Valley of Grace

valley of grace

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MARION HALLIGAN

valley of grace

First published in 2009 Copyright © Marion Halligan 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing¯in¯Publication entry: Halligan, Marion, 1940– Valley of Grace / Marion Halligan. ISBN 978 1 74175 694 4 (pbk.) A823.3 Edited by Rosanne Fitzgibbon Text and cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko Set in 13 5/16 pt PastonchiMT by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Bianca Lucy, Julee and James

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Contents

The Masonry Dancer Valley of Grace

1

3

Possessed by the God The Critical Period

34 60

Can you plant a cabbage right? Composing the Day

151

The Boilermaker’s Garden

204

107

All things, said Plato, are produced either by nature, or by chance, or by art; the greateg and mog beautiful by one or other of the firg two, the leag and mog imperfect by the lag. Montaigne Essays Book 1, Chapter 31, ‘On Cannibals’

The Masonry Dancer

Sometimes on mondays luc would have lunch with Julien. They liked to go to a cheerful cafe on a corner where they could sit in the sun under a plane tree. The most popular dish was steak tartare. Enormous mounds of raw red meat glistened in the sun. Luc preferred the planks of salad: wooden chopping boards loaded with ham and cheese and greens and tomatoes. Opposite was a handsome empty building that one day turned into a building site. It was rather grand, with sober decoration on the facade and elegant spaces glimpsed within, all gradually becoming derelict. Windows were removed and gutting seemed to be going on inside. A snake of linked bottomless buckets carried rubble from the top floors down to a skip on the ground. There were muted crashes and puffs of dust. Several ladders were propped against the facade and a young man ran up and down them. He stepped on to windowsills and jumped inside, then darted out and somehow swarmed over the face of the building, down a ladder, up again.

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Luc and Julien admired this performance. The man was very beautiful, lean and fit with olive skin and dark curls. Mediterranean man, Julien called him. A Greek god, transported to the Roman province, said Luc, for sometimes the man shouted instructions at his workers and they heard the melodious pure notes of his southern accent. Luc said, It’s a performance, you know. Street theatre. We’re the audience, we the cafe customers. We come and go, but the performance runs its course. You mean, it has no other meaning? Like a trapeze artist? An exhibition of skill and daring, for its own sake. Yes, said Luc. Of course, some building gets done, I suppose, the building is being renovated, but mainly it is the sheer joy of the act. They could have gone to another cafe while the works were happening, avoided the rattle of debris crashing down the buckets, the dust, the rapping of hammers and the whining of saws. But they didn’t. They sat in the sun and ate lunch and admired the beautiful man running up and down his ladders and dancing across the facade of the building. It’s like all such performances of daring, said Luc. It’s danger¯ ous. There’s the fear he might fall. I don’t think we want him to, but how exciting is the thought that he might. The exhilarating fear of falling. For watcher, for performer. For watcher, for watched.

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Fanny picart works in an antiquarian bookshop. She takes the old books off the shelves and smooths the leather bindings with her palms. Old books die if you don’t handle them, says the bookshop owner, her boss. Luc is a thin and transparent young man, with pale spiky hair. He looks like a silverfish. Fanny thinks perhaps he would like to be a silverfish and live all his life in a book. Except of course that silverfish are his deadly enemies. When there are no customers she takes a volume down, rests the spine in her hand and sometimes reads what’s in it. Le Vieux Latin, the shop is called, it specialises in books about the Latin Quarter, and old prints, like the sixteenth¯century engraving of the church of Saint Etienne du Mont and beside it the Romanesque church of Sainte Geneviève, just round the corner from the shop. Demolished, says her boss with huge sadness. A jewel, and demolished. Soufflot got the job building the replacement. That’s the Panthéon, you know that. Meant to be a church. No sooner finished than the state pinches it for a monument to great men. It’s

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certainly pompous enough. Luc doesn’t like the Panthéon. Fascist, he says. Not Soufflot’s idea, of course, to have no windows. That’s the Revolution stuffing things up. Fanny has climbed up and walked on the roof of the Panthéon, on the galleries of the roof. She was terrified, they seemed to plunge and roll and try to tip her over the edge. Even though there were low balustrades to hang on to she felt a vertiginous panic, as though the building did not like her and wished her ill. I think it’s a malicious building, she says to Luc. Malicious, eh? I like that idea. She agrees with him that it is a tragedy that the church of Sainte Geneviève should have been demolished. Sainte Geneviève is her birth day saint, January 3, as well as the patron saint of Paris. From her fourth birthday Fanny has known the story, how Geneviève was all her life a virgin, and especially holy even as a small child, that it was her praying that kept Attila the Hun out of her beloved city, which was called Lutèce then. Fanny carries a little shiny card in her wallet with a photograph of a statue of the saint on one side, her face pink and blue¯eyed, her expres¯ sion pensive, her robes and the niche she stands in painted in gold Gothic patterns. She’s holding some big gilt keys. On the back is a prayer which recalls her success at praying and vigil. Luc buys a set of eighteenth¯century watercolours of differ¯ ent views of the church, inside and outside, possibly done when it was known that the building was to be knocked down, as a kind of record. Fanny would like to own them, but there is no way she can afford such a treasure. Works on paper are not like old books, they must not be handled else they will crumble, or be exposed to light,

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when they will fade. She has to look at them as little as possible, in the dim back room, even dimmer than the shop itself. Luc is a friendly person to work for. He comes from a pros¯ perous family. His parents own pharmacies in Lyon, and several apartments in Paris and Vichy, and a villa in Biarritz. André Picart would like his daughter to marry him. Fanny is twenty¯five, and no prospects. Her mother says she is timid, gentle, she’ll come to it sooner or later. Leave her alone. Fanny is a slender aristocratic looking girl; André considers the stockiness of himself, the round fleshiness of his wife, and wonders how they produced her, her small bones, her narrow waist and hands and neck, her pale brown smooth hair, the plain slightness of her. Her willowy graceful manner. He drops heavy hints at her about marrying Luc. He’s not the marrying kind, she says. Marrying kind, sniffs André. No man is the marrying kind. It’s women who make them. Do you think I’d have got married if it hadn’t been for your mother making me want to? You’ve got him all day to yourself in that bookshop. Show us what you’re made of, girl. Fanny knows Luc isn’t the marrying kind because she’s seen him in the cafe with his friend. A man as pale and thin of skin as Luc, with the same fair spiky hair. Sitting on opposite sides of the table, not touching, but the curve of each body so conscious of the other, so responsive, that their connection was plain. Their voices were soft and their eyes locked. Fanny envied them their single¯ ness, their stillness, their occupying of their own private place, in the noisy cafe. He’s a silverfish, she says to her father. I couldn’t marry a silverfish. Now you’re being frivolous, says her father.

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• Fanny likes the bookshop. Her friend Séverine started work in a chocolate shop, with a family making and selling chocolates. Any that were not perfect enough for the sharp eyes of the master chocolate¯maker were put in a bowl and the staff could eat them. After a while you’re just not interested, Séverine said; at first it’s marvellous, but then you couldn’t care less. Séverine married the son of the chocolate¯maker and still works in the shop sometimes; it makes a change from minding the baby all day. She ties bows in her curly black hair and paints her face and wears tight bright clothes; she sings her welcome to the customers. In the pink and gilded space of the shop she is another delicious confection, with her rosy cheeks and black curls and eyes like amber toffee. Sometimes she brings Fanny chocolates but still doesn’t care to eat them. Fanny thinks how different the bookshop is. She doesn’t get sick of the books, she’s addicted to them. To their leather, smooth but slightly grainy to delicate fingers, the weight and solemn bulk of them in her hands, their throat¯catching smell, and the sense of them as porous, dense with the knowledge they contain but also soaking up not just the body oils but some more ethereal essence of the people who have held them. Their souls, spirits: there ought to be a word. She and Luc are their own best fans. Not many people buy things. People browse, sometimes the same ones, over and over. Like the young man who reverently turns the pages of volumes, gazing at the pictures. He’s handling the books, says Luc. Keeping them alive. He should buy, says Fanny. I don’t think you ever exactly own books like this, Luc tells

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her. They have their own life. They just stop in certain places at certain times. Then they hold court, you might say. Fanny thinks of the books sitting graciously on their shelves, waiting to hold court with their admirers. With their subjects. It’s a charming idea. And exasperating. They come from before us, says Luc. And go on after us. Most of the transactions are with sellers, especially people who have inherited. They bring along boxes of old books, as junk they no longer want but expect to get a high price for. Fanny thinks Luc is too generous. When he isn’t in the shop she offers paltry amounts; the sellers protest but nearly always accept. Both the bookshop and the chocolate shop close for three hours over lunch. Sometimes Fanny and Séverine meet. Séverine skips the large matriarchal midday dinner, which does not best please her mother¯in¯law, but she loves Séverine and the baby so lets her go. Fanny loves seeing Sylvain; he is a most beautiful child, with stiff straight black hair like his father and his mother’s rosy golden complexion. She is his godmother, she hugs him, buries her nose in his neck, drops kisses on his little scented head. The two young women eat salad and talk about inconsequential things. Her family may make comments about Fanny not being married yet, but Séverine never does. She is happy to let Fanny enjoy Sylvain whenever there’s a chance. Fanny doesn’t ask Séverine what being married is like. She has on a number of occasions met her husband Thierry in the large apartment above the shop, which is also pink and gilded, but she has never been conscious of them making that same dense and quivering space for themselves in the world as Luc and his friend in the cafe, but maybe that is because they can fill

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the whole apartment. And maybe Sylvain kicks his way out and lets the outside world in. And there is the doting mother¯in¯law, and the father¯in¯law, the famous chocolate¯maker, whose skills Thierry has inherited as well as learned, though whether he has his genius only time will tell. Fanny sees that maybe that oneness can only happen in solitude, of the kind that is possible in a large noisy cafe but not in the bosom of family and friends. This is the public face of marriage, even when it is in the privacy of its own home.

Gérard Tisserand is a builder. His father is a builder too. Gérard began by being apprenticed to André Picart. Then for a while he worked for a friend of his father’s who’d got the job of repairing a church. Gérard was moved by the complexity of the medieval building, its weight and yet its lightness, the simple ingenious skills with which it was created. He discovered he had a knack, a flair, for this kind of restoration, and more than that, a kind of gift, maybe spiritual would be a word for it, as though the structures commu¯ nicate to him their original intent and substance. It is not to do with the religious intent of this first building, the church, but of its essential nature as a construction of the human spirit. So Gérard became a restorer of old buildings, working at first for other builders. Then he bought a ruin, a wreck—He’s mad, said his friends—he borrowed heavily, mortgages and high interest rates—What a fool, he’s crippling himself for life. In fact, it is a success. He rips out partitions and lean¯tos and false walls, renews the rotten and returns the wreck to its original

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eighteenth¯century elegance of pale stone and panelled walls and high glittering windows. He rents out the apartments and buys another wreck, starts again. André Picart usually comes along when buildings like Gérard’s have been knocked down. He puts up new ones, concrete, steel, good quality, no shoddy workmanship, very modern and comfortable, spacious even, though with today’s lower ceilings you can get an extra floor in the same space as those extravagant old places. In his early days Gérard often worked with him, but not any more. At dinner with his wife and daughter André Picart speaks of Gérard Tisserand, his gift, the knack, it’s uncanny. He is a figure in Fanny’s mind before she meets him. The young man who senses buildings. The stairs, the panelling, the balustrades, all just right, either the original uncovered and restored, or a new one made to fit exactly with the old, or else pieces recovered from demolition sites. He has a gift, no doubt, says André. And patience. And he’s a skilled craftsman, oh, no doubt—I taught him all he knows. Well, not quite all. But there’s no money in it, not like that, he’ll not make even a living at that rate. André speaks as people do when they are obsessed with someone, full of disapproval, full of envy. He sits in the spacious dining room of the apartment he built exactly as he wanted, with every modern convenience, in the block he constructed on the site of an old grand house, a magnificent old building, but no good in modern times, it had to go, though he saved a sliver of the garden. This new project, he says, it’s a sink to pour money down. He’ll come a cropper for sure.

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Where is it? Fanny asks. Some crooked old street in the Latin Quarter—down near the Institute for Deaf Children. Towards Port Royal, somewhere. He looks at her. Oh no, my girl, don’t go getting ideas, he’s not your type. One of those nuggety swarthy characters. A gypsy, I wouldn’t be surprised. At least he’s not a silverfish. More like a cicada. His wife and daughter laugh. He has made a joke, and it’s important to recognise it.

The building is not in some crooked street but in the rue St Jacques. Fanny walks through the small oval place in front of the Val de Grâce and just past it is the building, eighteenth¯century, five¯storey, classical. It is a wreck, in the process of being gutted. A segmented orange worm descends from the top floor, a set of elon¯ gated bottomless buckets chained together, through which rubble is poured into a hopper in the street. It rattles and crunches all the way until the final clanging arrival in the hopper, and quantities of dust rise. Gérard Tisserand Builder, says a banner hung from a balcony. Against the facade is a ladder and she sees a man she supposes to be Gérard though not so swarthy, not so nuggety, run up it, balance on a windowsill, sway, lean out and look up, climb in. Fanny pauses to read unseeing a plaque on the wall of the building next door. Gérard appears again, walks along a windowsill, teeters. Fanny’s heart teeters too.

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One day she comes home from work and finds the man from the ladder sitting in the drawing room and it is indeed Gérard Tisserand, and he is, close up as well as dancing over a building, by no means so nuggety and swarthy as her father would have her believe. His skin is sun¯tanned a coppery colour but is fine in texture; she thinks of the books in their elegant bindings that desire to be handled. He has black curls and dark eyes. André sends his daughter to fetch the tray of apéritifs. She puts olives and small salty biscuits in bowls, ice in a bucket. The men drink Suze, bitter herby yellow, made from gentian, the smell even is too sharp for Fanny. She has an Orangina. Her mother will have a small vin doux when she comes in. These apéritifs speak of the south; she wonders if Gérard comes from there as well. The men talk shop. Neither pays attention to Fanny. She has plenty of time to look at Gérard. At his long fingers, very clean, the nails short and stubby but scrubbed. He’s cleaned up after work, he wears fresh jeans and a white linen shirt, turned up a little at the cuffs so she can see his brown wrists and the black springy hairs. At the neck, too, no tie, but buttoned quite high, there is a glimpse of smooth skin and just a suggestion of black curls. His cheekbones are broad and carved, the skin slides into a slightly shadowy hollow beneath them, and above are the deep velvety sockets of his eyes, with straight generous brows. The black curls cropped, but not too short. Square chin, with a dimple. Gérard does not appear to see Fanny at all. As she is not listening to what they are talking about. Some¯ thing about finishing the job earlier, borrowing a couple of André’s workmen, reinforcing the structure, needs modern engineering principles, all formally done of course. Fanny sits not drinking her

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Orangina and imagines holding Gérard in her hands as she would a rare book. André Picart says he will have to think about it. They will talk further. There needs to be more precision about figures. Of course, says Gérard.

André Picart is wrong about the unprofitability of Gérard’s work. Gérard knows exactly what it costs him to restore his buildings, the money borrowed, the interest rates, the labour of his team, the raw materials, the time. He factors in a considerable return on his own expertise. The resulting figure is a large one, but his apartments are so desirable he has no trouble finding clients. Certainly not at so good an address as the rue St Jacques. The building will have a large apartment on each floor, with the main room running from front to back, so there are windows at both ends. Had Fanny stood at the first floor windows of the building opposite she would have been able to look across and see the trees in the garden behind. There will be a shop on the ground floor. Gérard plans to rent out all the floors except the top one, where he will live. What will be worth a lot of money in these apartments is the light, because of the long main rooms being lit on two sides by the high paned windows. Enough of the original windows remain, in good enough order, to make all seem original; and even where they will be newly constructed he will use old glass, which is thick, uneven, sometimes ribbed, sometimes warped, with whorls and knots. The light shines sweetly through such windows, and the view the other way is subtly strange. It might be the eighteenth

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century out there, as it is inside. Clients won’t necessarily work any of this out, they will simply covet it. Gérard’s apartment on the top floor is the finest and lightest of all, which is unusual in such buildings. It is usually the first or the second storey that is the best, the piano nobile. He is planning to make a secret staircase to the attic, in a cupboard, so there will be unexpected rooms. When on his top floor he removes mould¯ ering partitions the ceiling falls in, and there, much higher, is a plaster ceiling, dingy, dusty with the long¯hidden dust of decades, but almost intact. It has a central oval, domed, like a little cupola, with cupids, fat winged baby creatures, looping ribbons around it. It’s at that moment Gérard decides it is time he got married. He’s thirty¯eight. And he’ll find space for a lift. A wife cannot climb to the top floor of an eighteenth¯century building on an old steep turning staircase.

