Coming out of the shop, Madden saw Helen Black well sitting in her car in the shade of the chestnut tree. Two women stood with folded arms chatting to her, but they moved off as he approached. She accepted, with a smile, his offer of a cigarette. When he bent over to light it, he caught a whiff of jasmine, reminding him of the evening he had gone to her house.
'I don't know whether it's unusual,' he began, 'but you are the first woman doctor I've met.'
'Not unusual at all. Twenty years ago there were barely a dozen of us in the whole country. Of course, the war helped.' She drew thoughtfully on her cigarette.
'It's terrible to say that, but it's true.' She glanced up at him with a smile. 'My grandfather was a gentleman, you know. That's to say he did nothing.
When Father came down from Cambridge and said he wanted to be a doctor the old boy nearly had a fit. He thought it was almost as bad as going into trade. And the funny thing was, Father was just the same. 'You can't,' he said. 'You're a woman.' But we got over that.'
Sunlight filtering through the chestnut leaves touched her hair with gold. He already regretted the moment of their parting. He wondered if he would ever see her again.
'I took over the practice after the war. Most of the villagers seem happy enough with the change. That is, apart from one or two.'
She was smiling broadly and he saw she was looking at Stackpole as he approached from the direction of the pub.
'How's my patient, Will?' she called out.
'Sicker than when you saw him, Miss Helen.' The constable tapped his jacket pocket. 'I've got his statement, sir, signed and sealed.'
'We think the man we're after came through here on a motorcycle,' Madden explained to her. 'It's a start.'
'Don't wait for me, Miss Helen,' Stackpole said.
'Are you sure, Will?'
'I've still got Gladys Maberley's statement to write out, and then I want to have a word with Fred. Get him calmed down. The post van will be through in an hour. I'll get a lift back to Highfield.'
Madden shook his hand. 'Good work, Constable.
You'll get those statements off to Guildford?'
'First thing in the morning, sir.' He touched his helmet and was gone.
Madden walked around to the passenger side. She reached over and opened the door.
'You don't have to go back to London right away, do you?'
It sounded more like a statement than a question, and Madden shook his head.
'Come back to the house and have lunch with me.'
She smiled at him as he climbed in and then, unaccountably, laughed.
'What is it?' he asked. And when she didn't reply, 'Why are you laughing?'
'I'm ashamed to tell you.' She started the car. 'I was thinking about my locum falling off his horse.'
She seated him in the arbour on the terrace with a glass of beer.
'I'll be back in a minute.'
Madden looked out over the sunlit garden at the woods beyond, rising like a green wave. The heat of the day was still building. He sipped his beer. It was a moment of peace, rare in his life, and he wanted to arrest it and clasp it to him: to stop time in its tracks.
He heard a noise and looked round, expecting to see her. But it was Mary, the maid. She was carrying a wicker hamper and a plaid blanket.
'Good afternoon, sir.'
'Hullo, Mary.'
She smiled at him and put down the basket with the blanket on top of it, then went back inside the house, but returned in a moment with a pair of cushions.
'I thought we'd have a picnic'
Helen Blackwell stepped from the doorway on to the terrace. She had shed her skirt and blouse of the morning and was wearing a cool chemise-type dress of white cotton. Her hair, freed from the ribbon she used to tie it back, lay on her shoulders. Madden saw that her legs were bare.
'Thank you, Mary,' she said to the maid. 'That will be all.'
She picked up the cushions and the blanket. Madden assumed the burden of the hamper. Together they went down the steps from the terrace. As they started across the lawn the black pointer he remembered from his first visit rose from a pool of shadow beneath a walnut tree and joined in the procession behind them.
They reached the orchard at the bottom of the lawn and passed beneath plum trees heavy with sun-ripened fruit. The buzz of wasps sounded loud in the dappled shade. A stone wall marked the boundary of the garden. She opened the gate and let him through, then closed it quickly before the dog could follow them.
'Not you, Molly.'
The animal whined in disappointment.
'Stay!' she commanded, without explanation. She smiled at him. 'You can't come on a picnic dressed like that. At least take your jacket off.'
He did as she said, then stripped off his tie as well and draped both garments over the green wooden gate.
They were close to the edge of the shallow stream.
On the other side, the woods came down almost to the water, but where they were a carpet of meadow grass extended for a short distance downstream. He followed her until their way was blocked by a thicket of holly bushes.
'This is the tricky bit,' she said. She slipped off her shoes and stepped down from the bank into the stream. 'Be careful, the stones are slippery.' She moved slowly through the ankle-deep water, holding the cushions and blanket in a bundle above her head.
When she was past the bushes she climbed up on the bank again.
Madden took off his shoes and socks and put them on top of the hamper. He rolled up his trousers and stepped down into the cool water. She was waiting on the bank, hand outstretched, to take the basket from him.
'I used to come here with my brother, Peter, when we were children. It was our secret place.'
They were on a small patch of grass enclosed by bushes. Close to the bank, water-lilies tugged weakly at their stems in the faint current of the stream.
'He was the pilot, wasn't he?'
'You remembered…' Her deep blue gaze brushed his. 'That was such a terrible night. All I could think of was how we'd been young together — Lucy and Peter and David and I — and now they were all dead.
And then I looked into your eyes and saw that you must have been in the war, too, and I couldn't stop thinking about all those dead… the ghosts we live with.'
He wanted to speak, but could find no words, and he looked away.
She studied his face for a moment, then began to spread the blanket and cushions on the grass. Madden retrieved his shoes and socks. About to put them on, he was arrested by the sight of her sitting beside him. She was leaning on one hand, her legs tucked to the side, looking down, her face hidden by the fall of thick, honey- coloured hair. In the stillness that enveloped them the whirr of a pigeon's wings sounded loud overhead. Not knowing what to do or say, he unfastened the sleeve of his shirt and began to roll it up.
'Shrapnel.' She spoke, and he felt the touch of her fingers on his forearm where the scars were spread like strewn coins.
'I worked in an Army hospital for a year. I know all the wounds.' Her fingers stayed on his skin. Her touch went through him like fire. 'And that scar on your forehead…' She took her hand off his arm and raised it to his head, sliding her fingers under the lock of hair that fell across his brow and running them gently across the skin. 'That's most likely a shell fragment, too.'
Madden began to tremble. Her face was close, but their eyes didn't meet. Her glance was fixed on his forehead. He saw a faint line of sweat on her upper lip and the golden hairs on her forearm. He put his arm around
