“I tell you,” he said, “school can forever blight a fellow’s life. Whoever would choose to haveHamletrattling about in his head for a lifetime?”
Kitty and George Greenfield played a duet on the pianoforte. They were not very good, but what they lacked in skill and coordination, they made up for in merriment. Everyone ended up laughing and applauding with far more enthusiasm than the performance strictly deserved.
Winifred recited William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” It contained her favorite lines of poetry:
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
The daffodil was her favorite flower, though perhaps it had recently been challenged by the daisy. Before starting, she touched her hand to the daisy brooch pinned to her dress.
What a lovely evening it had turned out to be. But…there wasonly one more daybefore the long separation from Nicholas.
—
Winifred and Nicholas did not go to the birthday party, which was primarily for children anyway. Instead, they went into the courtyard, where they spent the afternoon strolling in the paved cloisters and sitting in the rose arbor. They had tea brought out to them there.
They had been busy during the morning with both families, waving Bertrand Lamarr on his way home from the terrace and then the Taylors, Matthew’s family, from the cottage and the smithy in the village. But the afternoon was for them alone.
Soon they would be apart for a while, for almost five months, in fact. But during that time there was a wedding to be planned and a house in the country to be searched for and purchased.
The wedding was to be at Bath Abbey just before Christmas. Nicholas suggested it. It was where the Cunninghams had married and where Winifred’s life as their much-cherished daughter had begun. Her face lit up at the suggestion.
“Christmas has always been a very special time with my family,” she said. “Will we be able to stay to celebrate with them?”
“It is why I suggested Christmastime,” he said, setting one arm about her waist as they walked.
“Such a long way into the future,” she said. “Have you heard of special licenses, Nicholas? I believe they can be procured in London. Perhaps—”
“You temptress, Win,” Nicholas said, cutting her off. “A very firmnoto that. You are almost irresistible, you know? Almost, but not quite. I want you to have a wedding you will always remember and one I will always remember. And weddings are, or ought to be, about families as well as just the bride and groom. They are about the love that binds two people together, but also the two people to their own families and each other’s. I do not want just to marry you. I want towedyou. Is there a difference? To me there is, but—”
“Yes, there is,” she said with an audible sigh. “And I want that too. I want to wed you in Bath Abbey. And I want everyone there. Will they all come? But they surely will. My family all love me, and yours loves you. Christmas it will be, then. But how am I to live between now and then?”
“As you usually do, by inhaling and then exhaling, one breath after another,” he said. A trick he had learned during the wars. “One breath at a time and one day at a time. Five months does sound like forever, though, does it not? In the meantime, you must dress hunt, and I will house hunt.”
“How trivial you make me sound,” she said. “As though choosing a dress is theonlything I will need to do. I daresay I will be so rushed off my feet that I will have to beg you to postpone the wedding until Easter.”
He laughed. “Please do not,” he said.
They lapsed into silence for a few minutes while he contemplated almost five months without a sight of her.
“I will write every day,” he told her.
“Is that possible?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows.
“In my experience, men are not letter writers,” she said. “I do not picture you as being one.”
“What do you picture meas, then?” he asked her.
“I will write to you every day too,” she said without answering the question.
He stopped to pull her into his arms. He touched his forehead to hers and kissed her—cruel lips to soft, slightly trembling lips. He smiled against them, amused by the image of himself as some sort of ruthless, dangerous rake.
