But does what you just told me change anything? I could still be the instrument of breaking up a marriage, even if now yours is one in name only.
Who knows how much your wife comprehends? She may not seem to be living in the present, but she may at times, perhaps more often than anyone thinks, be just as she was. She may be able to understand her own words and emotions and those of the man she married and for whom she still may feel love.
Barbara did not know how much of her thoughts to tell Stephen. She sensed that he already knew them.
She hardly realized it, but by then they had both lighted up cigarettes and were smoking. She had never seem him smoke before, but believed he had taken up the habit because of the war, to help him relax. Since coming to London, it was why she, too, had begun to smoke.
She had been wondering about something else. "Do you have a picture of her?"
Hesitating for a moment, Stephen drew out his billfold and took out a snapshot. The young woman Barbara saw in the picture was in her twenties, beautiful and dark-haired, with a vitality and joy of life in her smile as she stood astride a bicycle.
"It was taken the year before her illness. I prefer to think of her as she was."
Barbara thought he had finished explaining to her. She waited, to be sure, but when he did not say more, she tried to put into words all she had absorbed from him.
"I believe I understand now, about your marriage, unless there is more you want to tell me."
He did not respond, so she went on.
"I'm terribly sorry for you both. But it really doesn't change anything, does it. You're still married and we both still want to be faithful, to others as well as to ourselves."
She wanted to cry, from the hopelessness she felt, and at the same time the desire for him that she was no longer sure she could restrain herself from feeling.
"We both need more time, to think things out. I certainly do, after learning more about your wife and your marriage."
"But we don't have much more time," he reminded her.
"Then we have to make the best use of what time we have.
A lot of happiness can be crammed into a few hours or days, in wartime. A lot of mistakes, too."
Stephen looked as if he had been doing a lot of thinking about his marriage and her, too.