Fanny is in the shop dreamily holding the pale brown calfskin of a nineteenth¯century account of the Luxembourg Gardens, discov¯ ering that in the thirteenth century the area was inhabited by a devil which had to be exorcised. In summer she and Séverine take Sylvain there to sail his boat on the pond. She hadn’t realised the place’s antiquity. The book with its fine etchings will fetch a lot of money if ever somebody buys it. She is gazing at a painting like a pattern of a vegetable garden belonging to the monks who cultivated the area for some centuries when Gérard comes in. This is shortly after the false ceiling fell in and he discovered the

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precious plaster mouldings above it. Although he paid little atten¯ tion to Fanny in her father’s house he recognises her with no trouble, and is pleased to see her. Hi, he says, looking round, and back at the young woman in a plain jumper and skirt of caramel¯coloured cashmere that is like a second sinuous skin to her slender body. Hi, he says, do you work here? He tells her about his ceiling. Maybe there is a book with his house in it? Or something like it? He’s never much bothered with old books before, just worked by instinct, but this ceiling’s some¯ thing special. He looks at Fanny. His ceiling has fat cherubs on it, and she is slender, but somehow she seems to go with it. He looks at her again. There’s something eighteenth¯century about her, her paleness, her elegance, the elegance that goes with tall pale rooms where the light falls in subtle if not ambiguous ways. And so he falls in love with her, and she with him. His request needs a good deal of searching out, he has to call in often to see how it is going. Her father is still not certain that the restoration business is all that viable, whatever the figures say, but there is no doubt that Fanny isn’t getting any younger, and she seems keen enough on the chap, and he on her. And it’s certainly the case that young Gérard is an interesting fellow. What do you think, my angel? he asks his wife, and she says, They are in love, how can we not agree? And what if we were not to? They’re old enough to decide. Fanny and Gérard get married, and invite guests afterwards to the apartment. It isn’t furnished yet, so it can be filled with round white¯clothed tables for the luncheon of the wedding guests. The

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rows of wineglasses, the fishbowl vases full of pointed yellow roses refract the light almost as cunningly as the windows, and Fanny, in her silk dress that flows like cream and is of the same luminous colour as the tall panelled walls and the high patterned ceiling with just a touch of pale blue on its ribbons, seems so utterly to belong that people blink their damp eyes and say, a marriage made in heaven. Gérard supposed that Fanny would stop work when she was married, since his wife doesn’t need to work, but Fanny cannot bear to leave the bookshop. Just part¯time, she says, and he agrees, Gérard doesn’t want to refuse Fanny anything. Just until the babies come, anyway. Don’t they make a lovely couple, said everybody at the wedding, and indeed they do, he so dark and vigorous and glowing with sun¯browned health, she so slender and fair and radiant. Now she is married and beloved, words like pale and smooth are not enough, she is fair, radiant, luminous, still gentle, still delicate, but strong in her beauty. She’s quite a gorgeous girl, really, isn’t she, says her father to her mother, I never noticed. The mother smiles, as she often does with her husband. You can show him things, but he takes his own time to see them. Luc in the bookshop doesn’t notice this, but other custom¯ ers do, and Gérard, who has taken to dropping in and browsing, marvels at the way she shines in the dim shop. He’s become fasci¯ nated with the books which have pictures of his kind of building; he loves to look at them, not so much because he learns things, what he needs to know about buildings he learns from them, from the nails and screws and dovetails, the joints and joists, the beams, the levelling and planing and piecing together. It’s as though the

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work and the skill and the passion of the hands that made these things is still present in them, and his hands can feel them there. It’s not information he gets from these books so much as recogni¯ tion, and satisfaction. It’s like being with a lover and knowing her in more and different ways. Of course Gérard doesn’t say any of these things, not even in his head. Fanny guesses some of them, watching his reverent receptive hands holding the books. She marks things for him, with slips of paper, puts books aside on a back shelf. Luc seeing them together says to himself, how wonderful to see two people so much in love. He and his friend are still in love, still full of the delight of living together, but he does not imagine it shows with them as it does with this couple, so transparently glowing for all the world to see. He thinks that he and Julien are discreet, that they appear to be just good friends. Gérard begins to buy books. He becomes a good customer. He puts them on the bookcases set in alcoves either side of the pale marble fireplace in the sitting room. How well they go there. Old books in an old room. He has a joyous overflowing sense of rightness. Everything is beginning to be complete. He looks at the cherubs looping their ribbons round the small cupola of the ceiling and thinks of this as a talisman. He has some stationery made, thick and cream¯coloured, and when you look at it closely you see that it is printed with the image of this ceiling. It pleases him, the hard dealings of business overlaying this charming image of a folly. The children’s wear shop on the ground floor, Plaisir d’Enfant, does not need all the space so he sets up an office in one of the back rooms, which has French windows opening on to the garden. His desk is a long wooden refectory table, seventeenth¯century

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and marvellously battered, and he takes a couple of books down and leaves them open on it. Customers admire them. From the Vieux Latin, he tells them, they have terrific stuff. Between Gérard and his clients Luc is starting to do quite profitable business. Quite a surprise for Luc’s father, who had his reasons for wondering if he would ever make the rent. The apartment is beginning to be furnished. Gérard takes Fanny shopping for necessary things. He isn’t purist about it. They have an early twentieth¯century carved walnut chest of drawers that’s a Picart family piece, and several armoires from his aunts. They buy sofas in pale yellow leather to catch and replicate the light in the room. And there are mirrors. No curtains, the shutters are enough. They go to flea markets and find candlesticks, old pewter plates, a seaman’s chest that might have sailed with La Pérouse. Not too much, they don’t want clutter. The floors are honey¯coloured wood, wide boards, some original, some from demolished buildings. There is an Aubusson rug in ancient worn golden colours with a bit of red that has faded to brownish pink. Is it all a bit too pale, do you think? Fanny asks Gérard, and he says, No, that is exactly how it should be, it suits you perfectly. He likes her to wear the pale colours, camel, fawn, caramel, the beiges that he first saw her in. And occasionally plain black, that delineates her in the mysterious shifting light of the rooms.

Séverine comes to visit Fanny. Thank god for the lift, she says. I wouldn’t fancy lumping this heavy boy up all those stairs. Séverine is pregnant again. She is quite envious of Fanny. The pink and

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gilded apartment she lives in above the chocolate shop is certainly vast, but it is not hers, it belongs to her mother¯in¯law who runs it with a firm hand. She dotes on Séverine, and on Sylvain, and doubtless will on the new baby, but it is still not Séverine’s house. I keep wanting Thierry to get us a place of our own, but he says why should we bother? All that extra expense and so much less convenient—as it is it’s down the stairs and he’s at work—and of course he’s right. But still. You’d miss your mother¯in¯law, Fanny says. Passing the baby over any time you feel like it. Not any time, says Séverine. But yes, sometimes. Her belly is enormous, she suffers from the heat, is always tired. You’ll feel better when the baby’s born, says Fanny. Sylvain the beautiful godchild sits on her lap and strokes her cheeks. He smooths his fingers over her eyelids as though tracing the solid shape of the eyeballs underneath. Fanny shivers with delight at this questioning delicate touch. She loves the way small children make you look at the world as though you, like them, have never seen it before.

The wedding was in late spring. In August the Vieux Latin closes and Gérard’s business takes its holidays. They spend some time in the house on the Mediterranean coast near Marseillan which belongs to Fanny’s family, on a property where André’s brother grows grapes and melons, and in the country behind St Tropez where Gérard’s family has a place. There is a lot of family stuff with Gérard’s brothers and sisters and their children who are just

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about teenagers and Fanny’s cousins who all seem to have babies. They come back to Paris in mid¯September to days beginning to turn cool and a city energetic and ready for a new start after the lassitude of summer and the dusty tourist¯infested heat of the dog days. The chestnut trees in the garden are beginning to change colour. The apartment waits, serene and welcoming in its cool manner. They are really married now. There has been the wedding, and the honeymoon. The ordering of the apartment. The summer holiday, with family. And now it is the rest of their lives. Coming home, putting away the summer clothes, back to work: this now will be the pattern of their days. Of course a baby will change things, but it will also be fitting into the mode of life Fanny and Gérard are creating in their handsome apartment in the rue St Jacques. Gradually the light takes on the silveriness of winter, as the trees lose their leaves and the sun doesn’t shine. Grey the light may be, but the creamy yellow colours of the apartment prevent the bleakness this suggests. Outside there is the tracery of bare branches against the colourless sky, inside is warm to the eye and the skin. Séverine’s baby Ghislaine was born late in August. Séverine is very clever: a pigeon pair. Her mother¯in¯law dotes more than ever. Sylvain goes several mornings to nursery school, and often on those occasions Séverine comes to see Fanny with just the baby. Ghislaine’s head is covered with a dark fuzz that everybody says will soon turn into black curls like her mother’s. Her body is covered with a dark down, almost fur; Fanny finds this attractive in a rather shameful way. She strokes the small furry body with

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shivery fingers. She is not so sunny a child as her brother. She yells when things are not to her liking and needs a lot of amusing, doesn’t sit quietly in friendly arms like Fanny’s but arches her back and crumples her face in what seems like rage. Fanny takes this as a challenge, and holds her over her shoulder and soothes her and murmurs, and is very pleased when the child relaxes and is still. Feeling her small violently beating heart grow calm against her own breast gives Fanny sharp little twisting pulling feelings in her stomach. She walks about the apartment. See Ghislaine in the mirror, she says. Look at the trees, the branches are bare. And down there, see, a man sweeping the gutter. The baby cannot look at any of these things, but she seems to like Fanny talking about them. She curls up, almost dozing. Taking an angry or maybe anguished baby and changing it from a stiff protesting awkward bundle into a relaxed kitten¯like creature seems to Fanny as important a thing as anybody could ever do.

Fanny and Gérard don’t go to church in any regular way but some¯ times on her way home from the bookshop she calls into the church of Saint Etienne du Mont which is given over to the cult of her birth day saint. Luc is very critical of the pink and blue statue of Sainte Geneviève. Decadent nineteenth¯century Gothic piety, he says. She looks such a wimp, he says, when the real woman, you know, she got out there breaking blockades to bring back corn for the starving people of Paris, she persuaded the conquerors not to kill their prisoners, she stopped the Parisians leaving the city when the Huns were just about at the gate. She would save them, she

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said, and she did. Whereas your creature looks about as saintly and courageous and powerful as a garden gnome. Nevertheless, Fanny thinks, she is Sainte Geneviève and her birth day saint, and if her job is curing the blind and chasing off demons and looking after the sick, the poor, the lonely and the unemployed, none of which conditions Fanny suffers from, that is her luck. She’s the patron saint of security men, you know, says Luc. He seems to think this pretty funny. I should get a statue of her over the door. You could get somebody to make you a saintly courageous and powerful contemporary version, says Fanny. Find a medieval one, I’d rather. Gothic, real, not pseudo, is the only thing in churches and holy statuary. The earlier the better. I thought you were keen on Romanesque. Yes, well, Romanesque of course. I said early.

One day after she’d bought the bread at the bakery in the little place which was hardly more than a bulge in the rue St Jacques, she went into the church of the Val de Grâce. She’d often looked at it, its pillars and dome. A solid baroque edifice, its bowl¯like curves and virtuous straight pillars anchoring it to the ground. A building haughty, confident, supercilious even. Not soaring, a rocket ready for heaven, like a Gothic church, a rocket fuelled by faith and the aerodynamics of its shape to lift its mighty weight into the air. The Val de Grâce presses its weight into the earth. It’s beautiful, with its pale intricate stone, its charming

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repetitious symmetry, and it’s the grand relation of the building she lives in. Inside it is full of cherubs, fat babies. Flocks of the gilded creatures swing from the baldaquin. There are twisted dark marble pillars garlanded with gilt foliage and others in paler marble round the dome. Wherever there’s space there’s a fat cherub. Not babies exactly though that is the shape of their limbs, their plumpness, but their heads are too small, their proportions are wrong. They are like men who have kept their baby chubbiness of long torsos and short limbs. Rather sinister if you look too closely. And there is the Christ Child, solemn little manikin, subject of prayer by his mother and amazement by his father. Quite often, after that, when she goes to buy the bread she visits the church. Often outside the bakery there are two men sitting drinking on the pavement, beggars, vagrants, their clothes and beards and bodies all ragged, but they talk and laugh and enjoy themselves. It’s a party they are having over their wine on the edge of the pavement. She puts money in the ancient cap placed for that purpose, they bow elaborately and go on drinking. She knows the money will be spent on more drink. But she is glad to help people who have nothing, yet seem . . . She can’t say happy, who knows what anguish lies underneath, but she can say, seem to get so much pleasure out of their situation. Then she crosses the road and goes into the church and sits for a moment in this great humming space. She looks up at its immensity of pale grey stone. Even with all the decoration, the cherubs, the frescos, the marble and gilt columns, it has a bareness, a coldness. It’s the colour of concrete. There’s no stained glass. The light is silvery; when the sun

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shines, lemony. There is no comfort in it, as there is in her house. It is splendid, but God does not love her in this church. Time passes. Gérard prospers. Fanny blooms, as young women do who make love very often. Gérard likes to come home for lunch, Fanny wears a skirt and stockings so she doesn’t have to take her clothes off and they lie on the Aubusson rug. Or she will sit on the edge of the table with her legs round his waist. Or stand leaning against the window while the street below goes about its business. It’s fun, fully clothed like this, it feels illicit, they laugh breathlessly. Then she will have some favourite thing of his to eat. Not difficult, Gérard has a lot of favourite things to eat. At night in bed there is time for languor and play. Both marvel at this unexpected gift of sex that just goes on getting better. Who would have thought, they say, Fanny out of innocence, Gérard out of experience, as their hands touch each other’s bodies, who would have thought, and they gaze into one another’s eyes with shameless delight.

At Christmas the shops in the rue St Jacques wreathe their windows with evergreen branches. Real ones, not plastic. When you walk along the street their peppery smell prickles the nostrils, becoming more pungent as the boughs dry and release their scented oils in the cold air. Plaisir d’Enfant has wonderful thick evergreens, and the window inside has a few tiny garments arranged on crumpled white silk, all brightly coloured, a little green smock, a red velvet dress, a minute pair of socks printed with purple jelly babies. The woman in the shop changes them often. Red leather boots with orange buttons, mittens embroidered with holly, a tiny hooded

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coat in navy blue printed with red rosebuds. When you see them from across the street they look like jewels in the snow. Whenever Séverine comes to visit her she can’t resist calling in to Plaisir d’Enfant. Just to look, she says. But she always buys something. Fanny looks on enviously as she chooses among the small garments. Hand¯stitched, says the shop woman, look, and shows them the exquisite craft of an outrageously expensive tiny dress. It’s made of pale blue linen embroidered with white daisies. So fine, says the woman, look, you can pull it through a wedding ring. Wouldn’t Ghislaine look just gorgeous in it, says Séverine. I think she has to have it. While the woman is wrapping it up Séverine says, She’s going to have to have tests, you know. They think there’s something wrong. Fanny stares at her. Séverine has picked up the baby out of her pusher. There, precious, you’ll look so gorgeous, won’t you, treasure? Ghislaine frowns, her thin little furry arms poke out like rods. What . . . starts Fanny, but Séverine says, Oh let’s not talk about it, you know how doctors fuss. She signs the credit card docket. I’ll have to run, she says. Let me know, says Fanny. What? Oh yes. Yes, I will.

Fanny who never suffers from insomnia sleeps very badly that night. She can’t stop thinking of Ghislaine and her anguished crying. What do you do when a baby is so full of pain? And is it

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her body that hurts, or her mind, or her spirit? How can you ever know? Does Séverine understand this little scrap of human life that she buys expensive dresses for? How can clothes help? They are like offerings to the gods. Or maybe a diversion. Either way, the baby in so fine a dress must be safe. Fanny turns restlessly in her bed, trying to shake off these thoughts. Finally Gérard puts his arms round her and his loving fingers caress the bones in her spine, one by one down her back, and she goes to sleep. Sylvain goes to school. Ghislaine is a solemn child who likes to walk by herself. The tests? Oh, says Séverine, they’re monitoring. Fanny is hurt that she does not tell her more, but then understands that it is too hard for her friend to talk about. Two is enough children, Séverine says. Fanny is still not pregnant. Her father stops asking: Any news yet? When’s that grandson of mine coming along? Fanny talks to her doctor, who says, Let’s be patient, eh? After all she is still young, not even thirty yet. Not quite, she says, but isn’t that the point? I thought it was supposed to be better when you were younger. And anyway I want to have my children before I’m too old. Hmm, says the doctor. Is there a problem with frequency of intercourse? Maybe, missing the fertile period? No, says Fanny. Not a chance. You’re very narrow, he says. Who knows how safe childbirth might be. Maybe we should listen to our bodies. Narrow women have children. True. So the doctor arranges to have her checked out. There’s nothing wrong, he says. Not with you. What about this husband of yours?

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Curiously, for all their intimacy with one another’s bodies, they do not talk about children. Not now. They did at the begin¯ ning, how they would arrange the nursery, what names they would choose, whether it would be better to have a girl first or a boy. Gérard saying that of course she would stop working in the bookshop, and Fanny saying what about one or two mornings a week, just to keep up the connection, and Gérard supposing that would be all right. She still occasionally visits Sainte Geneviève, in her pink and blue and gilt seemliness, but doubts she can be any help; she’s her birth day saint but pregnancy isn’t one of her interests, she was professionally a virgin and not ever a mother. Fanny wondered who did look after that department, it didn’t seem to be anybody she could think of. And yet infertility must often have broken women’s hearts, there must have been endless prayers offered up for children to be conceived. Who had the job of mediating them? She still sits from time to time in the Val de Grâce. One day, perhaps she was tired, she tipped her head back and stared at the dome and its silvery clear light, which seemed very pure and illuminating. As she stared the dome began to spin, its columns blurred and she felt its turning weight pressing down upon her as the dome spun closer and closer. She wasn’t afraid, though dazzled and dizzy; she closed her eyes against the whirl of it and when she opened them it had slowed and was stopping, back in its rightful place. She sat for a while, feeling overwhelmed but excited. When she got up to go she had to hang on to the chairs to make her way out, and when she got to the stairs at the door she stumbled. The light outside seemed bleak and cold after the spinning dazzle of the dome. Her muscles ached as though they had held themselves against a heavy weight.

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She didn’t tell anybody. She didn’t stop her visits to the church but the dome stayed sedately in place. That day had been hot. She’d walked quite a lot doing her shopping and was tired and thirsty. Had walked in the sun without a hat. It was just after her period. There were explanations. Sometimes she sits in the oratory of Anne of Austria, one¯ time queen of France. It’s cold and dingy, even though a plaque announces it has recently been restored by gifts of the King of Morocco. How recent is the plaque? The paintings seem rather boudoir¯like. Not inspiring. Were they Anne’s choice? Anne’s heart was buried here, but like so many others disappeared at the Revolu¯ tion. It’s a mournful place, why would anybody want to sit there? But sometimes Fanny does. She looks Anne up in the Petit Larousse. She was a Spanish princess, despite her title, and judging by her portrait remarkably plain, with a pudgy flat face sloping down to enormous shoulders and eyes like currants in dough. In contrast Anne Boleyn, on the same page, has a sharp and sparkling face which woos the viewer. Fanny thinks how horrible it must have been to be obliged to sleep with a person chosen for you, whether you fancied him or not. Imagine meeting your new husband for the first time, and thinking, Oh God I have to make love to this person. And a man looking at his new wife and wondering how he will persuade his flesh into a state of desire for this creature. The woman probably young and a virgin, the man probably not. A queen could quite likely never make love out of love, only ever duty. •

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A book comes into the shop, a glossy big black and white volume called La Vallée de Grâce. It’s not very old, sixties probably, though it has facsimiles of old prints. Fanny buys it for Gérard, but of course she reads it too. She’s known that the area where she lives was anciently inhab¯ ited by religious orders. You can see it in the names of the streets along which she walks, doing her shopping, going to work: rue des Feuillantines, rue des Ursulines. Her windows look out on to the site of the old convent of the Carmelites, all disappeared except for its doorway, in the usual grey¯blond stone, piously preserved in the wall of the entirely modern building which replaced it. The Val de Grâce itself was a Benedictine site, there were Visitandines nearby, and then up the street is Port Royal, now a hospital. The Valley of Grace was the name of the whole area, consecrated to teaching and medicine. And religious communities. It’s the bit about Anne of Austria that’s interesting. Queen of France, wife of Louis XIII, married at fourteen, thirty¯seven years old and still childless. Twenty¯three years of failing to get pregnant. So she makes a bargain with God. You give me a son and I’ll give you a church. A good offer, it seems. And not refused. God not above a bargain, apparently. Or maybe fond of playing games. A magnificent church, she promises. Louis XIV is born in 1638, he it is who lays the first stone in 1645, by which time he is already king, under his mother’s regency. By the time it’s finished he is well and truly king on his own; his mother dies the next year. It is consid¯ ered the most Roman of French churches. In the Jesuit style. A whole church. What a bargaining tool. And no saints involved. Just God. Her husband dedicated the city of Paris to the

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Virgin Mary, hoping for an heir, but Anne went straight to the top. Fanny sits in the church, so grandiose. Looks at the dome: there are two hundred figures in that fresco. All three times life size. She remembers her experience of the dome whirling down upon her. Screwing down. Pinning her. A lover. A church a bull a shower of gold. Raping her. But that’s back to front. It’s the impreg¯ nation that comes first. Not the church. She has no bargaining tool to match that. Not even a solid belief. Gérard is greatly amused by the book. He doesn’t mention Anne of Austria’s trade with God. He’s more interested in the hearts. All the royal family had their hearts deposited in the oratory. See this, he says to Fanny. By the late eighteenth century there were forty¯five hearts in magnificent gold reliquaries. And guess what happened to them? Come the Revolution they were all bought by some painter. Not the reliquaries, they were melted down. The hearts. He ground them up and mixed them with oil and painted them on his canvasses. They gave a marvellous glaze, apparently. Shit, I wonder do they know which paintings. It’d be great to see them. Paintings glazed with the hearts of kings. Gérard shivers, somewhere between horror and macabre glee. He is after all a secular Frenchman, child no matter how many generations on of the Revolution. Would it be better or worse if it’s a crummy painting or a great one, he wonders. Fanny, who thinks it’s odd that they can be so free with one another’s bodies but find it hard to talk about intimate concerns, like not being pregnant after all this time, says, abruptly: What

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about Anne of Austria bribing God to make her pregnant? Giving him a church in return for a baby. Well, that mob always did pull rank whenever they got the chance, says Gérard. And remember, he says, his voice slow with sarcasm, it wasn’t just a baby, it was an heir. Louis XIV, no less. Who by the way had an exceptionally large heart. Would have made a lot of glaze out of his heart. Gérard laughs and puts his arms tight around her. That night they sit on one of the yellow sofas and watch a documentary on television. It’s called The Heart of the Dragon, and is in Chinese with a French voice dubbed over it. A Chinese man, a railway policeman with a gentle affectionate face, says he would like a son to carry on the family name but has already had a daughter, so the law says he must stop there. He sits beside his father, the patriarch, not very elderly but greatly respected, and smiles at him. The commentary doesn’t even say what the family name is. Fanny says, Would you like a son to carry on the family name? What do however many Chinese care about my family name? Or I about that man’s? He takes Fanny’s hand. A baby would be nice. Just to be a baby. But I can’t offer any churches. And anyway how do we know it worked? She might have got pregnant anyway. She hadn’t for twenty¯three years. Maybe Louis XIII didn’t fancy her much. Maybe it took him that long to get going. I did wonder about that. What? What sex would be like between kings and queens. If they ever got any pleasure out of it.

