“Because I’ve been thinking of the past. I’ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married . . . Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?”
“Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, . . . one’s happiness, one’s reality?”
“For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly—”
“For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I’d ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn’t paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only—it was so precious—the kiss of an old grey-haired
