"I would like to show it to you." She felt the smile arrive, which it did completely and without asking permission in the way of smiles that are not performing anything. "Then I will come in June," she said. He held her hand in the October morning beside his private pond, and Dioynes sat on his boot, and the beeches on the south ridge were copper and gold against the pale sky, and the thing that had been forming since a woman walked into his pond with bare feet, and no embarrassment about it, stood in the morning air between them, fully assembled at last. He did not say anything else for a long moment.
Neither did she. Some things do not require additional words once the essential ones have been said. He was learning this, she thought, or perhaps he had always known it, and had simply not had occasion to use it in some time. The letter arrived in Brook Street on a Thursday, nine days after she returned to London. It was formal—correctly, predictably formal.
The letter of a man who had warned her it would be formal, and had then written exactly that. The address was precise. The salutation was correct. The first two paragraphs contained information about estate matters in Wiltshire that were entirely accurate and entirely beside the point. Between the formal lines, in the spaces where his actual self was visible through the architecture of proper correspondence, there was something else, a mention that Henderson had expressed a strong opinion about the east wall that she would, he thought, find interesting if she were ever inclined to hear it.
A brief and technically irrelevant observation that the pond had been unusually quiet since Monday. A postscript—the postscript was where he had clearly stopped managing, that said only, "Dioynes, I have been informed by Constance, has been telling fortunes in the Hullbrook kitchen garden." "Henderson considers this unlikely. I have no firm opinion." She wrote back in the space of one afternoon. She sent the letter before Prudence could intervene.
He replied in four days, then three, then two. By the end of November, the formality was losing ground in the second paragraph rather than the fifth, and by December it had retreated almost entirely to the salutation, where it clung with the dignity of things that have been correct for a long time and do not know how to stop. By January, the letters were simply Ambrose, which was more than she had hoped for in October, and meant considerably more for being him. She returned in June. The peonies on the south wall were deep rose and cream, the particular bloom that requires years and delivers everything, and the June light on the wall was exactly as he had described, warm and slanted, and the kind of light that makes you understand why someone looked at an east wall on a cold October morning, and decided to begin.