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Ah. Maybe Anne lay back and thought of churches and then it happened. Fanny shivers. She is thinking of telling him about her ex¯ perience in the Val de Grâce but Gérard leans across the sofa and starts taking her clothes off. She slides down on to the floor. The Aubusson rug looks like velvet but feels prickly under her bare bottom; she doesn’t care about that. She lies back, spreads her arms and her legs, and takes him into her. This is better than churches, he murmurs in her ear, and they laugh, they both laugh when they make love, for the sheer gurgling¯over delight of it. But still she is not pregnant. There’s a book of saints in the shop. She tries to find a saint for pregnancies. Rita of Cascia seems to look after infertility. Who on earth is she? Reading her brief biography doesn’t help. And of course this is an old book. Fanny suspects she won’t be in the Church’s current calendar of saints. Yet surely there must even these days be saints for infertility? Maybe the Blessed Virgin would be the one to go for, though she didn’t seem to be into children in the ordinary way of sex. In fact Fanny has the distinct impression that she never had any after Jesus. She visits Sainte Geneviève again. Since Luc was so sarcastic about her decadent pseudo¯Gothic wimpy piety Fanny has become unhappily conscious of how pink and blue she is. The point about the church is that Anne of Austria believed. She was quite certain a baby could be bargained for a church. Fanny isn’t.

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We need science, says Gérard. Fanny tells him about her tests. He has some, and turns out to have a low sperm count. Perfectly healthy. Plenty of semen, not a lot of sperm. And no, doing it less often wouldn’t help. IVF, that’s the way to go, says the doctor. If you want to. Do you? Gérard says to Fanny. If you do. She looks at the graceful space of the apartment. At the light, greenish golden today with summer sun and the fresh leaves on the chestnut trees, their milky white flowers buzzing with bees. At the cherubs looping their ribbons round the shallow dome of the ceiling. At Gérard’s face which she loves, his gaze which makes her tremble with desire. I have always wanted a baby, she says. Then we’ll try IVF. She purses her lips. It’s pretty successful, so I hear. Maybe a bit too much sometimes, triplets and quadruplets and such. Fanny sighs. Of course that way you get a lot in one go, he says. IVF, says Fanny. It doesn’t hurt. Maybe. It’s a lot of poking round. Time, mess, she says. I am very happy with you, she says. And I with you. Let’s leave it to fate, she says. He slides his fingers under the silk of her knickers, turns her so that she looks down on the chestnut trees with their blazing

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spires of flowers. The windows are open, she leans against the balustrade, he slides into her sharply from behind. She cries out her pleasure, as she doesn’t often allow herself to do. And there it is, fate, happening as it happens to everyone. Fate to be childless. Fate to have a child. Fate to die in childbirth. Fate to bear a monster in body or in mind, capable of all sorts of atrocities. A sickly baby, or a healthy one. The delight of its parents, or the breaking of their hearts. Time will tell. Time will sort it all, in the end. And who can see how it will be? The heart of Louis XIV, the Sun King, majestically large this heart, as was apparently his intestine which made him a very greedy eater, will be ground up with oil to make an exquisite glaze for a painting. Did the painting deserve it? Where is it now? A sombre material, gloomy. So the glaze is described, and so it would be, made of human heart.

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Possessed by the God

It was the smile. Different from the one when she walked out with him and he lifted his bent arm like a wing and allowed her to rest her hand in the crook of his elbow. Though the two had in common that they were hardly smiles at all, mainly a gleam in her eye. A smile on the mouth with the right messages is not too difficult, but to get the eyes to express them is quite hard. The walking¯out smile conveyed a hidden, in fact quite subterranean pride, whereas the other was intended to hide. Both smiles were cool, serene, lofty, but this other had a glint of the sardonic, only a glint, more might have seemed forced, and behind it she was safe. When she got it right she could walk, with just the slightest languid sway to her hips, out to the pavilion in the garden where the girls were supposed to sleep. Girls: only ever one at a time. But over time quite a number. Sabine did not undress beforehand. At one time she had worn a black silk kimono with rose¯painted peonies, but then she decided that was too intimate so now she wore going¯out clothes, one of the Chanel suits she favoured or perhaps a cocktail dress,

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something stiff¯skirted and rustling. With a superb piece of jewel¯ lery. On the nights of the glamorous dresses Jean¯Marie would look at her admiringly when she took his evening chocolate in to him, as he sat in bed reading his daily half¯hour of novel. The routine was strict: she took in the chocolate, in a china pot with a sideways spout that had belonged to his great¯grandmother, he sat in bed wearing one of his dark paisley nightshirts, he said: Tonight, I think, my dear. He had a way of raising his eyebrows in high arches across his forehead and opening his eyes wide and flashing them, at the same time his mouth would open in a gleaming swift smile and it was as though his face had beamed a message. She would bend her cheek to be kissed. On cocktail¯dress nights his mouth would curl in its sensuous way and he would twist his hand in the crackling fabric and brush it against his cheek. She would wait in the kitchen until she knew the chocolate would be finished and the novel time nearly done and then walk through the house and out of the door into the garden and across to the small pavilion. Come now, she would say to the girl, who would follow her into the house. Provided she found the smile, she was invincible behind it. The girl might talk, ask questions, make conversation, but the smile would hold all that at bay. They would go back through the hall and up the stairs, Sabine’s shoes with their small sharp heels clicking on the tiled floor, the girl’s slippers shuffling. The girl wore a nightdress and robe, that was the routine, all the details were part of the routine. Sabine’s mode of dressing was hers to control, but not the other details. She would knock on Jean¯Marie’s bedroom door, open it, the girl would go in and Sabine disappear. She knew he would be

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sitting up in bed in the jewel¯coloured nightshirt, but she never stepped into the room far enough to see him, or to have to look at the expression on his face. Jean¯Marie’s bed was large, with a buttoned headboard in satin the colour of one of the fine old burgundies he liked to drink. Its mattress was the most expensively sprung kind since the delicate back of an intellectual needs great care. Sabine’s bed was smaller, boat¯shaped, with white linen sheets and a soft old mattress, she’d slept in it since she was a small girl, had brought it with her to the marriage, not knowing then that she would be the one to sleep in it, thinking that indeed there would be a child, before Jean¯Marie made it clear that he was to be her only concern in this marriage. When she could let the smile go, this smile faint, serene, pitying perhaps, sardonic a little, remote, untouchable, hugely hard work, she could curl up in her bed and feel she was in her own safe place, in the clean linen smells and cool smooth fabric of her childhood. They were not there for breakfast; the girls he invited to stay in the pavilion were not invited to breakfast with him. Sabine and Jean¯Marie ate alone. He dipped long slices of buttered bread into his bowl of strong milk coffee and looked out into the garden. Not the part where the pavilion was, the side, with its vegetable beds and espaliered fruit trees against the warm brick wall. Of course it looked different at different seasons, sometimes there was snow, sometimes it was end¯of¯summer yellowed. Their useful garden, was how he described it, and when he sat placidly drinking his coffee and gazing at it he was doing his useful thinking. Sabine sitting in her red woollen dressing¯gown, pouring two¯handed the hot milk and the hot coffee so they mixed together, did not speak

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and tried not to think, her thinking was not useful in the way her husband’s was. Once she had thought she might read a book, a new novel that she was enjoying, or a biography, but he said not to, it distracted him. She looked at the rows of cabbages and thought of Marie¯Antoinette playing at being a dairymaid, because she had seen rows of ornamental cabbages at her cottage at Versailles. She wondered if anybody had ever done a study of women and the games they play, the make¯believe, the ludic constructions of daily lives. Ludic was one of Jean¯Marie’s words. Dinner was the time for conversation, and that was amusing. Jean¯Marie always had a lot to say, and on these occasions he often found Sabine witty and gave his dry chuckle. He would look dotingly at her; she was his wife. One of the girls might be there, or other disciples, students perhaps, if they were bright enough, or simply acolytes of the philosopher. They sat strung taut and waiting for their opportunity to be clever; if they succeeded they could be invited again. Jean¯Marie raising his eyebrows, flashing his eyes and his smile, could terrify them. It was an expression that examined all questions. Stuffed cabbage was often on the menu at these dinners, the woman who cooked the meals made a delicious one. It is the dish of philosophers, said Jean¯Marie, but was put out when other people fed it to him. It was his role to provide the simple straight¯from¯the¯earth food of peasants, but he did not think it should be offered to him at tables where he was a guest. Like the robust country wines he served. The simple pleasures, these things celebrating an essence of Frenchness that came from the country’s ancient soil. But when being entertained he liked to be offered a good burgundy. At a pinch, a Bordeaux; he wasn’t difficult.

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Jean¯Marie spoke, with a tolerance more dismissive than contempt, of the pre¯war cafe set, the Deux Magots mob, and of the gay lads of the post¯war period, all very interesting, they had done their best, you could see what they were trying to get at. But, said Jean¯Marie. He did not say, Whereas I, his acolytes could say it for him. He shrugged his shoulders. But, he said. Of course. His voice was mellifluous, he spoke fast, they had to keep their ears open and their minds sharp to follow him. The occasions when husband and wife went out together, his arm held out like a wing and her gloved hand in the bend of his elbow, were not frequent, though there were regular outings. To mass at Saint Sulpice on Sundays, and afterwards to take coffee at one of the small bars thereabouts. Never on their own. The excursion to mass was too famous to be private. Sometimes to a dinner or a reception, when a car would come. She knew that he approved of the way she looked, examining her from head to toe and nodding. The plain expensive dresses and costumes, cut to suit her slender figure, her hair styled short and shapely, its blond colour ashing into grey, her handsome legs in fine stockings and shoes that cost a fortune. He never minded what she spent on her clothes or her appearance. She was his wife. She never went to his lectures, either the regular ones for students or the public ones, where people sat on the floor, because there was no other room, sat in fact right at his feet, looking up at him as they wrote down everything he said. She often walked the short distance downhill to the station and caught the train into the city; it was twenty minutes to the great market at Denfert¯Rochereau. The delicacies she bought just for

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him were part of the routine too, the lobsters from a certain fish¯ monger who kept excellent ones, in the season, and scallops in the shell, and a particular kind of sausage fashioned from fine seafood. And sometimes she’d go right into Les Halles, where there was still a little street of merchants selling fresh foie gras. These things were served at meals for just the two of them, cooked by Sabine. His long pointed lips sucked the meat from lobster claws, his plump white hands mopped with bread the juices of the foie gras pan¯fried with caramelised apples. At dinners with guests those same pointed lips mouthed succulent little blooms of discourse, but when they were alone he said things like, These beans are very fine, Sabine, really they are excellently tiny, you have done well, and the dressing with walnut oil and sherry vinegar is quite a masterly touch. For he had a good palate long¯trained and noticed these things. At the finish of these meals he would smile lovingly at her, and often embrace her at the end of the evening. Sometimes they’d light the fire in the drawing room and sit reading, more often Jean¯Marie would go into his library and work there. There were the lectures to write, and articles, and of course the books. It was Sabine’s job to see that the house ran, not like clockwork, which ticks, or like a machine, which hums or purrs or even roars, rather like an animal organism whose gentle breathing you might hear as a kind of comforting rhythm if you listened quietly but which was silent, as thinking is, and digestion, when it is healthy. Jean¯Marie occasionally praised Sabine for the fine art she made of it, but mostly it was so efficient in never impinging upon him that he never remarked it. The woman who came in to clean, the cook who made the stuffed cabbage and peasant stews, the man

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who gardened, the plumber, the roof mender, the washing¯machine repairman, all came without his knowing. Sabine kept the accounts and wrote the cheques. In the evenings when he was in his library she sat at her pretty desk in the morning room and did the books, double entry in big ledgers with marbled endpapers, meticulous columns of figures written in tiny black script and always balanc¯ ing. Occasionally he glanced at the figures, this was the nearest he got to an awareness of the mechanisms that kept his life running so smoothly. He admired them as a work of art as much as of expen¯ diture, and provided the end figures had a pleasing discrepancy on the plus side he hardly registered them. Sabine was a thrifty woman. She spent an enormous amount of money, but to excel¯ lent and careful purpose. It was in the high bourgeois tradition that he liked to proclaim was the glory of France. As of course was the peasant tradition, there was no contradiction there, not as he described it. Rather a pleasing symmetry. The pearl¯grey three¯piece suits always clean and pressed, the professionally laundered grey¯blue shirts, the polished house and tended garden, the elegant meals, none of these things disturbed the large expensive gently breathing animal in which his mind did its thinking. Sometimes when Sabine went into the city she met her friend Cathérine for a cup of tea. Not very often. They had kept in touch, just, since they were girls together, at college, students in book¯keeping, and had a firm but discreet friendship. Cathérine knew Sabine was married to the great man and was too polite to give in to her curiosity about him. Sabine offered titbits of her life, knowing that a friendship deserves some intimacy, but she

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did not invite Cathérine in. She knew quite a lot of things about her friend, and Cathérine’s daughter Fanny, mainly insignificant confidences. The wedding, the apartment, the son¯in¯law’s skills. In turn she said, I am buying lobster for Jean¯Marie’s dinner, he is so fond of it. Cathérine might say, How will you cook it? And then they’d discuss sauces and whether it was better hot or cold. Sabine might mention that they were dining at the Palace and what the food would be like there. Cathérine might say, I saw Jean¯Marie mentioned in Le Monde last week, you must be very proud. Yes, said Sabine. The girls in the pavilion were not there every night. In their singular quality. But some nights. Jean¯Marie in his paisley nightshirts, which Sabine ironed carefully, he hated wrinkled nightclothes, leaning against his padded satin bedhead, drinking his hot chocolate. And Sabine escorting the young woman into the house, to the door of the bedroom. Sometimes one of them would get pregnant, in the tiresome way of young girls, and look at her with triumphant fearful eyes. Sabine would give her a slip of paper with an address and a cheque and that was the end of it. No children, was the rule. No care¯ lessness, either. Sabine abided by the rules, so must they. The incident was recorded in small figures in Sabine’s account book, coded as financial transactions so often are, a sum of money and a name that might have been a hotel, or a holiday house, but was in fact a clinic. The House in the Pines. In the suburbs, in fact. If Jean¯Marie ever wondered what it was, he did not ask. Following these sums of money spent on The House in the Pines, not immedi¯ ately but shortly afterwards, would be items for large sums spent at

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jewellers. Sabine had superb jewellery, not glittering gold stuff like every other well¯dressed woman on the metro but discreetly rich and beautifully made pieces. An antique half¯hoop of diamonds, worn beside her engagement ring. A looped brooch of corals, with pear¯shaped earrings to match. And her pearls, a quite long string of comfortably but not vulgarly large baroque pearls, so flatter¯ ing to the complexion, and costing considerably more than The House in the Pines, their date shortly after the first occurrence of the girls in the pavilion. Sabine poured the weak tea she and Cathérine liked into fine cups. They often met at an old¯fashioned tea shop with spindly chairs and ethereal cakes. Cathérine looked at the large topaz ring that slipped heavily around Sabine’s thin pale brown finger. She said, I think Fanny would like to have a baby, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. So long they have been married now. Babies, said Sabine. What is this habit with babies. Always where they are not wanted, and not where they are. She sighed. Some friends, after a sigh like that, would have said, Did you ever . . . Would you have liked . . . but these women were not given to asking questions, except about lobsters and such. They offered their small pieces of information and the questions were never spoken. Of course, she is young, said Cathérine. These days. Women have babies quite late, these days. Yes, said Sabine. That is true. They had never been to one another’s house. Cathérine had considered asking Sabine to come to her apartment for lunch but thought it might seem she was fishing for an invitation in return.

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Which she would be, so she couldn’t do it. She sometimes wondered how Sabine lived. It seemed a way of life quite splendid, from odd mentions in the newspaper. Sabine the lady of the manor; she looked the part. And the great man in his library, not to be disturbed. Sabine did not think of inviting Cathérine. It was not some¯ thing that could happen. She did not have visitors to the house. The large house, with its warm rooms full of scents, floor wax and furniture polish, quinces in a bowl, lavender in the linen, hyacinths or lilac or lilies in vases, the spicy smells of stuffed cabbage. She ran it, with its strict net of timetables, its meticulous web of figures in the account book, she inhabited it, enjoyed its comforts, with Jean¯Marie or on her own, entertained the designated people in it, but she did not in any sense own it, it did not belong to her, or take note of her in its functioning. She was its chatelaine, and privileged, but she did not have the freedom of it. Sometimes she read about people being given the freedom of a city, symbolised by a large key, frequently gold, and thought she would like such a thing for her own house. Of course it wouldn’t happen. Not unless Jean¯Marie died, and that was not a thought for the thinking. Nevertheless she took pleasure in its order and its odours, its rich textures and surfaces. She bought things for it and set them in place with a careful eye. She sat in the morning room and looked out at the vegetable garden, the cabbages and lettuces, the beans on trellises and the peas, the fruit trees and raspberry canes and rhubarb beds, and thought of all the blessings she could count. •

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Cathérine had a garden, but only for looking at. When André had demolished the grand house to build the block of flats they lived in he had left a fragment of its gardens, so there was a view from their upper floor of box hedges and gravel walks and a line of pollarded lime trees. Remember when we were at that college, doing our book¯ keeping, what good girls we were. And shy. We didn’t know at all where we’d end up. Isn’t it funny, Cathérine said to Sabine. It’s just as well, isn’t it, said Sabine. Otherwise we would not have the courage to live our lives. And yet, they’ve turned out well. We’re both prosperous, contented. Oh yes, yes, there’s all that. But somehow, being young, all those hopes, ambitions . . . it’s just as well we don’t know. The mystery of the future, it’s the great blessing. I think I had more fears, said Cathérine. It seems I feel more relief than you. Oh relief, yes, but that’s it, it’s calm, it’s not grand . . . You have your husband, there’s grandness, such ideas . . . Yes.

