I’d gone in to get us some water - not tea, it was too hot, and neither of us like it as much as we pretend to - when I had to call for Diana. She was across the garden, on the bench where we’d had our first conversation, the one that started this whole thing off, our unlikely, half-century-spanning friendship. It would have to be something major for me to unsettle her, it was hard enough persuading her that I would sort the drinks as it was. But this was and so I called her, and swiftly she emerged from the half-tunnel of foliage, across the sunken patio of tropical plants, ankles bothering the tufts of white ragged robin, the drifting yellow poppies. The moth waited for her.
The three of us - baby wrapped around my hips, I guess - peered down at it. Flat against the upright of one of the concrete steps back into the house, wings out, so still it could have been held in place with a pin behind glass, rather than here on a still Friday afternoon. Even among the expansive oasis that is Diana’s garden - still, I insist, the most beautiful domestic garden I’ve ever seen - it looked out of place. Wings that finished in elegant tatters, bearing thick striped bands between pale grey and deep green. Tiny, endless shifts of colour that call to mind leaves and bark.