Eleanor

The wife of Simon and the mother of two children (Caroline and Hubert), Eleanor walks through the garden chatting with her husband who tells her of his failed marriage proposal to Lily years before in Kew Garden. Eleanor remembers herself as a little girl, painting by the lake with five other girls. As Eleanor painted, a "grey haired woman with a wart on her nose" suddenly kissed her on the back of the neck, a precious kiss that became Eleanor's "mother of all [her] kisses all [her] life." When her husband asks whether she minds if he talks about the past, she responds that she does not mind and asks, "'Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees . . . one's...