Jean¯Marie wore a djellaba when he worked at home in the mornings. He said it allowed the air to circulate around his body which helped in thinking. In the old days he’d worn nothing under it, possibly still did. She’d had to wear skirts and stockings, not trousers and not tights, he would often seek her out and take his pleasure, from behind, bending her over the back of the sofa, or

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a table, or his favourite place, the sink in the kitchen. He’d never slept with her, not all night, but had often come to her bed. She wondered if he was a good lover. She had not had that thought at the time, but later, with the girls in the pavilion, the wondering had come. He was enthusiastic, she knew that, very keen, he took great pleasure in the act, but was he a good lover? For a woman, not just himself. She could not tell, not from experience, he was all she knew. She had sometimes imagined taking lovers and maybe finding out, but had never done so, hadn’t worked out how, and thought that probably she wasn’t really interested or she would have made it happen. Reading magazines and novels made her suppose that he wasn’t, but they might not be right themselves, all sorts of fictions might be perpetrated, and then who knew what he had learned from the pavilion girls. She had heard one of them say, in a holy voice, It is being possessed by the god, and realised she meant Jean¯Marie, how distasteful. But maybe it was. Maybe she was living with a god. Then I am an angel, she said to herself. The angel of good housekeeping. And then, when she thought of famous examples of divine possession and impregnation there was never much sense that the woman enjoyed it. Mary, Danae, Europa, Leda. Fun for the chap, but for the woman? Psychologically demanding, being chosen by the god, and of a dread excitement, but the woman’s pleasure not ever mentioned. Not much foreplay in a shower of gold, or even a swan for that matter. And as for the Holy Spirit, the girl didn’t even know until told about it later. It needed an angel with lilies to inform her. And just the one time in each case and then she was pregnant and that was it, left to get on with it, sorrow and tears

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mostly, as is ordained for the daughters of Eve. Just the one time; girls always said that of shameful pregnancies: I only did it once. But in the divine cases it was true, for certain. Presumably this is the attribute of a god, to be able to impregnate first time. She did not often admire the pavilion girls. They often seemed coarse and even a bit grubby, or anyway sloppy. But of course it wasn’t any of her business. She didn’t talk to them much. They said things like, What gorgeous amethysts, or Awesome vegetable garden. You could think of them as puppies, clumsily gambolling about, except that they were so avid. She no longer asked herself whatever could Jean¯Marie see in them. Mimi was a case in point. A small thin girl, very dark, with an unfortunate complexion and solid hairy legs. She looked fourteen, but Sabine knew she wasn’t, since she had finished university and was out in the world, in fact had a good job in the faculty, and anyway Jean¯Marie wasn’t that foolish. She looked fourteen, that early anguished teen stage, but at the same time ancient, her thin childish air somehow wizened. She is like a fruit that withers before it is ripe, said Sabine to herself. And not coming across as very clean, with a potent body odour and a muddy tint to her skin. Called Mimi, what sort of a name. Probably not a christened name. Inventing herself. Sabine sometimes thought of saying to her husband: Jean¯Marie, what do you think I make of these girls? She imagined his answer: My dear, I do not expect you to make anything of them. The pavilion girls always disappeared the next morning, back to their other lives. They got their own breakfast, and Sabine did not expect to see them. One afternoon Mimi rang the doorbell.

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Sabine was slicing a very young and delicate calf ’s liver, a favourite of Jean¯Marie’s, for dinner. Mimi needed to talk, she said. Sabine took her into the kitchen. She could not afford the time to sit around in the drawing room making conversation with this girl, and certainly didn’t want to. She offered her fruit juice or mineral water. Mimi talked about the calf ’s liver, and about the snow peas out of the garden, and the raspberries Sabine was making into a summer pudding, an English dish that her husband had got very fond of when he was in Cambridge. She found herself telling Mimi how to make it, with stale bread and not cooking the berries and not using too much sugar, it should be quite tart, the freshness of the fruit should be everything. The girl seemed distracted. She examined a long skewer¯like fork that was lying on the table. What’s it for? she asked. For getting the meat out of lobster claws, said Sabine. She waited for her to say why she was there. When Mimi said, I have to tell you, I am pregnant, in a small voice, Sabine stopped her slicing of day¯old bread for the pudding, and sighed. How very careless, she said. She got her chequebook and a card with the name and address of The House in the Pines on it. She wrote a generous cheque, enough for the termination and a considerable sum more. What’s this? asked Mimi. Sabine sighed again. They’ll take care of you. They’re very efficient. Safe. Even kind. Mimi frowned. But it’s not nearly time . . . Oh, she said. Her face went pale under its prickle of acne. You mean . . . an abortion? I couldn’t do that.

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It’s a bit late. What do you mean? You’re pregnant. There’s not a lot of options. There’s the only one. I don’t believe in murder. Sabine looked at her. Do you see yourself as Leda? Or maybe Europa? Danae perhaps? Pardon? Mimi looked bewildered. Sabine felt herself being malicious. After all, being possessed by the god hadn’t been Mimi’s expression. She just always lumped the pavilion girls together. This way, it’s neat, simple, clean, no fuss. Whereas a baby is the opposite of all those things. I know. But a baby is a human being. You know, with Jean¯Marie and all, I’m a Catholic, a Catholic intellectual, but essentially a Catholic. I can’t kill a child. Intellectually, emotionally, morally . . . there’s nothing would permit me to kill a baby. It’s a foetus. She’s alive. Human. She? Or he. Sabine went on making her summer pudding. You don’t think I planned this, do you? It’s the last thing I ever thought of. But I don’t see I have any choice. Jean¯Marie cannot be involved. No children, that’s the rule, said Sabine, her voice rising and harsh. No children. I obeyed the rules. So can you. I don’t expect Jean¯Marie to be involved. It is me, my choice. I don’t know why I even told you. Sabine sat down. Yes, why did you tell me? She stared at Mimi.

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Are you thinking of blackmail? How can we be certain who its father is? Do you think I have no moral sense at all? What sort of whore do you think I am? Tears ran down Mimi’s cheeks. I don’t know. I suppose . . . it’s momentous. I had to tell someone. Your mother? Family? Mimi shook her head. There’s just me. I’ll manage. I’m okay, I can. A baby. It’s a matter for rejoicing. That’s what I think. Unto us a child is born: it should be a matter of joy, always. She smiled. Her colour had come back, and the acne scars were barely a smudge. Her eyes were wide open and bright, they were full of light. Shining. Keep the cheque, anyway, said Sabine. You never know. And anyway you can use the money. But don’t forget, you cannot trouble Jean¯Marie. His life must go smoothly, or he can’t think. No complications. Of course not. I had no intention of worrying him. Irritating, more like, Sabine thought. She looked at the girl. Woman. She appeared less wizened. Maybe she was about to ripen. To ripen, and split open with Jean¯Marie’s seed. It’s you I wanted to tell, said Mimi. I thought you should know. I do so admire you, you’re so wonderful . . . about . . . everything. Sabine didn’t know whether she felt jealous of this young woman, or sorry for her, or proud. All three, it seemed. After she had gone she sat at the kitchen table so long that it was too late to get the pudding done and she had to open a jar of quince preserves to have with yoghurt, perfectly delicious but how wasteful to open preserved fruit when it was the high season of all the fleeting summer fruits.

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She thought a lot about Mimi and the light in her eyes. One day she went to a funeral in the Val de Grâce of a retired colonel with whom Jean¯Marie had corresponded. He did not have time to go so she went in his place, the mark of respect was necessary, he said. Afterwards she walked down the rue St Jacques and stopped in front of Plaisir d’Enfant. All the beautiful tiny garments. She went in and bought a little jacket in cream wool georgette, embroidered with red rosebuds. A boy or a girl could wear it, the sales assistant said. It wasn’t as though it was pink, the red was very stylish. All the babies are wearing red, she said, little touches, like the rosebuds. When Jean¯Marie came home he asked her how the funeral went, and listened briefly. He’d had a letter from Mimi saying she wasn’t coming any more, and was put out. The girls wrote letters to him quite often, all his acolytes did, he encouraged this elegant activity, reminding them how many great thoughts have been preserved in correspondences, but this was unpleasant news. He cast the missive down on the desk. The silly girl, he said, annoyed. These flighty creatures, you can’t depend on them. He frowned, and sank his head on his chest, and paced the room. Severance was his role, he did not care for it to be usurped by a silly girl. Sabine looked at the letter when his back was turned and memorised the address. She watched Jean¯Marie pull himself together. She wondered if the girl’s dismissal had made him afraid he wasn’t much of a lover, and was astonished at herself. Dinner was a beefsteak, well¯hung and tender, with parsley butter and a salad, followed by a ripe camembert and fruit for dessert, which exacerbated Jean¯Marie’s bad temper; he liked real desserts. The funeral, she said, I hadn’t time for puddings. Though there was a good bakery opposite

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the Val de Grâce where she could have bought some tarts. It had crossed her mind to do so, but she hadn’t. It is quite disappointing, said Jean¯Marie. At the end of a long and difficult day one looks forward to some small delicacy.

Sabine walked down the hill and caught the train into Paris as she normally did when she was going to the market at Denfert¯ Rochereau as befits a thrifty bourgeois housewife, having given her husband his breakfast in bed, his bowl of milk coffee, the sticks of bread and butter, with jam, greengage plum from their own tree, it was a little early for him to be out of bed, though of course he was working, reading some necessary text. But she didn’t get out at Denfert¯Rochereau, she went on to Palais Royal and caught a taxi to the address she had memorised from Mimi’s letter. The building was an ornate early twentieth¯century edifice plastered with garlands and swags and ribbons. It was raining, a steady drizzle out of a low pale grey sky. The dead brown leaves of the plane trees hung limp and wet from their branches, or turned into sludge on the ground. Water trickled and tinkled and lay in gleaming puddles. Mimi’s apartment was up four steep flights of stairs; she could go straight in the street door, there was no bell or intercom or code to dial. When Mimi opened the door her face was bright pink and damp, her hair spiky with sweat. She looked angrily at Sabine, then put her hand over her mouth and rushed away. Sabine came in and shut the door. The apartment had tall ceilings and panelling painted a pale coffee colour, rather shabby and worn; it was austere, quite bare in fact, but the proportions were lovely,

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and it was clearly someone’s chosen place, it belonged to Mimi, it was hers, and that was a powerful thing. It was filled with pale clear rainy light, a firm and demanding light that made no promises but did not dazzle either. Sabine was pierced with a sudden desire for a life inhabiting just such a space. Mimi came back. Morning sickness, she muttered. Yes, I know, it should be over by now. Tell it that. Shall I make a cup of tea? said Sabine. With a plain biscuit. Or dry toast. That’s supposed to help. So they say. Mimi, pink and damp, her black hair spiky round her face, in the intimate just faintly decayed grandeur of her own rooms was splendid, with her big belly and frowning eyes. Sabine gave her the parcel from Plaisir d’Enfant. Mimi frowned harder. Sabine opened the door to a bedroom, smaller but equally tall, then found the kitchen. The apartment was tidy, clean, showing evidence of the life Mimi led there, with a lot of books, and catalogues from art galleries in a pile, with herbs in pots on a windowsill and a large green¯flowered orchid and a computer with beside it a pile of manuscript pages. A newspaper was open at a crossword puzzle. In the kitchen she found a tin of tea and a teapot. When she took the tea in Mimi was holding the tiny jacket and looking doubtfully at it. Thank you, she said, in a cold voice. It’s an act of self¯indulgence on my part, said Sabine. I happened to see it in a shop window and couldn’t resist it. It’s very pretty. Mimi put it down and looked at her. This isn’t going to be Jean¯Marie’s baby. He isn’t going to take her over. Heavens, you can’t even begin to imagine that he might want to do so. Jean¯Marie doesn’t do babies. Or children. Never has.

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Never will. He does not need mortal progeny to carry on his name. His immortality is his books, his words, they will carry his being, his essence, into the future, and far more dependably than any flesh and blood descendants. Sabine was silent, afraid of the naked bitterness she’d heard in her own voice. Oh yes, of course, Mimi said reverently. Yes, of course, I should have understood that. Of course there can be no troubling him. She gave Sabine a dazzling smile. I feel so happy about this baby. When I don’t feel sick. I knew an Englishwoman who got morning sickness. She used to eat a large breakfast of eggs and bacon and sausages and toast and marmalade, you know all that English breakfast thing—Sabine gave a faint shudder—and then run off to the bathroom and vomit the whole lot up. Then she’d wash her face and come back and have another large English breakfast, eggs, bacon, sausages, toast and marmalade, and be perfectly all right. Mimi laughed. How dreadful, she said, with wonder in her voice. One English breakfast, that’s pretty frightening, but two! I don’t want to take your baby either, said Sabine. I after all have Jean¯Marie. But I would like to come and visit sometimes, and even help, if I may. Mimi looked doubtful again. A baby needs a godmother, you know that. To fill in the gaps. There are always gaps, I know enough about babies to be sure of that. Well, we can see, can’t we, said Mimi. A godmother. An ancient necessity.

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It sounds good. Yes. Perhaps. Mimi seemed after all quite to like having Sabine to visit. They became friends in a wary kind of way. Sabine always brought small rich things, expensive beautiful versions of necessities, which she said she bought because it was such fun, which was true, and Mimi believed her. She didn’t go to the birth, though Mimi invited her, there were other young women for that. She waited several weeks, then called in and found Mimi distraught. The flat a mess, the baby crying, a smell of old nappies and Mimi grubbier¯looking than ever. I didn’t know it would be like this, she said. Sabine didn’t either, but had heard. Nobody knows, she said, otherwise the race would die out. Women even forget from one child to the next, so they say. She bought Mimi a washing machine and a dryer and came with pots of soup and stuffed cabbage in plastic boxes to freeze, and champagne to drink and once a bottle of quite ancient sauternes with a jar of fresh foie gras so that Mimi would not always be submerged in infantine things. The baby was indeed a girl, Mimi called her Louise, and Sabine thought she was quite remarkably beautiful, unlike most babies she saw, with a round little head like a rosy apple with firm juicy cheeks and a cap of spiky black hair and eyes of that milky depthless blue before they let you know what their real colour will be. Jean¯Marie had a rather cute tip¯tilted nose which she had always thought a quite dangerous feature for a philosopher, and indeed it had once been rather sharply cartooned in a left¯wing newspaper, but on Louise it was utterly charming.

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Mimi started to ring Sabine up and organise for her to come and look after her goddaughter.

The strength of a net is the myriad thin threads of which it is made. If even one of these is cut or broken then the precise perfect tension of the whole is irremediably lost. The things which it is designed to contain poke or bulge through it, possibly they fall out altogether, and are lost or broken. Some threads broken mean more threads break, and finally the net is a net no longer, but a snarled and snaggled tangle of threads. So it was with Sabine’s complex net of timetables which held the life at number 23 rue Guy de Maupassant in its thin strong filaments. It had been a kind of magic net which she constantly wove, knotting the threads and checking the work for flaws and weaknesses, her skilful fingers performing the intricate double task of creation and mending, her eyes vigilant. Now threads broke, unnoticed, the tautness was lost, it no longer held. Things dropped through, and were broken or lost. The net began to unravel, to become lumpy and misshapen. And then there were the accounts, with their own compli¯ cated webs of figures. Bulges there too. Washing machines. Clothes dryers. State¯of¯the¯art prams. Lots of small astronomical sums from Plaisir d’Enfant. Jean¯Marie looked at them with a queasy eye. He never had understood them. The balance at the end, yes, in the black always, and that still seemed okay, but there was something strange about the process. He shook his head, it didn’t help. Of course, the balance at the end was the thing. That did still look okay.

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Things began to go wrong. The house was no longer immacu¯ late. Sabine was no longer immaculate. Jean¯Marie put on one of his pearl¯grey suits and found a gravy stain on the lapel. He opened the drawer and there were no shirts impeccably pressed and folded in their laundry cellophane. Dinner was increasingly often from the charcuterie or the bakery; once he thought it was a frozen meal, a quite classy one, but certainly not the real thing. The beans had not been picked while still tiny. The courgettes ran to fat. One day some strange cleaning woman burst into his library. He lifted his head in shock. Only Sabine cleaned and dusted the library. He roared. And then . . . he had lost his train of thought! Something really important, something huge, it was just shaping itself, he had his fountain pen ready, something vital, essential, the thing he’d been working to . . . and now, what was it? Where was it? Gone. Lost. Lost. His eyes filled with tears. He rushed out to find his wife, but she wasn’t anywhere about. He realised that he was alone in the house with the cleaning woman, that Sabine had left him alone with the cleaning woman. What had possessed her to do that? It couldn’t be menopausal, could it? Surely she was long past that. Wasn’t she? Surely, long past. How old was she? He tried to recall her face, as it had looked at breakfast, say. He closed his eyes and pictured her. Her hair rather long, even shaggy, starting to curl a bit, very grey of course, had been for a while, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright. Quite pretty, in a rather unkempt way. Of course she had been very pretty when she was young, and then always a handsome woman. An elegant bourgeois matron. Always to be depended on to catch the right note of smartness. Not a

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grey¯haired girl with a pink face. He realised suddenly what it all meant. She had a lover. Sabine had a lover. That was it, a glow. It meant a lover. Why was she doing this to him? The anguish, the rage, the bitter gush of jealousy like a monstrous attack of dyspepsia, how could he think in that state? What possessed her to do this to him? He took off his djellaba, got dressed and caught the train into the city. He would go to a certain little gallery in the Latin Quarter and look at pictures, it was a while since he had bought a picture, and perhaps the lady who ran it would be there, and available in the evening, and if not he could still dine on his own on one of the excellent menus at the Bel Aujourd’hui. When Sabine arrived home quite late and with Louise and found him not there she supposed she must have forgotten he was going out. Mimi was off to Bruges for a conference and Sabine was minding Louise for three days, not just an afternoon. She put her to bed in the pavilion, with the baby intercom she’d bought; she would sleep there herself later. Next morning Jean¯Marie came down to breakfast at his usual time and found no sign of it. He went into Sabine’s room, realising he hadn’t set foot in it for years, decades even; she wasn’t there and the bed wasn’t slept in. The shameless hussy. Jean¯Marie had to sit down suddenly with the shock of it. A thought struck him, and he went out to the pavilion. He opened the door, and there she was in her nightgown. A mixture of scents wafted round her, perfumes and powders and sweet fleshly odours. A naked baby lay on the table. He gaped. That’s a . . . baby.

