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Twinkling eyes, fingertips, eyebrows. Fleeting seasons. One world and another.
    They were astonished at their newfound powers. Prick a newborn stone, smooth as the forehead of time, and fly across chasms of sensibility and insensibility.
    And a tendency arose in da Silva’s paintings—as if his misgiving was theirs—for winter to extend beyond each envelope they wore, or autumn to appear suddenly in a carpet of leaves, convicted or bruised in a flash for natural indolence, and for the trees to part into the sculpture of a horseman riding magnificently and motionlessly into a falling horizon that seemed to embrace the Serpentine.
    Thus there was summer around them impressed with the latent bruises of winter. There was the judgement of autumn upon them led by a bridle of fate. There was the smitten light they wore of refinements of water and fire. They paused in the shadow of the beautiful trees close to the Round Pond. A hubbub arose, an outcry, a rushing of legs and arms that seemed one with the harness of expedition they had witnessed.
    A crowd was gathering at the edge of the pond which stretched a hundred yards or two from bank to bank.
    Francis and Julia quickened their pace. At last they stood at the edge of the water and saw nothing but their own mountainous shadow there on cloud Olympus.
    And then the light flashed upon a log. It seemed a loguntil it disclosed the knuckles of a hand. A child’s hand around a child’s toy or ship. The body in the water was so submerged it may have been brown or black miscarried foetus of the gods within Olympus. Save for the white gloves or blossoming skin of its hands where these emerged like paint on the glittering dark surface of sky in water. Was this the harlequin pigmentation of oceans resurrected backwards into toy ship or fleet? “Let me … let me …” cried Julia, secreting a letter there she intended for Francis across a generation and more “ hold it . Let me rescue it.”
    But the crowd was oblivious of the cry she raised, of the spontaneous irrationality of posted letter and saved or hoarded communication. There came a long-drawn-out insistent siren that dimmed the telephone beak in the sea, the rush of an ambulance towards resurrected pond, the speeding away of wheels. Then a vacancy in da Silva’s body of the globe as populations melted or vanished.
    “When did it all happen?” said Julia in bewilderment. “My unborn … I was taken ill.”
    “Your unborn … Our unborn … Their unborn …” He seemed to be waving at an elusive target.
    Da Silva murmured soothingly to a shadow on the mountainous reflection of heaven. “Perhaps a spiritual fleet is implied that will take us.”
    “Take us where?” Julia cried.
    “To a coronation,” said da Silva.
    Francis listened too. He heard, as da Silva spoke, the faint sigh or rattle of milk bottles coming across the park as though to announce the arrival of ladies-in-waiting to Queen Julia.

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    The magnificent sculptured horse and horseman called Phy sical Energy continued to move motionlessly above the Serpentine.
    And across the water Epstein’s Rima flew close to the ground above implicit rivers and bodies of water from continent to continent, South America to Europe.
    Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park were characteristic English parkland, designed for a queen, in which apparently alien, apparently archaic, apparently natural, freedoms and fates reside, with a degree of serenity, at the heart of the universal city da Silva loved.
    Queen Julia possessed three ladies-in-waiting.
    One was da Silva’s Jen who came towards her, it seemed, in the humour of cosmos, from a bank of posterity.
    Then there was Eleanor Rigby, implicitly clad in furs, who had already appeared, it seemed (Francis seemed uncertain of the resemblance as he cast an eye upon her charms within da Silva’s paintings), that very morning with the painted bowler-hatted young man and with the black milkman in Holland Park Avenue. Perhaps she had