The fountain beneath the sun. A tragic love stories

It began on a day so bright I still cannot forgive it. The kind of English summer that looks like innocence itself — white dresses, polished lawns, a world pretending to be perfect. I was thirteen I think, old enough to write stories, too young to know that words could wound. That afternoon, I stood at my bedroom window, watching Cecilia by the fountain. Robbie was there too — our gardener’s son, Cambridge-educated, a boy who never quite belonged but never seemed to care. I watched her strip off her dress and step into the fountain’s green shimmer. She held a broken piece of porcelain. He stood beside her, silent, the air thick with something I couldn’t name. I thought I understood the scene. I thought he had made her do it. Something that girls from decent households don’t. Even now, after all these years, I can still see the sun burning on her bare shoulders, the look on his face — not cruelty, as I told myself then, but longing. I didn’t know what longing was, mistook tenderness for danger, passion for harm. That evening, the world trembled on the edge of misunderstanding. Later, he wrote Cecie a letter— one true and trembling with love, another coarse and foolish, meant never to be sent. But fate, that quiet thief, chose the wrong one to deliver. I was the one who delivered it — and curiosity, my oldest sin, made me read it first. It was clumsy, tender, obscene in one stray paragraph. I remember the word that changed everything, the word that taught me what adults are capable of feeling. I folded the letter back, trembling, and believed I had discovered evil. And in that single, glittering instant, my imagination began to rot. And that night, when the screams came from the darkness, when Lola, my cousin, stumbled toward us with torn skin and tears on her face — I saw a shadow running through the trees, and my imagination leapt to fill the shape. I said his name. I said it again. By morning, the policemen were there. Robbie was in handcuffs. Cecie was silent, pale with disbelief. I thought I had saved her. I didn’t know I had just taken her life away. Years later, the war came, as if the whole world had been punished for my lie. Robbie went to France in uniform — to fight, to atone, to die, though I didn’t know it then. Cecie became a nurse. I did too. I thought if I washed enough wounds, mopped enough blood, I might earn forgiveness from the air itself. But every face I tended was a reminder: I had made a good man into a ghost.

love Cecilia

make it yours!

When I saw her again — Cecilia — it was in a small, dim London flat. Robbie was there. His body looked older than his face, his eyes older than his years. I had imagined this meeting so many times, rehearsed every apology, every word. But when it came, my voice broke. I told them everything. That I had lied. That I had been a child playing god with other people’s fates. I said I would make it right, name the true culprit, set them free in whatever way the world still allowed. Robbie said very little. Cecie looked at me — not with hate, not quite — but with something quieter, heavier. It was pity, maybe. Or exhaustion. When I left that room, I told myself forgiveness was beginning. I didn’t know that they were already gone. I am old now. My hands shake as I write this. The sea outside my window moves like time — endless, unbothered. I have written many books. People say my stories are tragically beautiful. They do not know that every one of them was an apology disguised as fiction. This is my last. The only one that matters. In it, I have written of that summer, that letter, that lie. I have written of their love — the one I destroyed and could never understand. But I could not let it end as it did. I gave them the ending they deserved. In my story, Robbie comes home from France. Cecilia meets him in a small London flat, her hair still damp from the rain. They hold each other, they speak of forgiveness, they walk through the city until dawn. In my story, they are together — always. I let them live. Because the truth is unbearable. Robbie died of sepsis at Dunkirk, days before the evacuation. Cecilia drowned in a bombing at Balham Underground Station. They never saw each other again. They never read the letter I wrote to say I was sorry. There was no final meeting, no confession, no release. Only silence — a silence that lasted my whole life

Gardener's house

So, I rewrote the silence. I turned it into something soft. I gave them words. I gave them time. I gave them back to each other. Sometimes I wonder if that is a cruelty — to let the dead live only on paper. But I have come to believe that imagination, which once betrayed them, might also be my only way to make amends. When I write them walking along the Thames after the war, I can almost hear their laughter. I can almost believe they forgive me. The story, for a moment, becomes real enough to touch. And then the tide turns again, and I remember the truth. That I was a child with too much belief in the power of words, and now I am an old woman drowning in them. But still, I write. Because writing is the only language I have left for love. The night is growing colder. My name will fade soon enough. But perhaps, when someone reads these pages long after I am gone, they will believe — even for a heartbeat — that Robbie and Cecilia lived. That they found each other again in some other time, some gentler universe, where letters never get lost and children do not mistake love for sin. If I can give them that, then maybe, after all these years, I would forgive myself, for the moment I wronged them in the fountain beneath the sun.