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Sabine smiled up at him. Yes, she said. She was tickling its tummy and helping it kick its legs. The baby gurgled and Sabine pressed her face into its stomach and covered it with kisses. Her hair was askew and she had no make¯up on. Her face was shiny and quite pink. A little girl, as you see, she said. A little girl, in the pavilion. Always girls in the pavilion. Always betrayals in the pavilion. Betray¯ als, ha ha, that’s funny. She laughed, a long throaty laugh. My breakfast, said Jean¯Marie. You know where things are, said Sabine. Well, I suppose you don’t. But you can learn. It’s logical really. And you, my dear, are above all a man of logic. She started shaking white powder over the baby as though she were flouring her in order to fry her. Her fingers paddled in it, a little cloud rose up, and she talked loving nonsense words. Giggling. Cooing. A woman her age, making a fool of herself. As people always have, always will, offering language and love to each new generation. Louise looked in her eyes and laughed back. Jean¯Marie did not see this, the love and language. He saw a woman immune to reason, a woman it was impossible to talk to. But he tried. My breakfast, he said, again. Sabine was folding a nappy with skilful fingers, wrapping and pinning. It is long past the proper hour. She looked at him then, and smiled, a dazzling triumphant tender smile, but so strong, so tough, so serene, that his words were shredded to pieces like a wave against a large smooth rock in

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the sunlight. The words shredded into fragments without meaning, not to Sabine, who was moved by them no more than is a rock serene in the sunlight which a wave dashes itself against, and not to Jean¯Marie either. He didn’t know what to do. Words had never lost their meaning before, not to his colleagues, his students, his acolytes, however subtle and difficult they found their sense, and never to Sabine, who normally needed very little telling, who answered his wants by instinct. And certainly never to himself. He could not remember when he had spoken and it had not meant anything. Make me a cup of coffee, dear, while you’re at it, she said. I should feed Louise now she’s had her bath, she’ll be hungry. Who’s is she? Jean¯Marie asked. For a terrifying moment he thought she might be Sabine’s child, but surely she was too old, and wouldn’t he have noticed her being pregnant? And he certainly hadn’t fathered it. He knew how long it was since he’d made love to her. She’s my goddaughter. Her mother is a friend. Isn’t she simply adorable? Jean¯Marie grunted and, with a small swing of his djellaba which was meant to be masterful but felt simply petulant, turned in the direction of the kitchen. It was long past time for his break¯ fast. That was why he felt sick.

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The Critical Period

I have found us a house, said Gérard. A house? said Fanny. Are we looking for a house? You never know. We might want a house one day. Where is it? . . . In the suburbs? Could we bear to live in the suburbs? It’s only twenty¯five minutes on the train to Luxembourg. And getting less all the time. I love this apartment. So do I. But a house, with a garden, and bedrooms, so much space. He doesn’t say, room for children to play, to live. She knows he is thinking this, though they have agreed to stop considering the no children, though it is clear from the subtexts of conversations that the idea does not go away. This apartment is quite huge. Plenty of people have children in much smaller apartments than this. Fanny sits often and reads, and sometimes lifts her eyes from her book and enjoys gazing at it, its high ceilings and the oval dome where

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cherubs romp and garlands hover, the pale yellow walls that catch and reflect the sunlight, or replicate it on dull days. I don’t expect there would be cherubs on its ceilings, says Fanny. He doesn’t say, it might not matter, if we had our own flesh¯ and¯blood little fat cherubs; he is a delicate man. No, I don’t suppose so. Roses, he says, we could have roses. Real ones, in the garden. An arched walk, with roses climbing over it, scented, filling the air with scent. Summer nights, and the odour of roses. Lunch in the garden, under the cherry trees. Yes, she says. There’s no hurry, says Gérard. I didn’t know you were keen to be a gardener. She smiles tenderly at him, holding his tough working hand in hers. Neither did I. Maybe I am growing up. Oh no, says Fanny. Don’t do that. Never do that. Promise me. Okay. I shall stay a boy forever. A boy gardener. He found out about the house through word of mouth. It was a deceased estate, and so far he hadn’t had a chance to inspect it. It was three or four minutes walk from the train, in a charming commuter valley. There was a high brick wall around it and he had seen it only through its firmly grilled gates, it was rather like a small manor house, square, symmetrical, almost a cube, with attic windows and a basement, the front staircase a shallow arc leading to a door quite high above the ground, with a fan of glass panes to shelter it. There were high balconied windows, it was stucco pointed with stone, and the walls were covered with ivy. It was set on the side of a hill that gently sloped to the sun, with a circular gravel

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drive, lawns, a small orchard, a copse of what looked like hazelnuts and a little stream that ran between grassy banks along one side. He couldn’t see this through the gates but knew it to be there. The brick walls were covered with espaliered fruit trees growing wild, their long whippy branches waving over the walls. It was gloriously pretty, with a promise of summer lusciousness, and he decided he would buy it if the price was all right. He wouldn’t mind if it was quite high, as long as it wasn’t outrageous. A deceased estate was usually code for a wreck, but that wouldn’t be a problem. It could even be a bonus if original mouldings and panellings remained, but if they didn’t he was expert at restoring them, with old or new work. He would buy it and fix it up, and one day they might live in it, a graceful life of polished sunny rooms and nourishing gardens. Whatever happened it could hardly be a loss. Fanny told Séverine that Gérard was thinking of buying a house. Oh no, she said, you can’t, Fanny, it’s too far away, you can’t go so far away. It’s only twenty¯five minutes from Luxembourg. But it’s a train, such a bore, and besides the suburbs are another world, I’ll never see you. Well, it’s not happening yet, said Fanny. They were sitting in her yellow room drinking tea. Sylvain was at school and Ghislaine, who’d finally learned to walk, squatted by the low table. Fanny had collected shells from her last holiday and put them in a bowl of a pale turquoise colour that made her think of the sea, and the little girl was picking them out and lining them up in a row on the table. There were madeleine cakes on a

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plate, and Séverine tried to give her one but she took no notice, concentrating on her shells to get the line exactly as she wanted it, selecting, rejecting, changing. She did this with one hand, the other held the hem of her dress of fine Liberty flowered wool in a complicated pleat between her fingers, so that an edge of it fitted under her thumbnail. She was a round¯faced child who looked at the world with solemn eyes. I think she gets prettier every time I see her, said Fanny. And her dress, it’s beautiful. It was smocked across the bodice and tied at the back with rose¯coloured ribbons. It was a picture¯book dress. She won’t wear trousers or jeans or anything useful like that, said Séverine. I have to take her with me when I buy clothes so I won’t get it wrong. Has to be dresses, and they have to have roses on them. Sounds limiting. They can be printed, said Séverine, or embroidered. Provided there’s roses on them it’s all right. So far. Lucky there’s a fashion for good little English girl dresses. Sometimes I wonder whether you come to see me or whether I’m just an excuse to visit Plaisir d’Enfant, said Fanny. Oh Fanny. Séverine looked reproachful. She broke off a piece of madeleine, put it in her teaspoon and dipped the spoon in the sweet milky tea. She held it out to Ghislaine but the little girl took no notice of it. Come on, said the mother, it’s delicious, darling, do eat a little. Séverine’s hand moved into Ghislaine’s line of vision. She pushed it away and two of the shells got bumped slightly out of

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their row. Ghislaine went rigid and threw herself backwards, falling flat on her back, and wailed, a high long note of anguish. Oh tantrums, said Séverine. They say children grow out of them. She looked anxiously at Fanny. Not very pleasant, I’m afraid. But they say it’s best to just ignore. Fanny has seen tantrums and always thought they were about rage. Secretly she’d admired them. It would be a wonderful way to get rid of your anger, to throw yourself on the floor and drum your heels and roar and sob. Sometimes when she felt really angry about something she’d imagine herself doing it, close her eyes and mentally kick her feet and yell; it felt good, in a shameful kind of way, behaving so badly. Once she was visiting a friend with a two¯ year¯old who’d had a tantrum because her mother wouldn’t let her have another slice of cake. The child had thrown herself on the floor, feet drumming, face red and mouth wide open, yelling with fury. She looked like a gargoyle. The mother said calmly, Lisette, I can’t hear myself talking to Fanny with all this racket. Take that tantrum out into the hall and have it there. And meekly the child had got up, gone into the hall, laid down and begun kicking and yelling again. Fanny had to put her hand over her mouth to shut her laughter in, and her friend had smiled quite smugly back. But to Fanny this didn’t sound like that kind of tantrum. It didn’t sound like rage, it was fear, and pain, as though the child was experiencing something intolerable, and in turn the adults felt the mysterious horror of it and that it was unbearable. The sound wasn’t the hearty frustrated roar of the child refused cake, it was a thin and desolate wail. She could not tell Séverine the story of the tantrum taken out into the hall. Ghislaine couldn’t hear and

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certainly wouldn’t understand such a request, she was locked in her own inconsolable anguish. Neither Séverine nor Fanny could touch her. Do you want to come . . . Fanny started to say, but Séverine shook her head. I’d better not leave her. More tea? asked Fanny. Séverine held out her cup, put sugar in and milk and stirred it, but didn’t drink it. Oh, she said, noticing that the spoon with the mush of madeleine had fallen face down on the Turkish carpet, oh, I am ruining . . . That won’t hurt, said Fanny, but she got a cloth and cleaned it up, for something to do. See, not a sign. They’re supposed to put them out in the marketplace for camels to pee on, she said, when they make them, it gives them a nice finish or something. Whenever it was that it was made. After a while Ghislaine stopped and lay staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were vacant under the tears that continued to well out of her eyes. Fanny thought, it is as though she has been to some terrible place that we cannot even begin to imagine and now is just beginning to come back. Her mother took her gently and sat her up. She gave her a toy she had taken from her bag, a small wooden cart with solid wheels, and the child held it with one hand. With the other she picked up the hem of her dress and pleating it slid it under her thumbnail. The first finger of the hand with the cart turned one wheel round and round. Séverine picked her up and sat her on her hip, the child hung unclingingly to one side and kept turning the wheel. She walked round the room with the slight swaying movement natural to a

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woman carrying a child, as though trying to kid her she is still swimming in the womb. Ghislaine turned the wheel on the little wooden cart. Séverine reached the window and looked down into the rue St Jacques where cars were banked up, their drivers leaning on their horns, filling the air with rage but not moving the traffic. I suppose you don’t have traffic jams in the suburbs, she said. She moved away from the window, her steps idle, deliberately without intention and yet somehow tense, pausing to look at a bowl of tulips on a table, at a picture on the wall. Fanny wanted to jump up and lead her to the sofa, sit her down on it and make her relax, hold her hand and soothe her. Murmuring as one does to a child, don’t worry, it will be all right. Instead she said, That’s Gérard’s collec¯ tion: prints of the district, he buys them whenever he finds them. Séverine paused in front of one of the etchings. Don’t I recognise this? she asked. It looks familiar. It should. It’s just around the corner. The Institute for Deaf Children. Not exactly the same these days of course. More walls, and more built on. Séverine stood staring vacantly at it. Gérard buys them from the Vieux Latin. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get the sack while he’s our best customer. Yes, said Séverine. Well, I suppose I’d better go. Time to pick up Sylvain. With a little slippery movement she slid the child into her pusher and began walking slowly to the lift. Ghislaine was still turning the wheel and took no notice of the changeover. Bye, her mother said, not stopping, blowing hasty kisses, I’ll call you. Fanny understood that this sudden quickness after the vague mooching around was because of the little girl. In the pram and off

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before she noticed, before there was another instance of heartbreak, while the wheel of the little wooden cart had her attention. Not even stopping to put the child’s coat on; Séverine said she was extremely tough and healthy, she never caught cold, none of the dreary infec¯ tions that Sylvain was always bringing home from school. When she’d gone Fanny followed her aimless path around the room, though not with the same swimming walk. Looked down into the street where she could see Séverine walking briskly behind the pusher. She must have put her own coat on in the lift. Stopped at the etching. There is something about etchings, she said to herself, the fineness of the lines, and the great multitude of them, the patient hand and eye taking their time, the infini¯ tude of tiny scratchings into the wax and then the acid biting into the plate. And the result of all these fine black lines is light. The luminous spaces between them glowing so pearly, and out of all this technique, so moving. There is the solid glowing dome of the Institute for Deaf Children, set up by the Abbé de l’Epée and funded by the state in 1790, the Revolution taking care of all its children, even the unlucky ones, but there’d been build¯ ings there long before. In the fourteenth century it had been a hospital for pilgrims going to St James of Compostella. The rue St Jacques had been the beginning of the pilgrimage, the long street climbing up from the river, not steeply sloping but a long slow arduous climb, and that just the beginning. How far was it to Compostella? And why did people go? Was it always holiness, or sometimes for fun, a holiday with a religious bonus? She looked down into the street and imagined them striding along it, in the opposite direction from Séverine. In their robes and shady hats

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and sandals and staffs for leaning on and their bags and the cockle shells that marked them as pilgrims to St James. All looking much the same in this uniform which could be a sign to the faithful to welcome and succour them but might also advertise them as fair game for cheats and con men. And not at all the same under¯ neath, all the human reasons for going on pilgrimage, frivolous and serious, all the hopes and fears and desires and despairs. All the bargains made with God. She wondered if Séverine ever tried bargaining with God.

Séverine had never told Fanny the results of Ghislaine’s tests. She’d asked on several occasions but her friend had always been vague: there were more tests, another appointment, it should be clear soon . . . Fanny had stopped asking. When Gérard came home from work she hugged him particu¯ larly hard. Feeling the usual melting in the pit of her stomach that even thinking of him could induce. So much love, so much love¯making, and no babies as a result. Fanny thought, a baby is one thing, and so is a healthy baby, but a happy baby is quite another. Gérard squeezed her tight in return, and kissed her mouth. He did not tell her he had been to see the house in the suburbs again, and had practically decided to buy it. He’d wait till he’d been inside, and that was proving difficult. The woman who’d inherited the house was elusive, and she it was who had the key. There was a solicitor but he did not seem at all interested; the previous owner had been his client. No agents. That might be an advantage. Much less professional, but possibly cheaper.

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The next day he visited one of his projects further down the valley and on impulse drove past the house on his way home. Number 15 rue Charles Baudelaire. The address had a good ring to it. A lot of the streets round about were named after poets, ones he had heard of. The late autumn afternoon was dark and cloudy, the light failing even earlier than might have been expected. The creeper that covered the front of the house had lost its leaves and was a shaggy net of brown twigs. The neglected branches of the fruit trees waved like whips over the wall. The house stood dark against the dark sky. It was romantic in a gloomy way, not pretty as he had seen it before. When it was his he would make sure there were always lights glowing yellow, warm and welcoming, with a lamp at the gate so the iron grilles would be charming, not excluding. He stood looking in, and a strange thought came to him, that he was the prince and inside was a princess behind a hundred¯year hedge, waiting to be kissed alive. He shivered, astonished to find himself so fanciful; that was a Fanny kind of thought. Maybe Fanny living in this house would be the princess, and when he kissed her . . . In fact, he saw suddenly, there was light inside the house, very thin and faint behind the iron lace of the glass panels in the doors; one of them opened and an old lady with a torch came out and locked them behind her. Here is the attendant crone, he thought, before he could stop himself. She had a basket covered with a cloth. Maybe living in the suburbs wasn’t as simple as he supposed. She jumped violently when she saw him through the gate and stopped and started to turn back but then stopped again. It wasn’t

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time for darkness yet but the light had gone from the sky, it had all bled away and the world was in a pallid state of no light rather than being dark, which was sinister because there was something dense and palpable about this livid absence of light. It seemed to have meanings beyond the usual closing in of a dull autumn afternoon. Nonsense, said Gérard to himself, and called out cheerfully saying his name in a bright clear voice and that he wanted to buy the house and was she the owner, he was very keen to have a look over it. After a long pause the woman said that she was the owner, Madame Lafarde had left the house to her but no he could not look at it now it was too dark. Gérard was a charming man. He tried to talk the woman into letting him in, but she stood at her distance on the top step as though she feared he would stretch out a long arm and pluck the keys from her grasp. They were large old iron keys on a large iron ring, and she held them tightly in both hands. It began to rain. The woman didn’t move. Well, he said, may I make an appointment to see the house, at a suitable time, and the crone said, Yes, she believed he could, and eventually they agreed to meet in two days time, at two in the afternoon, when it would be light enough to see; he had to under¯ stand there was no electricity in the house, and of course it was very cold. He said: You do want to sell it, don’t you? and the woman replied that oh yes indeed she did, she was not a rich person and could certainly not afford to live in it. There was no way she could manage to pay the death duties on such a property, not without selling it.

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He drove home, shaping the dark house, the crone, the strange light into a story for Fanny, but when it came to the point he did not tell her. Time for that later. In the event, after this Perrault¯like beginning, it was all remarkably simple. It was Madame Clicquot’s house, she had inherited it, she was keen to sell it. The faster the better. He inquired if she was a relative of the deceased; no, she was a neighbour. Madame Lafarde had no relatives. Yes, Madame Clicquot knew she was going to leave her the house. Why not? It is what happens. Madame Lafarde’s solicitor had the papers, he mentioned a substantial price that both parties were happy with, Gérard produced the money. It was a bargain for him, though he did not think he was cheating her. The house had been kept in an orderly fashion, it had clearly been clean before the dust of unoccupancy settled upon it, the panelling and staircase and windows were original, so was the plumbing, though there was a fairly new boiler for the central heating. It had a basement with a number of rooms, including a vast laundry with a wood copper and stone tubs, a ground floor with three large pleasant rooms, a decent¯sized primi¯ tive kitchen, a first floor similarly configured, with an enormous bleak bathroom, and the attics. Madame Clicquot seemed to have mislaid the keys to the attic, well, not mislaid, forgotten, they were at home in her house, she would of course give them to him. Along with the keys to the cellar and the front gate and the garden shed. Gérard wasn’t worried, he knew what the attics would be like, in terms of space, their state wasn’t a problem, he was prepared to do to the house whatever needed doing. The roof was of shingles, it looked okay but was sure to need some work. He’d fallen in love

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with his vision for this fine old gentleman’s residence, and with how beautiful Fanny would look as its mistress. It was painted inside a cold pale blue; he would have it in yellow, sunny, like his apartment. The old floorboards were well polished, he imagined the previous owner performing the dance of the waxing cloth, the patterned tiles of hall, kitchen and bathroom in good worn order, with occasional hairline cracks, but he believed you did not live in an old house if you wanted everything new and perfect. He contemplated with admiration the thrifty housekeeping of Madame Lafarde. It was an elegant house, and she had kept it well. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was cared for. He imagined upright lives on straight¯backed chairs. The kitchen and bathroom: well, there’d be time to work them out. He was very happy with his purchase. Maybe he’d put some tenants in, just as it was, and think about improvements. Get a man to restore the garden. Maybe show Fanny the house when the summer came and it was blooming. Or spring, with the fruit trees covered in blossom. He gave Madame Clicquot a lift back to her house which was just down the road from number 15 rue Charles Baudelaire. His was the best house in the street, though there were several smaller handsome old houses in big gardens, and some new fancy places on small blocks. Madame Clicquot’s was tiny, hunched, one¯storey and by the look of it no more than three rooms; no wonder she couldn’t afford to live in number 15. Even selling her own place would not have paid the death duties. He wondered if she would spend her new money doing it up. She was a dour old thing. A widow, he supposed. Like Madame Lafarde. So many old women were. He hoped that wouldn’t be Fanny’s fate; he’d rather lose her than die

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and leave her alone. La Clicquot was quite bent and didn’t have a lot of teeth. He still couldn’t help thinking of her as a crone. She gave him the keys, and he went into his new house, for the first time on his own.

