Free Twelve Drummers Drumming by C. C. Benison Page B

glassy-eyed at his handiwork.
    “Shall we go in?” Tom asked.
    “Oh … I doubt Celia’s back from her morning ride.” To Tom’s faint look of surprise he added, “I forgot to mention you were coming. Celia thinks it’s best if we all keep to our routines. I expect she’s right. I would be feeling a bit cooped-up inside.”
    Tom glanced at Thornridge House through the almost imperceptible humid veil that softened its outlines. Certainly the largest coop in the village or vicinity by a long chalk, but he understood the sentiment. After Lisbeth’s death, when family had descended upon him and Miranda, he had walked and walked and walked all over Bristol.
    “Bring your bike. We’ll go round to the pool garden. I don’t think you’ve seen the back of the house before. We should be able to hear Celia when she comes back.
    “This was a tennis court in the Northmores’ day,” Colm continued when they’d emerged from the east gardens into an expanse of lawn that dipped below the pergola at the south façade of the house. Cut into the middle was an oblong of untroubled water dotted with white water lilies, its stone corners softened by mauve irises. On each of the long sides was an iron bench, simple in design, but with sufficient length to seat St. Nicholas’s choir, if need should ever be.
    “It’s beautiful, serene,” Tom commented, leaning his bike against the grilled back of the nearest bench.
    “Yes, I find it … comforting. At times like this.” Colm settled on the bench and dropped the shears on the grass at his feet. Tom flicked him a worried glance.
    “I don’t think Phillip much approved,” Colm added, removing his hat and squinting at the sunlight glistening off the water.
    “Of what?”
    “Of taking out the tennis court.”
    “I’m not surprised.” Tom smiled. Edwin Northmore, Phillip’s father, had sold Thornridge House for taxes in the 1950s, and though Phillip had had a successful postwar career in London as a bank director,he had not been successful enough to buy it back. Nonetheless, Phillip retained a proprietorial interest.
    “He sort of harrumphed when I showed it to him. The old boy’s not much for change, is he? Speaking of which, how is he?”
    “I haven’t heard. I’ll be going up to the hospital this afternoon.” Tom joined Colm on the bench. “More to the point, how are you?”
    Colm raised his eyes to the sky. Tom followed his gaze. Above them a flight of swallows circled into a shimmer of white cloud. “Oh, stunned, I think,” he replied after a moment. “Deeply sad.” He glanced over at Tom, who could see that his eyes were rimmed with purplish shadows. “You would know, wouldn’t you?”
    “Yes … although—”
    “Time heals all wounds?”
    “I was hoping not to be banal.” In the wake of Lisbeth’s death, every platitude had been fed into his ears, usually by the well-meaning, embarrassed to be proximate to one with such a loss. He could do nothing but accept their awkward kindnesses, but he had learned this: In grief so deep, sentimentality has no home. “I was going to say that the awful agony does subside, I’ve found—perhaps it’s a little like those half-lives we learned about in science class.”
    “One day the residual half will be tiny.”
    “Perhaps. Though I haven’t got there yet.”
    “I doubt I shall.” Colm plucked absently at one of the strands of cotton taut across his knee. “And your parents, tragically, too, I recall.”
    “I was only a baby. I have no recollection.”
    Colm gave him an assessing gaze. “Of course. I remember it, though. I think I was about eight or nine. It was a little like when Diana died. The whole nation was caught unawares for a moment. Sorry, I shouldn’t go on about this.”
    “That’s all right.” Tom shrugged. The grieving often preferred to talk of other things. “For me, it’s something in a press clipping, really.”
    He thought back to the newspaper and magazine stories