Tallness of Simmone Ch. 07

Daniel was walking along Brighton seafront on a glorious summer's day, and despite all the other girls who had fallen under the spell of his machine - he had been able to make it work, indeed most successfully, on others in the end - he was thinking of his old friend, Simmone, again when he saw her.

He did not recognise her at first at a distance but his eyes automatically focussed on a remarkably tall woman ahead of him, a tall fair-haired woman in a sundress, a dress that did not hide the slimness of her hips. Recognition came as their paths converged. Three children were with her. 'Children' was perhaps the wrong term as the oldest, Sammy, or no doubt Sam now, must be twenty which made the girls seventeen, eighteen or nineteen. Daniel's shoulders went back, they looked good, strong young people albeit very much shorter than Simmone. Simmone's cry of recognition was a pleasure, her hug and kiss a joy.

Simmone was back in England, yes for good, she was no longer with Wilf, a long story, one of those things. The children looked on rather bored at their mother's meeting with an old friend, not realising quite the importance, indeed probable vital importance, of their mother's friend in their own being. Daniel and Simmone met for dinner that evening, they met a lot more after that.

It might well have been remarked upon, when Simmone and Daniel were in their twenties and working together, what an ill matched couple they would have made. Perhaps people seeing the same couple some fifty years later standing holding hands and staring out to sea back at Brighton once more on their Pearl wedding anniversary might still have thought the same: but no one would have missed the happiness each had in the other's company nor, indeed, whose children they clearly were, who joined them at the railings.