hall at Fulbrook vicarage in her mac, pushing the hood back and shaking the rain from her umbrella. The heavens have opened! she would announce with a dazzling smile. She loved all the English expressions for heavy rain—cloudburst, downpour, cats and dogs—and would use them triumphantly after a wet walk. She loved English rain, English greenness. She loved England, full stop.

Tom, to my surprise, has chosen part of Ben Jonson’s ode about the lily that lived such a little time. Although it fall and die that night, it was the plant and flower of light. He reads very solemnly and sounds unlike himself. “It’s for Catherine obviously,” he says when he’s finished, in a more normal voice. “But also for Mum, who died before she was ready. Certainly before I was ready.”