Old-age pensioners sipped Turkish coffee in a cafe advertising pastries from France. It was a pleasant place. It made him relax, and it almost made him turn his music off.
Up ahead, he saw her begin to stir. She closed her A-Z after carefully turning down the corner of a page. She had nothing with her but her shoulder bag, and she tucked the A-Z into this as she made for the door. He noticed they were coming to the end of the High Street and its shops. A wrought-iron railing atop a brick revetment suggested they had reached a park.
It seemed odd to him that she'd come all this way by bus in order to visit a park, when there was a park - or perhaps more accurately a garden - not two hundred metres from where she worked. True, the day was wretchedly hot and beneath the trees it would be cool and even he looked forward to the cool after that ride in the moving furnace. But if cool had been her intention all along, she could merely have gone into St. Paul's parish church, which she sometimes did in her lunch hour, reading the tablets on the walls or just sitting near the communion rail to gaze at the altar and the painting above it. Madonna and child, this painting was. He knew that much although - despite the voices - he did not think himself a religious man.
He waited until the last moment to get off the bus. He'd placed his instrument on the floor between his feet, and because he'd watched her so closely as she headed in the direction of the park, he nearly forgot to take it along. That would have been a disastrous mistake, and because he'd come so close to making it, he removed his earphones to silence the music. The flame is come is come is here went round in his head immediately when the music ceased. I call on the birds to feast on the fallen. He blinked hard and shook his head roughly.
There was a gate of wrought iron fully open, at the top of four steps leading into the park.
Before mounting these, she approached a notice board. Behind glass, a map of the place was posted. She studied this, but only briefly, as if verifying something that she already knew. Then she went inside the gate and in an instant she was swallowed up by the leafy trees.
He hurried to follow. He glanced at the notice board - paths wandering hither and yon, a building indicated, words, a monument - but he did not see the name of this park, so it was only when he was on the trail leading into its depths that he first realised he was in a cemetery. It was unlike any cemetery he'd ever seen, for ivy and creepers choked its gravestones and cloaked its monuments at the bases of which brambles and campion offered fruit and flowers. People buried here had been long forgotten, as had been the cemetery itself. If the tombstones had once been incised with the names of the dead, the carving had been worn away by weather and by the encroachment of nature, seeking to reclaim what had been in this spot long before any man had contemplated burying his dead here.
He didn't like the place but that couldn't be helped. He was her guardian - yes, yes, you begin to understand! - and she was his to protect and that meant he had a duty to perform. But he could hear the beginning of a wind howling in his head and I am in charge of Tartarus emerged from the gale. Then listen just listen and We are seven and We stand at his feet, and that was when he fumbled about, shoved the earphones back on, and raised the volume as high as it would go until he could hear nothing but the cello again and then the violins.
The path he walked on was studded with stones, uneven and dusty, and along its edges the crust of last year's leaves still lay, less thick here than upon the ground beneath the trees that towered over his head. These made the cemetery cool and its atmosphere fragrant and he thought if he could concentrate on that - the feel of the air and the scent of green growth - the voices wouldn't matter so much. So he breathed in deep