to wander among the graves, looking at tombstones made barely legible by the ravages of time. The yard was overgrown with weeds and grass, dampened by morning mist.
Gravestones bent into thick vegetation. Moss flourished on surfaces that never saw sun, and trees sheltered final resting places of people long forgotten.
A curious group of twisting Italian cypresses arched over a few toppled tombstones some distance from the church. Their contortions were mystifying, oddly humanoid, as if they were attempting to protect the graves beneath them. Intrigued, he walked in their direction and saw her.
How completely like her to have rolled up the legs of her faded blue jeans, to have removed her shoes and plunged barefoot into the tall, damp growth so as to capture the graves in the best angle and light. How like her as well to be utterly oblivious to her surroundings: oblivious to the streak of mud that snaked from ankle to calf, to the torn crimson leaf that had somehow become tangled in her hair, to the fact that he stood less than ten yards away and drank in her every movement and longed quite hopelessly for her to be again what she once had been in his life.
The low ground fog hid and revealed in alternate patches. The early sunlight weakly dappled the stones. An inquisitive bird watched with bright eyes from a grave nearby. He was only dimly aware of this, but he knew that with her camera she would capture it all.
He looked for St. James. Surely the man would be sitting somewhere nearby, fondly watching his wife work. But he was nowhere in sight. She was very much alone.
He felt immediately as if the church had betrayed him with its early promise of comfort and peace.
It's no good, Deb, he thought as he watched her.
Nothing makes it go away. I want you to leave him. Betray him. Come back to me. It's where you belong.
She looked up, brushed her hair off her face, and saw him. He knew from her expression that he might as well have said everything aloud. She read it at once.
"Oh, Tommy."
Of course she wouldn't pretend, wouldn't fill the awkward moment with amusing chatter that, Helen-like, would serve to get them through the encounter. Instead she bit her lip, looking very much as if he had struck her, and turned back to her tripod, making unnecessary adjustments.
He walked to her side. "I'm so sorry," he said. She continued to fumble uselessly with her equipment, her head bent, her hair hiding her face. "I can't get past it. I try to see my way clear, but it's just no good." Her face was averted. She seemed to be examining the pattern of the hills. "I tell myself that it's ended the right way for us all, but I don't believe that. I still want you, Deb."
She turned to him then, her face quite white, her eyes gleaming with tears. "You can't. You've got to let that go."
"My mind accepts that, but nothing else does." A tear escaped and descended her cheek.
He put out his hand to wipe it away but remembered himself and dropped his arm to his side. "I woke up this morning so desperate to make love with you again that I thought if I didn't get out of the room at once I should begin clawing at the walls in pure, adolescent frustration. I thought the church would be a balm to me. What I didn't think was that you would be wandering round its graveyard at dawn." He looked at her equipment. "What are you doing here? Where's Simon?"
"He's still at the hall. I...I woke up early and came out to see the village."
It didn't ring true. "Is he ill?" he asked sharply.
She scanned the branches of the cypresses. A shallowness in Simon's breathing had immediately awakened her shortly before six. He was lying so still that for one horrifying moment she thought he was dying. He was drawing in each breath carefully, and she knew all at once that his only thought had been not to awaken her. But when she reached for his hand, his fingers closed bruisingly round her own. "Let me get your medicine," she whispered, and had done so, and then had watched his determined face as he battled to be master of the pain. "Can you...for an hour, my love?" It was the part of his life that brooked no companion. It was the part of his life she