“Of course I noticed! She couldn’t get the pin through the wool of his jacket so he helped her tuck the paper under his lapel.”

Your face breaks into a wry smile.

“I sometimes feel as if we see the world through the same pair of eyes—only we’re wearing different glasses.”

“Talking about glasses, I couldn’t read the labels. Were you meant to be a bookcase?”

You give me a roguish wink.

“Ha! I was Fiction!”

The prospect of another war looms closer. Julian’s letters start to arrive. In contrast to his expansive, measured, often self-reflective writings from China, these are terse, decisive, and give the impression of being dispatched at tremendous speed. I arrange them on the mantelpiece like a charm. I have the superstitious notion that the longer the line grows, the safer Julian will be.

I invite Wogan to visit. Though his arm is still heavily bandaged, I press him to tell me about the fighting. He describes the waiting, the bursts of frenzied activity, the almost casual attitude to death.

I stop writing and stare out the sitting room window. The swallows are wheeling in erratic patterns overhead. I take off my glasses and rub my aching forehead. What I am about to relate requires all my courage.

This is my picture of Julian’s final day. Waking early, the sun already hot, and taking advantage of a lull in the fighting to fill in some of the potholes that obstruct the route to the front. Diving for cover as a group of enemy planes appear, their gunfire whipping the road into dust. A shell exploding near the ambulance where Julian has taken refuge. The shock as a fragment of casing sears into his flesh. The attempt to write to me, three hastily scribbled words on an empty page of his notebook.

When the telephone call comes I cannot take in what the voice is telling me. The blood pounds in my ears, my breath heaves in painful gasps. After that, everything is black. It is as if the water has closed round me at last.

Once again, you save me. You, sitting by my bed, stringing your words. I cling to them as to a lifeline. I cannot think, I cannot speak, I can only listen. At first, I do not understand what your phrases mean. Then, one evening, I think I see Julian’s dead body laid out on an operating table and I turn to you screaming. You hold me tight in your arms. The world is a work of art, I hear you say, and though there is no God we are parts of the design.

I glimpse the hand with its contraption. I sense that as one of us surrenders, the other must fight. I witness the blood the struggle causes. And in the distance, like a chimera, I spy a brilliantly colored, free-floating balloon.

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