Célia was standing outside Peter’s door, parting company with a tall, lean, white-coated Englishman who was striding away with a cheerful wave. This man’s chief obsession was the removal of foreign objects from the human eyeball while preserving as much as he could of the eyeball’s function—and, as if that were not enough, experimenting with ever more delicate and ingenious ways of doing so. Célia and I, indeed the whole Haddad family, revered him as a minor god.

Célia was pasty, her hair like soot. She was breathless, smiling, so focused on me that she didn’t even notice James. “Mr. Stallard is terribly pleased with the eye!”

The eye, that’s how we referred to it. The eye was small and gray and shy, sunk between mauve folds of lid. Reluctant to show Peter anything but clouds. “It was bloody clouds that got me into trouble in the first place,” Peter would say, in a light voice that did not fool us.

I indicated James. “Look who’s here!”

Delighted exclamations: “Oh, Peter will be so pleased to see you! He’ll actually be able to—a bit. He can definitely see the window today. Just a white square, but he can see it!”

The tears leaked from my eyes. She’d been crying too. Any tiny bit of progress and she cried, and I cried with her. We all went into Peter’s room.

—

Peter got tired after half an hour. The eye needed to shut down. Célia and I had not been able to understand much of what he and James said to each other. “It must be a special airmen’s argot,” Célia whispered, mystified. There was a joke about “tin openers” that they both seemed to find very funny. Then Peter called James a “sky pilot.”

“What other kind is there?” I murmured.

Célia didn’t know.

—

When Peter fell into a doze, Célia got out her sewing. She was just about to settle into the chair next to the bed when James spoke.

“Come along, Célia,” he said in a low voice. “We’re going to Willcocks for tea. It’s just across the river.”

It was the first I’d heard of the plan, but that didn’t matter. Reluctantly Célia abandoned her sewing and left the room with us. “What if he wakes up and I’m not there?” she said when we were in the corridor.

“He’s a big boy,” said James.

We could stand to hear this from him. What with the sun and breeze and health that James had brought in, not to mention the code words and jargon, Peter’s whole face had started to move normally, visited for the first time by proper expressions instead of the rigid lips that emitted only clipped chipper remarks.