He followed her like an angry, frightened child. How could he know what she knew? How could he see what she saw? He was where he had always been, while she had gone on definitely into something else. And there were no words she could have explained in. If she had tried, all she could have found to say, with perplexed brows, would have been, ‘But I know.’
She took him into the garden. They passed her bedroom door on the way, and he knew it was hers for it was half open, and the room hadn’t been done yet, and the little slippers he had kissed a hundred times were lying kicked off on the carpet, the slippers that had belonged to the real Catherine—or rather, as this one was now insisting, to the artificial Catherine, but anyhow to his Catherine.
For a moment he was afraid she would take him in there. Ice seemed to slide down his spine at the thought. But she walked past it as if it had nothing to do with either of them, and then he was offended.
Out in the garden it was easier to breathe. He couldn’t, in that public place, with the chance of a gardener appearing at any moment, take her in his arms, so he didn’t feel quite such a scoundrel for not doing it; and walking by her side and not looking at her, but just listening to her voice, he felt less lost; for the voice was the voice of Catherine, and as long as he didn’t look at her he could believe she was still there. It was like, in the night, hearing the blessed reassurance of one’s mother talking, when one was little, and frightened, and alone.
She took him through the garden and out by the wicket-gate into the park, where rabbits were scuttling across the dewy grass, leaving dark ribbons along its silver, and the bracken, webbed with morning gossamer, was already turning brown. And all the way she talked, and all the way he listened in silence, his eyes fixed straight in front of him.
She told him everything, from that moment of their honeymoon when, from loving, she had fallen in love, and instantly began to be terrified of looking old, and her desperate, grotesque efforts to stay young for him, and his heart, as he heard her voice talking of that time, went to wax within him, and he had to gaze very steadily at the view ahead lest, turning to throw his arms round Catherine, his sweetheart, his angel love, he should see she wasn’t there, but only a ghost was there with her voice and eyes, and then he mightn’t be able to help bursting out crying.
‘Is this far enough away from the poor baby?’ she asked, stopping at an oak-tree, whose huge exposed roots were worn with the numbers of times she had sat on them in past years during the long, undisturbed summer afternoons of her placid first marriage. ‘You know,’ she added, sitting down on the gnarled roots, ‘he’s the most beautiful little baby, and is going to comfort all poor Stephen’s despair.’
‘But he isn’t going to comfort mine,’ said Christopher, standing with his eyes fixed on the distant view.
She was silent. Then she said, ‘Is it as bad as that, Chris?’
‘No, no,’ he said quickly, his back to her, ‘I didn’t mean that. You’ll get well again, and then we’ll——’