The chocolate shop that Séverine had married into was called l’Île Enchantée. She and Thierry had been teenage sweethearts. She’d worked behind the counter, he was apprenticed to his father, the master chocolate¯maker. The shop was art nouveau in style, constantly carefully restored but never changed, with frondy ironwork and enamelled medallions inside and out with ladies and gentlemen dallying in frivolous Watteau¯like paintings. It was pink and gold, like a chocolate box itself. Séverine did not just serve in l’Île Enchantée, she was one of its gorgeous confections. And a skilled parcel wrapper. Since a lot of the business of the shop was presents, offerings for birthdays or anniversaries or visits, and the particular furnishings of weddings and christenings, this was important. And still at times she could help in the shop, when a girl came in and looked after the children. There were a couple of small round marble tables with spidery gilt chairs where you could sit and drink hot chocolate, an ancient Spanish recipe which had been brought to Bayonne by long¯ago forebears. Everything was pink and gold, and in the chocolate shop art nouveau became positively baroque. The young Séverine, deliciously in love with white¯skinned dark¯curled Thierry, thought life as full of choices as a filled¯to¯ order box of chocolates: truffle or hazelnut, marzipan or coffee,

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liquid liqueur or hard caramel, bitter orange or sweet strawberry. All delicious and the choosing difficult but not in fact matter¯ ing, since all tasted so good. Then she learned that the exquisite sweetness of all this could cloy, could even sicken, and finally she saw it as a business, the sweet choices were other people’s, hers to serve them, with products in the end hardly different from nails or screws or bolts in a hardware shop. The customer has desires if not needs and these are to be satisfied. The pink and gold shop with all its gilded metal stems and leaves and impossible flowers sprouting and curling and its heady smells was a pleasant place to work, the only idlers the ladies and gentlemen in their painted bowers lascivi¯ ously regarding the white legs of the lazily swinging girls. The best part of it was the customers’ pleasure. They were usually buying gifts, so they were in a good mood; their enjoyment was vicarious, they were pleased with the idea of the pleasure they were going to give others. And also proud to be seen as accomplished gift¯givers, informed and extravagant. Like Fanny, coming in to buy a gift for her mother¯in¯law, who had a fondness for pralines, and would be delighted to receive them in a pink and gilt filigree box from l’Île Enchantée. It was all handmade of course, and enormously expensive, and famous, so its gifts were flattering to both donor and recipient. It was nearly time for Séverine to pick up Sylvain from kinder¯ garten and Fanny walked with her. The little boy bounced up and down between them, holding a hand each. There’s a new girl in our school, he said. From Australia. Australia? You mean Austria? Sylvain shook his head. No. Australia. The teacher said. It’s a

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long long long long way away. It takes a day and a night and a day and a night and a day in an aeroplane to get there. I see, said Séverine. What’s she called? Amy. Amy Amy Amy. I might have her for my friend. Sylvain bounced so hard the satchel on his back banged up and down. She talks like this, he said. And out came a stream of beautifully accented gibberish which sounded as though it made sense but didn’t. It was disturbing. You listened and there seemed to be words strung together in careful grammatical patterns but you could discern neither vocabulary nor syntax. Just pure perfect meaning¯ less sounds. Goodness me, said Fanny, how do you understand what she’s saying? Sylvain shrugged. What language do they speak in Australia? asked Séverine. Sylvain shrugged again. English, don’t they? said Fanny. What does she look like? Like me, said Sylvain. Ah, said Fanny. Amy, said Sylvain. He liked the sound of her name. All the way home he kept saying it, as though it were a sweet he was sucking.

Next time Fanny met Séverine she had got a look at the little Australian girl. She’s pretty, she said. Fair¯skinned, light brown curling hair, quite long, tied back with a ribbon, big grey eyes. Quite picture¯book, really. Just like Sylvain, said Fanny.

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Well, I suppose she isn’t black. After a while it was reported that Amy spoke sort of like him, he could talk to her, and he wanted to bring her home to tea. I shall have to ask her mother, said Séverine. She rather hoped the opportunity wouldn’t arise, she wasn’t sure she knew how to talk to an Australian woman. And she didn’t want to have a little girl with foreign ways coming home to tea.

On the day Gérard finally bought his house in the suburbs, which was still a surprise for Fanny, in fact he thought he might keep it that way for a while, she brought home an etching of a pilgrim. Nineteenth¯century, again, but the figure medieval, in his coarse habit with a rope girdle, his feet in sandals, a hat over his arm and holding in his hand a scallop shell. In the background a line of silvery mountains. The caption read, in English, Give me my scallop shell of quiet, and Luc said it was the beginning of a poem, sixteenth¯century he believed it was, written by a nobleman in prison before the queen executed him. Fanny thought, here I am, in the twentieth century, looking at a nineteenth¯century etching of a sixteenth¯century poem about a medieval pilgrim. She put it in its layers of acid¯free tissue paper inside a stiff cardboard folder on the table in the library for Gérard to look at but it was a while before that happened. He phoned to say he would be late home; she could tell he was upset but all he would say was he was perfectly all right, please don’t worry, he’d be home as soon as he could, yes he was okay, perfectly okay but something had come up and he wouldn’t be able to get home for a while.

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When she’d given him the keys Madame Clicquot had remarked that the old lady had often complained of feral cats, not that she thought they’d be any bother to a resourceful person like himself but she felt she ought to warn him. He walked round the garden and with a certain hesitancy opened the shed but could see no evidence of them. Not like Greece, where the cats behave as if they own the places they colonise. No smells either. The garden was badly overgrown. He wasn’t sure of the season for pruning trees. So many things to find out. He should get a gardener straightaway to advise him. The stream was smooth and slow¯flowing between its flat grassy banks. He wondered how deep it was and got a bamboo cane out of the shed and plumbed it; just above his knees. If there were ever a child in this house she would have to be protected from it. His mind’s eye saw a table set for lunch under the trees with friends drinking glasses of wine and a small daughter in a summer dress wandering down the garden and stepping off the grass verge. The water wasn’t deeper than she was tall but children drown in shallow baths, he could see the dress muddying and waterlogged and the little girl with brown smooth hair like Fanny’s floating face downward, her hair spreading out in clumps across the water. He shook his head as though physically he could remove this image. There would be time to make sure she was safe. The house appeared quite fast on the outside, the external door to the cellar tight¯fitting and stoutly padlocked, the basement windows barred and unbroken. The balcony¯like iron work across the lower parts of the tall casement windows was a particularly handsome pattern, but in need of paint and the ivy beginning

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to grow through it. He worked methodically around the house, writing down things that needed doing, first outside then begin¯ ning inside with the basement. He’d do the attics last of all, for no reason really except that he hadn’t seen them yet and it seemed a good idea to work up. When he opened the padded door to the stairs that led to the attic a terrible stench made him pause. He wondered if this was where the feral cats were, and thought they must have been catching birds, pigeons probably, and maybe rats, and leaving the stinking corpses around. The roof must be in bad condition, at least in places. Or perhaps a window had been left open. It was late after¯ noon, but not yet dark. He considered coming back another day, but why not finish what was started. He went up slowly, stamping his feet, hoping the cats would go away by the openings they came in and not spring upon his head and claw his face. The attic appeared mainly one large room, full of a pale dirty light from unwashed windows front and back. The smell was more like a zoo than something dead, an ancient layered excremental odour. There wasn’t any furniture or carpets, just a wooden bed with no mattress, tumbled and heaped with blankets. Then he realised there was some creature there, lying on it, curled up. He finished climbing the stairs and stepped into the room, his body tense, tight¯strung, ready to turn and flee if necessary. The creature was looking at him with enormous eyes. Huge eyes, pale green, in a pallid pointed bone¯sharp face. It was a little girl. He saw that she was naked but for a cotton harness wound round her and buttoned down her back, with a long band whose other end was fastened to the leg of the bed.

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She looked at him. He spoke, soothing and slow. Hullo. What’s your name? Who are you? What are you doing here? Where is your mummy? She did not answer any of his questions. Her eyes blinked but didn’t flicker. She was evidently not toilet¯trained, though most of the shit was in the adjoining bathroom, a primitive basin and lavatory in the angle of the roof. She did not cower or withdraw when he went closer, but lay lethargic and still, gazing at him. There was something alarmingly floppy about her. She let her legs fall apart and began to masturbate. He looked away. On the bed was a half¯eaten apple and a heel of bread smeared with something brownish. He went on talking to her, asking ques¯ tions, making remarks. Aren’t you cold? Where are your parents? How long have you been here? Talking through his nose so he wouldn’t have to breathe in the air. He opened a window, it was already freezing in here, it couldn’t be any colder. He tried to cover her with the blankets, touching their crusted and stinking surfaces with just his fingernails. He no longer expected any answers to these questions, they were rather a soothing discourse while he took in the scene and worked out what to do. Of course he knew. The police. He started down the stairs, then went back and closed the window. When he left she began to wail, a thin high sound, hopeless and unstoppable. Madame Clicquot’s feral cats. Whose alibi were they?

Madame Clicquot refused all knowledge of a child in the attic. A child? What child? She didn’t know anything about a child. A little

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girl? They were joking, weren’t they? What could it possibly have to do with her? She was an old woman, getting on in a hard life as best she could. A child? What could they mean? So, why did Madame Lafarde leave you the house? She was a neighbour, a good neighbour. Hardly a reason. Was she a friend? She was a neighbour. What did you do for her? Nothing. Neighbourly things. The things you do when you live nearby for a long time. Looking after the girl in the attic. What girl? Who is she? Why is she there? Where did she come from? Why did Madame Lafarde leave you her house? A rich house, worth a lot of money? Why not? Why not leave it to her family? Not everyone has family. A child in the attic? So the questioning went. Madame Clicquot denied all knowl¯ edge of the child. But after repeated demands as to why she had been left the house, she suddenly muttered: She said I wouldn’t have to say. What? She said I could say I didn’t know anything about the child. Did you help her with the child?

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No. Sometimes. She showed me the will. She gave me things. So the house is the price of your silence. And work. A lot of work. When she was sick I had to look after her and the girl too. She couldn’t manage. And she left you the house. Why not? There wasn’t anyone else. That’s what she said, there’s no one else. Didn’t you think it wrong to keep a child locked up? There’s something wrong with her. She just lies about. She’s ill. She’s retarded. I tried to keep her clean, I gave her food, but there’s something wrong with her. She can’t talk. She spits. She can’t control herself. She does disgusting things. She’s an idiot. She ought to be in a mental home. She’s an animal. How long has she been there? Shut up in the attic? Madame Clicquot shrugged. I only know since the old man died. Four years ago, five. I don’t know how long before that. So she’s five years old. Older than that. Madame said, Ten years, ten years this curse. Ten! She’s the size of a four¯year¯old. There’s something wrong with her. She’s an imbecile.

The police threatened Madame Clicquot, with kidnapping, with keeping a person imprisoned against her will, with colluding in a crime, which carried they said the most severe penalties. The old woman was terrified, but still she repeated the same story, the child was retarded, she had helped. Only in the last few years; the old man died, the old lady couldn’t manage on her own, she helped,

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that’s what neighbours do, there wasn’t anything wrong with that, was there? There was the house, because she had helped, the only thing she could do, the house would be in good hands the old lady said, she was a good neighbour. It was important for a house to be in good hands. You sold it. What could I do? I don’t have money for death duties. I am a poor person. And sold the child in it. So she could be looked after. It would take some time to find out who the child was and how she came to be locked in an attic for four years, five, however many more. In the meantime Gérard looked into the huge eyes of the little girl and said he would take her home with him. She belongs to the state. I’ll look after her for it. She should see a doctor. Tomorrow. She can last another night. It’s irregular. Possibly. But the best thing.

When he stepped out of the lift into his apartment, late at night on the Tuesday he bought a fine house in the suburbs, carrying a small sleeping stinking child wrapped in the blanket they kept in the car, Fanny was so pleased to see him she gave him a hug around the child as well. I was so worried, she said. I’m all right, he said. I don’t think she is.

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Fanny looked at the small scrap of a child held in his cupped arms. Her eyes opened suddenly and she was awake. She looked at Fanny with her limpid gaze and Fanny’s heart gave a flip as though she’d swallowed a fish. Oh, she said, oh. Oh, the poor little thing. Whatever’s happened to her? He told her the story, the crumbs and fragments of it that were all he knew. She warmed up soup which the child slurped greedily, her face in the bowl like a dog. Fanny murmured and cried her indignation, how could these women, how could they, such things to do, this sad little morsel of humanity, it made you lose faith. She gave her bread and jam and a mug of chocolate, which she drank so fast it poured out of the corners of her mouth and she wailed. She wailed even louder and spat and scratched when they tried to bath her. They got as wet as she did. Gérard held her and so did Fanny with one hand, washing her with the other. She was afraid they’d bruise her, or break her, so meagre was her flesh on her twig¯thin bones. Fanny’s heart kept giving its little fish¯like flips, panicking and gasping for air. She talked softly to the child, a kind of murmuring babble that was less sense than sound, There’s the water running down your back nice and warm there sweetheart yes yes is that nice running down and squeeze the sponge water running nice and warm sweetheart is that nice nice yes and clean smells nice nice and soft, as though it were a song and the soft ess sounds mesmerising. After a while the terror went out of her tight little body and she seemed quite to like having water squeezed over her from a soft sea sponge. Fanny washed her hair with shampoo that smelt of verbena, gently massaging her scalp, and though she sputtered and wriggled when the water ran down

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her face she didn’t fight too hard. Her hair when clean was a pale reddish gold colour. Her skin was fine and white and her little pointed face with its huge eyes was beautiful. Her eyes: their green was a pale crystalline colour with the patterns in the iris seeming like facets of light. She gazed at them but they couldn’t tell what she was seeing. Her eyes followed them when they moved but they did not respond to words or smiles or offers of food, they simply gazed, enormous, profound, disturbing. Asking nothing, but making you want to give her anything that would touch that unfathomable regard. She may be ten years old, said Gérard. But Fanny did not think that was possible. She’s not as big as Sylvain, she said. Almost the first thing Fanny had asked was the child’s name. No one knew it. Not the crone. The police had not been able to elicit it. Madame Lafarde had only ever said the child, or she. Fanny asked the girl, but she gave her one of her crystalline dreamy looks. She has to have a name, said Fanny. Gérard said, The attic was in rue Charles Baudelaire. He hadn’t managed to explain yet to Fanny that he had bought the house. We could call her Charlotte. Charlotte was one of Fanny’s secret names for her own child but she gave it up with hardly a pang. Charlotte she became, nobody finding any evidence of any other name. The doctor confirmed that she was indeed probably about ten years old, if not more, though very small and underdeveloped. She did not exist in any official form that could be discovered. Her birth did not appear to be registered, not in France. Gérard searched the house at number

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15 rue Charles Baudelaire. He found the usual family documents carefully placed in a small metal trunk, the kind of papers that catch people in their significant but universal moments. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates. First commu¯ nions. School reports. The comings in, the brief performances on the stage of their lives, the goings off. There was a birth certificate for a daughter, Anne Solange, born thirty¯three years ago to Pierre and Solange Lafarde of 19 rue Charles Baudelaire—not because they’d moved but because the houses had been renumbered in the last ten years. A clever girl, judging by her school reports and university degree, and already at twenty¯one her aggregation exam, a sign that she was very clever indeed, she must have passed it on her first try which was very unusual. Gérard’s brother had been still trying at the age of thirty¯ one. That ought to have meant a luminous career. No more records after that, but evidently if she’d got married that certificate would be with her, wherever she was, though possibly it was odd that she hadn’t taken her other documents. Maybe she had no need of them, maybe they were supposed to be there and available when she wanted them, safely with the other family papers. But why had the house not been left to her? Why disinherit her? The Lafardes were a strict careful bourgeois family for whom the leaving of property would be a pious duty. Most unlikely that they would will their house to a neighbour, not their daughter. Suspicious, very suspicious, Gérard said to the police. They agreed, without much interest. Maybe this Anne was dead. Though they could find no evidence of it. Died abroad, perhaps. Absence of evidence didn’t concern them. They couldn’t get too excited

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about the case, a crime it might have been, shutting the child up, but the perpetrator, the old lady, was dead and her husband who presumably had been in on it too even deader. There was hardly a case to be made against Madame Clicquot, who at worst had only failed to intervene.

When Fanny rang Luc to tell him she wouldn’t be able to come to work for a bit because of Charlotte he got quite excited. You have a wild child there, Fanny, you know that? A wild child? Hardly. The poor little mite has been shut up all her life. Nothing wild about her. Yes, yes, that’s a category. That’s what they’re called. Oh yes I know wild children are often abandoned in the woods and all that, maybe even suckled by wolves, but abandonment by impris¯ onment is also a form. It’s the deprivation of civilisation that’s the thing. Can she talk? No, not yet. She probably never will. If a child hasn’t learned to talk by eight, I think it is, he never will. It’s a most fascinating thing, how the human creature learns language, it’s still quite mysterious, even though we think we know a lot about it. There’s a great deal to be learned from a wild child. Oh Luc, she’s a person, not a case study. Is she, though. A person. What makes a person? What makes us human? If it’s language, has she missed out? There’s a critical period, you know. Remember those children in orphanages in Romania, no love, no touching, they were vegetables.

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Charlotte isn’t a vegetable. She has speaking eyes. Though Fanny thought that really they didn’t say much. They simply implored, in their strange green light¯filled way, you had to work out what they might be meaning. Is the fortress empty, that’s the thing. It’s our nature to be linguistic creatures but we need the nurture of human contact to become so. Children need a rich verbal environment to learn language. You sound very excited by all this. Of course. It’s about the most exciting thing there is. Luc came to visit, bringing a large bunch of purple iris, a box of truffles from l’Île Enchantée for Charlotte, and a book. It’s the story of Victor, the Wild Boy of the Aveyron. The most amazing thing. This is his territory. I mean, after the Aveyron. He was in the Val de Grâce, this was early in the 1800s, still the Revolution, very idealistic, and the doctor who looked after him also worked at the Institute for Deaf Children, just round the corner, but of course I don’t need to tell you that—Luc enthusiasti¯ cally striding round the room waved at the print on the wall—and took him there to live with him. He slaved over him for years. He never did succeed in teaching him to talk. The boy was civilised, to an extent, but was always remote and lonely. Apparently he had a habit of staring out the window on moonlit nights, as though he wanted to be back in his woods. Very poignant. Itard, that’s the doctor, never really got through to him, the only person who did that was the housekeeper. He seemed to love her, after his fashion. Very much after his fashion. And now we have our very own wild child, in the rue St Jacques.

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Fanny looked fearfully into Luc’s excited face. I’m not running a circus, you know. No, of course not. Truffaut made a film about Victor. Wonder¯ ful thing. Very moving. L’Enfant Sauvage, it was called. The Wild Child. I’ll find you a video of it. No, thank you. No? No. I don’t want to see a movie of somebody trying and failing. She’s a little girl. She’s a person. Not an animal in a zoo. Well, my dear, you know, that is the question. Is she human, or an animal? If it is language that makes us human, then is she? If she has no sense of self, no love, no remorse . . . Some people would call what has happened to a child like this soul murder. Not murder, said Fanny. Attempted murder maybe. I don’t believe her soul is dead. Sick, and struggling, yes, not dead. But when she looked into the clear green crystals of Char¯ lotte’s eyes, she wondered. (Remarkable eyes, said Luc, remind me of a cat I had when I was a boy, gorgeous creature.) And the child was not easy to live with. She wasn’t good at using the lavatory. She spat. She took her clothes off. She lay with vacant eyes masturbat¯ ing. She seemed to make no attempt to reproduce the words Fanny tried to teach her. Bread. Apple. Table. Hand. She simply looked at her, the green eyes in the beautiful face haunting. Fanny was afraid that if she had not been beautiful, if her face was as ugly as her behaviour, she would not have been able to stand her. But her face so touched Fanny’s heart she wanted to hold her and keep her safe, wanted to love her and make her happy. Sometimes Charlotte let herself be loved, even invited it, nuzzled up to her with soft

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buttings of her head, crept under her arms, leaned hard against her. Fanny sat and watched the television, in theory with her, but Charlotte did not take to it, she did not seem able to register it, she would rather play with Fanny and so she gave up on the tele¯ vision. Reading books was possibly better, but the child’s attention was never held for more than a little while, and Fanny suspected that it was not ever the narrative that interested her, but the atten¯ tion paid. She gazed into the green eyes and thought of words like fathomless, and unfathomable. Looking for the deep mysterious life within. Or maybe they were simply shallow, the light in them a refraction from outside, inside as dead as Luc proposed. No soul, just animal affections. Bugger you, Luc, she said. Leave us be. Her mother came over frequently. She said to her husband, I know I wanted Fanny to have a baby, but not like this. She helped with the child, sat with her and sang old children’s songs. Fanny remembered them from her childhood, the piping cheerful voices singing these odd ditties that when you thought about them made little sense. Can you plant a cabbage right Like we do it Like we do it Can you plant a cabbage right Like we plant them all round here.

