No, he replied, looking away. I’m afraid they’re not ready for this. Everything has happened so quickly, and they are terribly old-fashioned.
I took him at his word. Why shouldn’t I? At the time I had no reason at all to doubt Simon Fitzwilliam, other than the preposterous accusations of his envious brother. The opposite. I had a hundred reasons to trust him. Hadn’t he rushed straight to the private hospital in Hampstead where I had lived since Christmas, immediately after his demobilization in January? And he’d hardly left my bedside since, except to make the necessary arrangements for our future together, the mysterious errands about which he refused to reveal any details. He had been devoted and attentive. He had seen to my every comfort. He took me on long walks to build my strength, he devised exercises for my eyes and my brain and worked me patiently through them, until I could read long chapters and solve puzzles without breaking down in fatigue and frustration. Until the sap began to rise inside me at last, and run in my veins.
“You’re back,” Simon said a few weeks earlier, as we collapsed laughing against a tree after some shared joke, I forget the subject.
I wasn’t altogether back, not quite. I felt sometimes as if I had changed, in some small yet fundamental way. My memory, from time to time, played tricks on me—not forgetting things, exactly, just scenes going in and out of focus, so that I couldn’t rely on my own recollection, like I used to, which unsettled me. I thought I had lost some tiny spark of defiance, some fraction of my independent will, when my head shattered Hunka Tin’s windshield last August.
But Simon’s will had filled the void. He had poured his strength into my broken body and molded me back together, and he had sealed my recomposition yesterday, when he slid a slim gold band over the knuckle of the fourth finger of my left hand and said, in a voice packed tight with sincerity, not missing a single word: With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
How could I possibly question him, after a speech like that?
We drove out of London along the Richmond Road, while the sky drizzled delicately upon the roof of Simon’s battered two-seater Wolseley. He had bought it last month from an old Harrow friend of his, an infantry officer who had lost both legs at Passchendaele and no longer needed a motorcar—or at least the kind of motorcar you drove yourself—and the gears ground noisily from disuse. The terraces passed by, gray and wilting, separating eventually into semidetached houses and then to boxy suburban villas. We kept a comfortable silence, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the roar of the motor, and I believe I dozed off once or twice, exhausted by the wedding and everything that followed, by too much champagne and too little sleep. In my haze, I felt the car slow down and turn, and I raised my head to the hoary English sight of a half-timbered public house, dripping rain from the eaves.
“Lunch,” said Simon.
That night he talked about his parents.
“It was a love match, actually. They were most spectacularly in love, or so I’m told. Isn’t that strange? One never imagines one’s parents in that condition.”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”
“Of course, the trouble was, they never really loved anything else half so well as each other. I often thought that there wasn’t room for another person between them.”
“Not even you and your brother and sister?”
“No. That’s the trouble with devotion, you see. They were always off on romantic escapades. They left us with nannies, Samuel and me, when we were three months old. Took off to Borneo for a year, to dive for pearls.”
“Dive for pearls?”
“Oh, it was good fun, no doubt. Some friend of my father’s—it was Lydia’s father, in fact—he lured them out with the promise of adventure and riches. You have to learn how to hold your breath properly and that sort of thing, and I doubt there would have been a surfeit of clothing. Terribly improper for my mother, of course, back in those days, though that was part of the allure for her. She was always a bit daring and headstrong. Anyway, it was all marvelously exotic—I’ve seen the odd photograph—but of course you don’t want babies along on that kind of expedition, and once we were out of sight and reach, you see, they more or less forgot our existence. Like a pair of pets left behind. I’m not at all certain they would have come back altogether, if Mummy hadn’t gotten pregnant with Clara. I think she was cross about that, actually. Babies were such a nuisance to her. Father was certainly cross. I remember how black-faced he was, when they returned.”
Simon lay on his back, smoking, his head propped by a pillow. We had stopped for the night at some sort of seaside village outside of Exeter, dreary with rain, and after a tasteless supper under the surveillance of a lean, red-faced landlady dressed in faded black bombazine from another century, we had raced each other up the stairs to our room in the rafters, dominated by an ancient, creaking bed frame that could have left the poor woman in no doubt of our entertainment. Afterward, Simon had rummaged through the luggage and produced a bottle of brandy—liberated last autumn from an abandoned German staff billet in the Argonne, he told me—which he now drank in small, disciplined sips from a tumbler on the bedside table.
“Did you mind?” I asked.
“I don’t remember. I was only a baby. I should add that my grandparents looked after us as well—my father’s parents—so it wasn’t as if we were surrounded only by professionals. I was awfully cut up when Granny died. She was great fun. Gave us far too many sweets. Then Mummy came home and had Clara, and I don’t think they ventured any farther than the Continent after that, at least until I went away to school. But the unavoidable fact is that they were bored by home and hearth, that’s all. The inconvenience of children. And Mummy never really liked Cornwall anyway. Too cold and rainy, even in August, and anyway she had loads of blunt in the beginning, she could do what she wanted. A Home Counties heiress. Granddad and Grandmama thought she was throwing herself away on Father, because we’re a third-rate family, really, no title or anything like that. Just a damp pile of stones near the sea. A few neglected acres of citrus in America. Until the money ran out, why, you couldn’t keep them there longer than a week.”
I turned on my side to face his profile. “It won’t be like that for us.”
“Won’t it? We are terribly in love, after all. Just as they were.”
“But you’re not like that. You’re going to be a wonderful father. You were born to give life to others.”
He reached for the ashtray. “I hope so.”
“You’re melancholy again.”
“Oh, it will pass, never fear. Where the devil did I leave my cigarettes?” He heaved himself from the bed and found the battered case on the floor next to his discarded shirt.
I sat up and held out my arms. “Come back.”