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[August 3rd 1958]
The train was now travelling at speed. The sideways gentle oscillation of the coaches blended rhythmically with the thundering forward surge of the train itself. It was hot. The men working in the fields were bare to the waist. We could see them toiling over the vast rolling expanses of cornland that the train was now passing through.
Francesca sat opposite to me, looking as usual cool, neat, beautifully turned out, with her sweetly smiling face. She studied the menu, and in a moment or two the waiter came up to us, and we ordered our cocktails, which arrived in glasses already frosted with the contrast of their contents and the warm, humid air of this hot summer's day.
The fields disappeared as we approached the outskirts of a town, and soon we were threading our way through the network of rails and points that made up Amiens station. Amiens – so that explained it. Some twenty minutes earlier we had passed a peculiar configuration of the ground about which Francesca had questioned me. I had recognized at once the signs of shell-holes overgrown with weed. They pock-marked the ground round about some marshy pools, where the willow trees hung green and graceful in the bright sunlight. Still they seemed to be ineradicable, to be very little older than the shell-holes had been in the war, where one marvelled at the speed with which they were covered up with weed and willowherb in the period of the war itself. What surprised now was that so little further disguise had taken place.
As the train sped through the complex of lines, I said to Francesca that it seemed strange that it was almost forty years ago to the day when I had last been here, and in such very different circumstances. It
was a dream for her to be sitting opposite to me – a girl so beautiful, so loving, so near to a dream that I had always thought could never, never come to pass for me.
The train, freed of the marshalling yards, had settled down into the steady rhythm of its speedy rush towa