Maybe it’s Marie¯Antoinette and the Revolution, she said, but her mother doubted that. Charlotte watched Cathérine while she sang but nobody knew what she made of it. Fanny admired

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her mother, she had a swift deft firm way of dealing with the child that did seem to keep her in order, a little. Don’t do that, she said when Charlotte masturbated, taking her hand away, and the child did stop, for a while. Gérard fossicked again through his house, searching the old lady’s belongings for clues. It felt a ghoulish thing to do, but every¯ thing was so spare and orderly it was not otherwise difficult. And he kept being overcome by the knowledge that this bourgeois housewife had kept a child locked up like an animal, a mistreated animal. The only papers were in the metal trunk. He offered the rest of the stuff to Madame Clicquot, who sold most of it. He got the cleaners in, and painters. He explained the mess in the attic as squatters. He was troubled by the fact that he was somehow betraying Fanny by keeping the house secret from her, though he did sometimes have projects that he didn’t say much about, but that was because there wasn’t much to say. This was deceiving her, but telling her the truth would be even more upsetting. It was the first time he had consciously kept her out of a part of his life, and saying to himself that it was for her sake did not help. It wasn’t until his mother brought photographs of his brother’s new baby that it occurred to him: there were no photographs in the house. None at all. Not of Anne as a baby or a little girl, none of first communion, no school or class photos, no studio portrait, no pictures of grandparents, no family albums, nothing at all. Even a family without a camera usually has a photograph somewhere. What about Anne’s graduation: wouldn’t there have been official photographs? The only explanation for their absolute absence was that they had been destroyed. And if photographs had been

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destroyed, what else? It made him think that searching for clues is not only finding what is there but remembering what is not. While the tradesmen were carrying out his renovations he visited the houses around, introducing himself as the new neigh¯ bour. Some, the younger ones, were away at work and not inter¯ ested, as he wasn’t in them. It was the older people, who had been there for years, that he wanted to talk to. A personable young man, with time on his hands; he found plenty of people to talk to him. The suburb still had a lot of the qualities of the village it had been not so long ago. . . . oh yes, a daughter, a lovely girl, slip of a thing, but striking, that red hair and green eyes. Yes, and clever too. No, don’t know what happened to her, went away and got married I suppose, they usually do, never give their old parents a thought . . . . . . I heard she eloped. Some no¯hoper of a young man. These good girls, they’re so innocent, they don’t know which way’s up . . . . . . such a good girl. Very quiet. Of course, they were older parents. Sometimes you get lucky. Too late, it seems, then along comes a real treasure . . . . . . she was clever, you know. I heard she got some amazing job. Was it England. Or Sweden maybe. Whatever, she never came back to visit. All the same in the end, these children. Clever, maybe, but it’s their own lives they lead . . . Everybody seemed to agree: Anne Lafarde was pretty, clever and good. A model daughter. But in the end, selfish, thoughtless, caring only about herself, that’s the way these days. Gérard was getting bloated with coffee and biscuits and little nips of sweet

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apéritif wine. Until the woman over the way came back from visiting her daughter in Anjou. . . . oh yes, I remember Anne. She was lovely. Some people don’t go for that red hair and green eyes, but on her it was quite beauti¯ ful. Her parents doted on her. They were quite old when she was born. You’d see her up and down the street, going off to school and then the university, or along to the shops. Always a cheerful word. She paid attention, remembered things. And then . . . Something went wrong. It’d be eight, or nine, years ago now, indeed probably more, ten or eleven, time always passes faster than you think . . . She disappeared. Well, she didn’t come out any more. I have this habit, before I go to bed, I like to sit at the window and look out, just look at the world, the dark. I put the lights out and sit for a while. It soothes me. Composing the day, I call it. There’s usually nobody around, people go to bed early hereabouts. They’re old, or they’re busy. I saw Anne walking in the garden. Night after night, walking in the garden. For several months, it would have been. The middle of summer. Most people were away, people round here, they can afford it, they go away for the summer. Silly, of course, it’s the nicest time in these parts. Anyway, I watched Anne, night after night, walking round the garden. She was pregnant. Pregnant? Yes. It was summer. She wore light dresses. I could see her shape quite clearly. And that particular walk that pregnant women have. You mean, her parents had her shut up, because she was pregnant? I suppose so. Yes. They were proud people. The shame of it.

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The disgrace. After so much honour. She gave a little laugh. They were old¯fashioned. They were old. For shame, then, not punishment? The shutting¯up? Well, perhaps punishment too. Then what happened? I don’t know. Anne disappeared, completely. She was there, then I never saw her again. Vanished? I wasn’t watching the house day and night, you know. I assumed she’d gone away to have the baby. But she didn’t come back. Did you ever ask? We weren’t friends. Just neighbours on good terms. But of course I asked. I said, How’s Anne, and they said she’d gone to Australia. A job. In a university, I think. Adelaide, now I come to think of it, they mentioned Adelaide. I think she’d studied philo¯ sophy, presumably they have philosophy in Australia. Do you think that’s what happened? Why not? What else? I sit at my window, looking out, remem¯ bering Anne walking round the garden. A pregnant woman walks as a galleon sails, my husband used to say. So she has the baby and is shipped off to the other side of the world. Taking her shame with her. It was the way their minds would have worked. Why would Madame Lafarde leave the house to her neigh¯ bour and not her daughter? Ah, she did that, did she? Well, Australia is a long way away. Maybe it’s dangerous. Maybe Anne died, after all. Gérard did not tell her about Charlotte. He wanted her to

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be a secret, not a matter of gossip and speculation. Maybe, later, he would talk to her about the attic, but he wanted to think about what she’d told him, first. When he was walking around the garden he made his way behind the hazelnut copse, and found an incinerator, like a minia¯ ture red brick fort. Ah, he thought. He opened its fire door. There were ashes. Maybe prunings, or rubbish. Maybe photographs. He pushed them around with the long iron poker. Nothing to say what they were. It was clearly an efficient incinerator. Nothing, no crinkly card edges, no curled scorched paper, to suggest that there had been photographs. But he thought, yes, I think that is what happened to the records of Anne. I’ll never know, but I believe. Then Madame Clicquot sold her story to France Dimanche. It made the front page. Everybody wanted to know about the child in the attic. A modern wild child. Poor little waif abandoned. The papers outdid themselves in sinister sentimentality. Abandoned at home. Feral child, feral parents—Who is the animal? the headlines shrieked. It was as though they egged one another on to find uglier and uglier terms. Gérard told himself it was the usual newspaper response when facts are disappointingly few but he still found it hateful. Somehow they found out the name he and Fanny had given her. Charlotte Baudelaire, one newspaper called her. People wanted to see her, interview, photograph her. They staked out the apartment on the rue St Jacques. They hung about the house in rue Charles Baudelaire. Newspapers wrote articles about wild children, Victor of the Aveyron, Caspar Hauser who’d been shut in a cellar for a decade and might have been heir to a German throne, two little girls in India who had been nurtured

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by wolves, Genie in Los Angeles who’d been kept shut up by her parents in a room of the family home, strapped by day in a potty chair and put to sleep at night in a cage. All the articles asked portentous questions in down¯market versions of Luc’s vocabulary: Human or animal? What makes us human? Do we have souls if nobody has ever loved us? Does language lie in human biology? What is nature, what nurture? Is Charlotte doomed to be forever mute? Fanny refused to read them but Gérard felt obliged to. Doctors and psychologists wanted to examine her. This was harder to refuse than journalists and photographers. And after all what rights did Gérard and Fanny have? He was called by one newspaper the man who bought a child along with a house. He’d finally said to Fanny that he bought the house as an investment, which was true, but the nearest thing to a lie he’d ever told her. Charlotte was disturbed by the doctors’ visits. She spat at them and lay and masturbated while they talked to her and any progress Fanny thought she might have made with toilet training was lost. They wanted to do brain scans and electrocardiographs to see if she’d suffered any brain damage. They tried to give her intelligence tests to find out if she was retarded but they had to admit she was untestable. Sometimes Fanny wanted to laugh as they earnestly tried to make their impossible measurements, more often she begged them to go and leave them alone. Some doctors were keen to take her away and put her in a clinic and study her. Out of the question, said Fanny, she belongs here, but wondered how long they would believe her. Jean¯Marie Demagny the philosopher asked to come and visit her and of course there was no refusing him. He was a sprightly

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man, and rather portly. Fanny did not warm to him. He looked at Charlotte fastidiously and held a red silk handkerchief to his nose as though she might still smell. He tried to talk to her but of course that didn’t work so he had to make do with watching her while not so much talking to Fanny as addressing a mono¯ logue to her which she supposed was a rehearsal for the article he was going to write. He sat on her yellow sofa and spoke of the nightmare loneliness of this little girl’s dark heart. He discussed the notion of the empty fortress and mentioned autism and Asperger’s syndrome. She is one of God’s lonely children, he said, she is trapped in her own story of unrequited love. I love her, said Fanny, but he took dainty sips of his coffee and did not pay her any attention. The question is, he said, is there some residual element of human nature not contained in language, some essence that makes us human. Although this sounded like a question there was no inquiry in his voice, only statement. Some essence that makes us human, he repeated, that DNA doesn’t satisfy. He did not show much human essence, she said to Gérard afterwards. The article he wrote was called ‘That drowned origin: the mystery of the human’. It appeared in some intellectual weekly review which Fanny would never have seen if he hadn’t sent her a copy. She gave it to Luc without reading it. She looked into Charlotte’s unsmiling face and her eyes filled with prickling tears. The child now loved being bathed and seemed to want to be touched. She liked pretty clothes. Fanny wondered how she knew this since she did not ever appear pleased, simply looked at her with those haunting eyes, but she was sure of her pleasure in pretty soft comfortable things. She is my changeling, said Fanny to herself. A

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little changeling child. Very strange, and a gift. And I do not need to learn to love her. When Gérard heard her call Charlotte my little changeling he said, Isn’t that a child swapped for another? Your own taken by the fairies and another one in its place? Fanny didn’t look at him. Mmm, she said. No, said Gérard. Fanny, no.

Meanwhile Gérard went to work, which included his new house. He could lock the gate and so far journalists, though in his absence they’d scaled the wall, hadn’t broken in. They had taken photo¯ graphs of the child prison house, wonderfully sinister ones of a grim pile in its net of leafless creeper, angled so it seemed to loom up behind high walls, against a troubled sky. They made the iron gates into prison bars taller than the house. Although she did not see the pictures he suspected that Fanny would never bring herself to live there. But still he continued to work on it, remembering what the woman over the road had said about its summer charm. He hired a gardener who mowed the lawns and weeded the beds, cleaned up the gravel of the drive and trimmed the espaliered fruit trees back into shape, sprayed all the fruit trees and thinned out the hazelnut coppice. It was a fine garden, the gardener said, though it had been neglected, but a bit of work and it would be its old self. Gérard said, Do what you need, I’ll leave it in your hands. The gardener got a man with a bobcat to dig up the vegetable garden which had good soil and had been well tended in its time. The bobcat turned up a skeleton.

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Now there was a body there was a crime. The police paid attention. The skeleton was identified by its teeth as Anne Solange Lafarde. Dead perhaps ten years. She’d had a child. She didn’t seem to have been murdered. Fanny and Gérard didn’t read the speculations of the press. They imagined for themselves how events might have happened. The bright beautiful daughter getting pregnant. The shame. Worse because they had always been so proud of her. Shut her away till the baby’s born. Pretend it never happened. They wouldn’t have killed her, would they? asked Fanny. I don’t think so. Gérard’s voice was troubled. I think what must have happened is, she died. I think she died in childbirth. After all, there was no medical help. They buried her, as decently as they could. The body was wrapped in a large piece of velvet, like a curtain, they reckon, with rosary beads in her hands and a missal. They can’t have been feeling very good about it. They don’t kill the baby, after all they could have, smothered her say and put her in the grave too. But they don’t, they let the baby live. But I think by this time they are a bit mad. And of course once they’ve buried the mother they can’t even more admit to the baby, said Fanny. They have to keep it secret because otherwise where is the mother? They could have left the child on a church doorstep. I think you’re right; they’re a bit mad by this time. They’d have to be, to think they could keep a child in an attic forever. They managed ten years. Couldn’t they have loved her? I suppose she was the symbol of all their daughter’s catas¯

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trophes. They’d have blamed her for the death, and the shame, the end of all their hopes. I can’t bear it, said Fanny. Gérard was afraid she was right. She was thinner than he’d ever seen her. Her eyes were black¯smudged and feverish. She kept talking about the dead mother. I can understand them not wanting anybody to know, she said, but why not just send Anne away? To an aunt in the country, or some such euphemism. People did. Then she could have had the baby and had it adopted and come back and got on with her life. You’re thinking logically. I don’t think they were. What about Anne? Where was her say in all this? Yes, said Gérard. I suppose she was her parents’ daughter. There was shame for her too. I suppose she was so distressed she just let it happen. But she didn’t have to go along with them. No. But she did. She was a dutiful daughter. And who was the father? Where was the father? Ah, said Gérard. I wonder did even the parents know that. Maybe Anne would never tell them. Some brute who deserted her. Certainly he didn’t stand by her. Married, I suppose. Maybe that’s what made them so angry. So vindictive. Not just fornication but adultery. I can’t see how we can ever find out, said Gérard. Not now. I wonder is there anybody anywhere who knows—the father must. He must be working it out, now Anne’s name is known. I doubt he’s going to tell.

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Maybe remorse will get to him. Maybe he will come forward and claim Charlotte. More like he never knew Anne was pregnant. You think she was noble and didn’t tell him? Or proud. Or shy. Charlotte came in from the kitchen. She had a handful of jam she was eating by holding it to her face and sucking. Jam was on her face and dress and dropping on the floor. In the kitchen, little one, said Fanny, we eat in the kitchen. She turned her gently around and gave her a soft push through the door. It does look as though the parents destroyed the photographs, said Gérard. Did I tell you? I searched but couldn’t find a single one. They were simply wiping out the family, as though it had never been. Denying the existence of all of them. What will happen now? asked Fanny. I don’t suppose anything will. Everybody’s dead. Except Charlotte. And people say she is too. That her soul is. What makes her a person. You don’t think that. I don’t want to. I don’t. But . . . You don’t. No, I don’t.

Jean¯Marie Demagny asked to come again to visit the child. He was wearing a perfect pale grey suit—perfect until Fanny noticed a

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wine stain on the lapel. He did not seem quite so dapper as before. His face looked less plump and his abundant grey hair straggled. He said he lived just up the hill from where this sad drama had taken place, he felt uncomfortable with the idea of all this happen¯ ing so close to him, it was perhaps the nightmare of the suburbs. The smooth and comfortable life, and underneath . . . Had Fanny ever contemplated that? Nature is not so red in tooth and claw as are the suburbs, he said, and though I may speak in metaphors the terror is no less. He sat and looked at Charlotte for a while, and Fanny noticed that he was crying. He didn’t seem to have the red silk handkerchief today. I knew her mother, you know. I hoped maybe not, but there’s no doubt, I see that. She was a student of mine, once. A bright girl, bright of face, bright of mind. Charlotte looks like her, she has her beauty, but not the brightness. I see no light in her face. So like, but not the image of her mother. She was one of the cleverest girls I ever taught. Jean¯Marie sat hunched into himself, the tears running out of his eyes. It would break Anne’s heart, he said, to see her child like this. It’s too late for the little one, you know, too late. I fear she is doomed to remain an eternal child, yet forever exiled from childhood. I talk to her, said Fanny, all the time I talk to her. She’s learning, I know. You can’t see it, but she is. I fear it is too late. Ten years too late. Stop saying too late, said Fanny. Tell me who the baby’s father is. I, my dear? Oh no, I cannot tell you that. When I say I knew her, I mean simply that she was a student of mine, a formal

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relationship, I did not know about her private life. You surely didn’t think . . . Oh my dear. She was a student. One always, so to speak, loves one’s brightest students. He gave a smile which Fanny described to Gérard as wolfish. Wolfish and very sad. When he got home Jean¯Marie said to his wife: That baby. The godchild. Louise. How did you know to talk to her? Know? said Sabine. What else would you do with a baby?

Séverine came to visit Fanny, without her children. Charlotte was not fit to be visited by children. Séverine looked critically at her friend’s thinness, her dark¯smudged pallor. Fanny was pleased to see her, to sit and drink tea and gossip almost in the old way. Charlotte sat beside Fanny on the sofa and leaned into her. She had a particular way of sucking her fingers, the middle two in her mouth and the other two tucked round her nose. Fanny usually tried to stop her doing this but she would spit so she let her be. Did Sylvain ever get his little Australian friend home to tea? she asked. Oh yes. Very clever. He came over holding her hand and I had to go and ask her mother. But it wasn’t too hard, after all. You’d think to look at her the mother was a local. She sounds pretty foreign but she actually speaks quite well, you can talk to her, so it all worked out. Amy’s a sweet little girl, very polite. Now Sylvain wants to go to her place. And does she speak his wonderful gibberish?

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She doesn’t say much at all. Not to me. She’s shy, I suppose. But they seem to chatter together in a perfectly sensible way. She even talks to Ghislaine, who seems to like her a lot too. Oh, sighed Fanny. I’m so glad. She smiled briefly: Sylvain sounds just like his papa. Knows what he wants. She sighed again. Séverine looked at her severely. Fanny, you’re so thin. And pale. And those eyes put in with a sooty finger, as my grandmother used to say, it’s not a good look. She stared around at the muddle of the apartment. And this place—you’d think a bomb had hit it. You’ve got to stop this, you know. You’re killing yourself. Look who’s talking. You’ve got to give her up. She’s not your child. Not your responsibility. Oh shh, said Fanny, giving Charlotte a madeleine. No, I can’t do that. It would be another betrayal. You can’t look at it like that. Her grandparents are the ones who betrayed her. I don’t think you can undo that.

