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Later, smiling and waving goodbye as her ship pulls away, Sidney thinks, Whatever we all might have started as, the war left us realists. He isn’t convinced that’s true. But the phrase is snappy and plausible, which some days is enough for a publisher. The difference between the width of the Channel and the Atlantic was a mere accident of geography and hardly material to the ways the life he’d known would change once Juliet was married.
—
A day after he hears the news, he gives Juliet away in a registry office at exactly two in the afternoon. She wears a smart new suit the pale colour of early morning skies.
Her face, looking at Dawsey, is incandescent.
Sidney is braced for this. (He has never quite unbraced himself, not after hearing the news of her previous engagement over the wavering telephone connection as his heart sank at her hesitant tone.)
He cannot precisely recall first meeting Juliet among the blur of his sister’s friends. Sometimes, beginnings are like that, slow and gentle until you find yourself in the middle before you realise there was anything to begin at all.
Endings, too. Sometimes.
Juliet had promised him a book, of course, and he knows she's got it in her, but she has her own story to live too on that island surrounded by a wild, grey sea.
—
Mrs. Burns slides a paper next to his elbow while Sidney ponders a list of rejected line edits returned with a twelve-page defense. He reaches for his scotch and finds a pen in his hand instead.
The phone rings. He answers absently while seeing what on earth he is putting his name to, even as he’s already signing.
“—ney! Oh, Sidney. You’ll never believe—”
“What’s that, darling?” he asks, still caught up in checking the terms, and then pauses. A blot of ink forms at the end of his forgotten signature. “You know, I didn’t think the connection from your island could get any worse.”
“—house is marvellous. Robins nested in the chimney though. We couldn’t start a fire until—”
Another wave of static breaks across Juliet’s voice. Sidney rests the handset between his ear and shoulder to light a cigarette.
He pulls in a slow lungful of smoke, listening.
—
He makes a careless promise to visit, which Juliet takes too much to heart.
So eventually Sidney braves the rocky Channel crossing, bothered less by the motion of the waves than by the ceaseless chattering of holidaymakers.
"Not a single reader among the whole lot, I'd venture," he complains to Juliet as they jostle along the island's roads. Seagulls turn above them with mournful cries.
"It's just as well. The Literary Society is a very discerning group."
"Don't I know it. I'm honored that I've received permission to sit in tonight."
"As if they weren't all dying to meet you."
Of that Sidney is less certain, given all she wrote of wearing down their resistance.
But before he can reply, a stone house comes into view, half-hidden behind trees touched with the first reds and golds of autumn.
He glances over at Juliet in time to catch her beatific smile.
—
Juliet sits one step down from him, watching Kit play in the violet-coloured twilight.
He smokes and the old quiet settles between them.
Kit runs up with a fistful of gathered dandelions. Juliet bends forward, listening to the tumble of words as she lets the child tuck the yellow flowers into her hair.
The child rushes off.
“You love her like she’s yours.”
“She is, in every way that matters. I have the strangest feeling she always was mine, long before I met her. And she always will be.” She reaches over for his teacup, which he surrenders as a battle lost years ago. Her hands curl around the sides for warmth like it was still the winter of ‘44 and they were all freezing before she takes a sip. “Some people just belong to each other, Sidney.”
He takes a drag at his cigarette.
Quietly he says, “I know.”