In the end Fanny didn’t have a choice. She caught an infection that turned to pleurisy and became so ill she had to be admitted to hospital. Charlotte took sick too and ended up in a different hospital. A doctor and a psychiatrist had her declared a ward of the state and released into their care. She was an important study, they said, and could not be left in the hands of amateurs. She became the subject of medical wrangles, with various professionals fighting over her treatment. Charlotte looked at them with her green glass eyes. She still didn’t use the toilet, still spat, still masturbated in her

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floppy way. One of the doctors said she had spoken a word, that he had taught her to say bread, but none of the others heard it. Sometimes one would take her to live with him and his family, but it never worked out for long. Fanny was very ill. The pleurisy was cleared up fairly quickly, but she remained frail. Gérard blamed himself for the insouciance with which he had brought the abandoned child home. He sold the house in the rue Charles Baudelaire through an agent, for consider¯ ably more than he paid for it. So in a way it made the lie he’d told Fanny true after all, it had been a good investment. As a property. Gérard said, I am going to take you to Tahiti to convalesce. We both need a holiday. Fanny said, We could go to Australia, we could look for Anne, and Gérard gazed at her in terror. Fanny, Anne’s dead. She died in childbirth. She was buried in the garden. Oh yes, said Fanny. I remember.

Fanny’s convalescence in the languid tropical air of Tahiti took a while. She still thought she had betrayed Charlotte. Everybody said she had no duty to her, no responsibility, she did all she could, far far more than might have been expected. Yes, said Fanny, yes, I know all that, I know it’s all true. She admitted to herself that in most ways she was glad to be relieved of the responsibility of the child, that it was too hard and too dispiriting and too unre¯ warding to love this little wisp of a girl whose nature had been denied her. She thought of a dog or a cat, who is its own person, who inhabits its own nature in a way that Charlotte had never learned and probably never would now. Fanny knew she was glad

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she was not going to be asked to spend her days endeavouring to give this lost child a sense of her own humanity. Soul murder, Luc had said, and maybe that had actually happened and not just nearly, as Fanny had hoped. Maybe the beautiful green eyes could never look at anybody and know them, and in knowing them know herself. Fanny couldn’t forget Charlotte’s green eyes. Her own filled with tears at the thought of her little changeling child. But her sadness was for the child’s loss of herself, and her loss of the child who might have been, more than for the little raw girl. Sometimes she dreamed of Anne, who had Charlotte’s face exactly but on a grown woman and full of the intelligence that the child’s lacked. Anne was carrying a parcel that she handed over to Fanny, telling her to guard it with her life, saying you are a mother, you will understand. Sometimes Fanny dropped the parcel and it rolled away out of sight. Or she opened it and there was a wax doll with green button eyes that could still stare malevolently at her. Other times she put it somewhere safely and couldn’t find it, she ran round the house crying and searching and woke up to Gérard holding her and rocking her as though she were the baby, scolding her sweetly for indulging in guilt¯trips. I still think I betrayed her, she said. I got sick, I lost my willpower, I let her slip away. I know all the arguments and I expect that where she is now is possibly the best thing, for me if not for her, but I still think I betrayed her. At least you gave her a name, said Gérard. She is Charlotte, you gave her that much existence. Fanny knew that it was Gérard who had named her, but she listened to what he said. •

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Cathérine came and stayed with them for a little while after they came back. She was worried about her daughter, she wanted to observe her and cosset her and bring her back to her old self. Luc called to say his mother was going to Lourdes. She’d had breast cancer which had seemed after a mastectomy to have gone away, you can never say cured, said Luc, just absent, but it had come back, spread to her liver and her spine. She wanted to go to Lourdes to drink the water, and she wanted him to go with her. Will you go, asked Cathérine. Oh yes, said Luc. I couldn’t not go. After he’d left Cathérine said, It is not the water itself, you know, it’s quite ordinary, no special minerals or salts, it is the holiness of the spring. Do people think it will cure them? asked Fanny, and Cathérine replied that it was not the cure so much as the blessing. But people want cures, Fanny said, they claim cures. Yes, said Cathérine, but that’s kind of secondary, it is the pilgrim¯ age. And like all pilgrimages, you go because it is a journey you need to make. Nevertheless, Fanny felt sure that Luc’s family secretly, deeply, devoutly hoped for a cure. It would have to be a miracle. She didn’t have any faith in miracles. She remembered the print of the pilgrim she’d bought as a present for Gérard. It seemed in another life. It was in another life. It was put away in a drawer somewhere, she should look for it.

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Luc’s antiquarian bookshop was a very good bookshop. The clients knew it, and the customers; Luc knew it, the books knew it. The distinction between clients and customers was Luc’s idea. Customers bought books, they paid for them and took them away, wrapped in acid¯free tissue paper and placed in a brown paper bag with a red wax seal. Clients enjoyed them, in one way or another, perhaps fondling them, or sitting at one of the tables turning the pages, or wandering along the shelves browsing. At the beginning Fanny had remonstrated with him; you shouldn’t let them do it, she said, they should be buying, but Luc always shook his head, and smiled, and after a while she understood that he saw the shop as a temporary or even a permanent haven for the books, a place where they alighted and sometimes stayed. He had a superstitious view of them, she realised, for a man who made so much of ration¯ ality; he believed that he didn’t own them but just minded them, for other people to enjoy, whether by buying or just looking didn’t much matter.

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Except of course that the shop didn’t make very much money. It turned a small profit, but wouldn’t have survived without the family pharmacies in Lyon. Luc told Julien that it was lucky for him his younger brother was a pharmacist with a wife and two little boys. And there was his sister who was a doctor married to a lawyer and mother of a daughter so there were heirs to the business as well as grandchildren and that took the pressure off him. The dynasty, both family and business, was safe. The pharmacies did well (they’re a goldmine, the lawyer son¯in¯law told his wife), Luc’s father Maurice thought it was only fair that Luc should have a share of the income they engendered—smaller than his brother’s since the brother did the work but still substantial enough—but he also thought that the bookshop should be a more businesslike business, no reason why it shouldn’t make some money; he had conversations with Luc along these lines. What about the rent, said Maurice, and Luc admitted it was high, but it was a good space and an excellent address, right in the middle of the Latin Quarter. You could relocate to the suburbs, said the old man, but Luc not hiding his horror said no, its reason for being was its address, which gave the shop its name, Le Vieux Latin, he couldn’t move, it would make a nonsense, this was where it belonged. In the old Latin Quarter, centre of intellectual life and scholarship. The customers would follow, the serious ones, said his father, but the idea so distressed Luc that the father didn’t pursue it. Instead he bought the building, wincing at the exorbitant price of Paris property, but assuring himself it was a good investment. He didn’t tell Luc he’d done this, he allowed him to go on paying a considerable part of his allowance back to him in rent, at least

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for the time being. Occasionally he came to Paris and inspected his purchase with secret pleasure. It was a narrow tall building, not particularly old, no more than middling nineteenth¯century, with a small paned window and a massive door a step below the pavement outside. The woodwork was painted a dark red colour, rather like Chinese lacquer that has darkened with age, also like the wax that sealed the paper book bags. Inside was a very tall room, with a wide mezzanine halfway up, made of iron, with a staircase and elaborate balustrades of metal. That belonged to the time Eiffel was building his iron apartment houses in Paris. It was painted the same aged lacquer red and so were the bookshelves. The space was lit by a number of dim yellow lamps. The father imagined needing a lantern to browse along the shelves, peering at worn leather bindings with faint gilt lettering. There were spindly tables at intervals along the mezzanine, each with a lamp, and these were where the clients sat, turning the pages with careful fingers, the lamplight pooling as it has done ever since there were books to read, candles and oil lamps and electric lights casting the same dim circles of brightness, making an intimate enchanted space in a gloomy world; so Luc put it to himself when he gazed round his shop. He wasn’t entirely fey, clients who were careless or clumsy were quickly moved on. But there weren’t many of those, clumsy careless people didn’t have an interest in antiquar¯ ian books. More problematic was a tramp, in battered clothes and unravelling half¯mitten gloves. He had a strong dry foxy smell, not unpleasant exactly, natural as well as feral. Luc imagined that quite a lot of old scholars would have smelled just so. He did wonder if he came in mainly to escape the cold, but he treated the books

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with reverence; so what, Luc said, if it was for the warmth he came. Not that it was all that warm, too much heat was bad for the books. Whereas fondling from clean but naturally oily hands was good. The tramp held his out for inspection as he came in, he probably washed them in the nearby Wallace. That was another reason Luc liked the shop’s address; its proximity to one of these green iron fountains set up to provide clean drinking water for the people of Paris, thanks apparently to an Englishman, Mr Wallace, whose memorial they’d become. There was a book about them, with black and white photographs. The shop had several copies. Above the mezzanine were the rooms for living in: a sitting room, a kitchen, with further up again bedrooms, and further up still a tiny attic guestroom. One of the bedrooms was Julien’s but he mostly slept with Luc in the big bed of the main room, except when he was working odd hours and didn’t want to wake him; he was a nurse specialising in intensive care. All the rooms had bookshelves, they doubled as store rooms as well as for living and sleeping. So many books, but Luc knew where they all were. Downstairs was a mahogany table that had been made a century or more before for cutting out patterns in a grand dress¯ making establishment. There were always interesting books open on it. As well as a candle in a pewter candlestick with a little lever to slide the candle up when it burnt down; this was for melting the wax for the seals. Fanny had a high stool beside it, she sat there in her clothes of mouse and mole and dim black with her fine legs crossed and her fair hair luminous in the light of the yellow lamps. An extravagance, Fanny, mumbled the father, but not critically, he could see how she and the shop fitted together. And Luc was away

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a lot, looking at collections or even libraries that people wanted to sell. He tried to do the big trips on Monday which was his closing day but that wasn’t always possible. There were still grand houses in the country with forgotten old books that brought gleams of avarice to their inheritors’ eyes. Besides, even a small and homely shop needs to be reliable, people make a trip, they are irritated if the place is arbitrarily closed. And the thing about the shop was, if you allowed for the subsidy from the pharmacies, that it func¯ tioned perfectly well, it did its job excellently, it made some money, it allowed Luc to live a good and happy and comfortable life. He is like somebody running a dogs’ home, said his father, only his is for books. I don’t suppose you expect a dogs’ home to make money. Luc’s mother didn’t care for going to Paris but after her husband bought the building she did make a trip to see the bookshop. He didn’t tell her that he had bought the building, only that it would please her son if she visited him. She rang him up often and talked to him at length, was he eating properly and did he go to Mass and was his flatmate comfortable to live with, but Maurice said it would be a good idea if she could picture him in his surroundings. They came by the Very Fast Train and stayed in a pretty hotel in the rue Jacob, quiet, with a courtyard planted with chestnut trees separating it from the street and a view of the spire of the church of St Germain des Prés reflected in the mirrored wall of the break¯ fast room. Handy that it is so close, said his mother. She was very taken with Fanny, who showed her the church of Sainte Geneviève, her birth day saint, and told the story of how she saved Paris from invaders, one slight girl defeating Attila and

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his Huns. Delphine admired the pink and blue and gilt statue and took one of her little prayer cards. Luc doesn’t like it, Fanny said, he thinks it’s a travesty, he only likes Gothic. Luc doesn’t understand the meanings of things, said Delphine. After that she started to tell Luc that he ought to marry Fanny. She is just the girl for you, she said on the phone. So elegant. So diligent. So calm. Now I have been to the bookshop, and can picture you, where you work. And I have seen Fanny too. Fanny under¯ stands the business, she said, and that’s important in a wife. Look at me and your father. Every time she rang him up she managed to tell him what a good girl Fanny would be for him to marry. Luc said, I am sure she has her own life, Mama. Why would she want to marry me? Girls need to be asked, said Delphine. She was fond of saying how pretty Fanny was, so slender, so gentle, so calm. Luc found the repetition of this strange. His mother was a stumpy woman, quite tiny, with thin legs and a very large bosom. She made a lot of noise as she walked. It was as though her weight came extra heavily through her thin legs and pounded the floor. The iron staircase thundered when she walked down it. She was wearing her mink stole over a navy blue suit with a straight skirt so she appeared to be a large furry top on a slender stem. She always wore expensive fine stockings and her legs were pale and very elegant. You look like a flower, said Luc, a lovely furry silver mink flower, and she gave him a strange look. He loved his mother and thought she was beautiful, but Delphine did not understand that. She was a wife and a mother and a grandmother

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and knew that she was valued. Maurice never told her that she was beautiful; it did not occur to her that he might. Fanny indeed was calm, and gentle, and diligent. A benign presence in the shop. All good qualities in a wife. But Luc had a lover, he would have liked to say to his mother, a lover is different, calmness and diligence are not what count, but even in a sly and teasing way he could not manage to say these words. Chemistry, sex, this is why we fall in love, not diligence and goodness. Though of course with luck these things may come too. A body that intoxi¯ cates may also be virtuous. Such class that girl has, said Delphine. Such breeding. Luc was surprised that she should say this. She knew that Fanny’s father was a builder, quite a smart and prosperous builder but not, he’d have thought, to compare with the pharmacy dynasty of her own family. Delphine was proud of this high bourgeois standing, built up over generations, expressed in the grand Lyon mansion, and the central pharmacy, with its nineteenth¯century cabinets, carved and glass¯doored, its sets of painted faience vessels with Latin inscrip¯ tions, its old yellowish bottles with ground¯glass stoppers, its great curved glass jars that now held only coloured water. Someone will snap her up, said Delphine. She is a perfect little madonna. She did not go so far as to say she would make a good mother to his children but he knew that’s what she meant. He’d thought she’d given up on him and children and was disturbed to see that she hadn’t. Luc liked talking to his mother on the phone. But all this about Fanny was becoming tedious. Give it a rest, Mama, he said. Tell me how you are. I’d like to see you settled before I go.

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Go? What do you mean, go? Is this that trip to New Zealand you’re always talking about? Delphine had had an au pair girl from that part of the world and often spoke of going to visit her now she was married with children, and of course the country too, its mountains and boiling lakes and the whiff of sulphur in the air. Luc! You know what I mean. We have to be prepared. None of us knows the moment of our going. We do if we’ve booked the tickets, said Luc to himself. Aloud he said, Mama, you’re a young woman. I expect you to see your great¯grandchildren grown up before there’s any talk of that kind of going. Maybe grandchildren should be enough. She paused. And, there’s you, Luc. Mama. Your sister’s pregnant again. That’s good. Great news. One day when Delphine asked, How’s my lovely Fanny, Luc could reply, She’s just got engaged. He took pleasure in saying this. To a builder, very handsome. Southern looking. Dark, with black curls. Delphine sighed. Oh dear. You won’t find anyone as lovely as Fanny in a hurry. Luc knew his mother knew he was gay. Of course it was never mentioned. She knew he lived with Julien. His flatmate, she called him, as though that would set him in the right place. Well, he said, luckily she’s not going to give up work. She’s cutting down, but not giving up. Good, said his mother vaguely.

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He does fancy renovations of old buildings, said Luc. Really grand restorations. You know, he came and courted her here, in the shop. He was looking for a book that would show how to restore an eighteenth¯century plaster ceiling and then he kept coming back to see her. He told Julien about his mother’s plans for him to marry Fanny. Now they were safely thwarted. Lying with his head on Julien’s chest, languid and full of love¯making. What! said Julien. But she knows . . . Yes. Of course she doesn’t like it; the Church, you know. Maybe she thinks I’ll grow out of it. Maybe she thinks it’s like sowing wild oats, you’re allowed so long and then you have to settle down. Maybe she thinks you’re bisexual. That it’s just a matter of choosing. Luc shuddered, his skin sliding against Julien’s. Some people are, you know. They seem to be able to move between men and women. Women too. I’m not sure my mother knows that. Julien’s hands slid over Luc’s body, smooth with the oil he had rubbed into it, that was part of their love¯making. Luc said: I think Fanny’s lovely—Mama’s right. I suppose I love her. But making love . . . no. What about passion? I don’t know what Mama knows about passion. I always wonder if she thinks marriage is about dynasties . . . business. Fanny being good for the bookshop. We always suppose our parents are ignorant. Or innocent. That they got us by accident. But I reckon . . . I reckon they were as hot in their day as we are. Not like this, said Luc.

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No, not like this. And what about the virginal Fanny, said Julien later. The diligent madonna and her southern stud . . . what d’you reckon? Luc pretended to be asleep.

Certain things did change with Fanny’s marriage. She worked fewer hours, and he missed her affection for the books. To Julien a book was mainly its contents but Fanny loved them, she handled them with a kind of respectful passion which was how Luc felt about them. She liked touching them, smelling them, being with them. He imagined a painting of her, on her stool, the madonna of the books. Except she had a husband now. So of course had most of the women whose likeness painters had turned into Our Lady. Husbands, or else lovers. Often the women were the mistresses of the men who painted them. He liked that, the awkward symmetry of it, the whore turned by the painter’s eye into the immaculate mother. The libidinous made virginal by a modest curve to the eyelid. Luc didn’t think it was any of his business to contemplate Fanny’s sex life and anyway marriages are secret even to the most perspicacious observer. But, he thought, she glows with happiness. He caught her in little private smiles to herself, for no reason. He missed her presence in the shop. It seemed duller without her, less luminous, which was a word he was surprised to find himself thinking. But then there started to be more customers, Gérard’s clients. Rich people who could afford the builder’s extravagantly renovated apartments, and were tickled by the idea of owning an

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old book which, if it didn’t have their own place in it, had one very like. A beautiful old book is a nice ornament to a beautiful old room. Luc had mixed feelings about this. Up till now his custom¯ ers had mostly been book lovers, and his clients certainly so, well maybe not so certainly the tramps. He felt like an adoption agency; were these frail beloved creatures going to good homes? I should be grateful I can nearly pay the rent, he said to himself, and told his father. My god, said Maurice, you’re not getting close to covering the rent! You’ll be making a living wage next. But Luc had lived a long time with his father’s sarcasm and accepted it affectionately. Returned it. It’ll come in handy when I have my ten children, he said. He was more dependent on Mondays for the buying trips that were at all distant. One such he was planning to make to Troyes, a deceased estate; the widow promised him some interesting things. I wonder, he said to Julien on the Sunday, she might be right but it might be total crap. Isn’t that the fun of the chase, said Julien. Yes, I suppose, said Luc, but it’d be a bit of a bore, all that way and no good. Julien was on the graveyard shift, and slept in his own room so he wouldn’t wake Luc when he got up in the middle of the night. Luc was drinking tea and eating packet toast spread with apricot jam when the phone rang; it was the widow, putting him off. It was not suitable, she said, she’d let him know. He supposed it was a rival book dealer. It was a fine day, he could see the sun shining in yellow slants between the buildings, making the tubs of shining green plants in the cafe across the square sparkle. He poured away the tea and put

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the toast into the bin and went down and ate croissants with a big cup of strong milky coffee while the sun fingered the street awake. He closed his pale lashes across his eyes and watched the light iridesce through them. It was irritating to have a plan cancelled but on the other hand he could see the day as a gift, an unexpected holiday. He walked down to the river but most of the book stalls were having a Monday closing day too. So was the flower market. He decided to find a shop to buy something interesting to cook for dinner. The small food shops were shut too and it was the day of no markets, but there was a Monoprix and he managed to avoid anything too industrial. He went back to the cafe and had a mixed salad with a pitcher of red wine, it felt like a holiday to be drinking wine for lunch. The sun had gone from the cafe but was shining on a balcony over the way. A young woman was playing with a cat, a fat tabby with classical tortoiseshell symmetry, she was dangling a plastic fish on a string for it to pounce, then pulling it away. The cat turned and leapt like a dancer. He remembered Montaigne, something about when he was playing with his cat he wondered whether in fact it was the cat entertaining herself playing with him. The cat being the one in control. Not that Montaigne would have used a word like control in this context. Montaigne made him think of being young, at university, and the contents of books being what mattered, rather than their bindings and gilt and the foxing of the pages. He had a copy of Montaigne upstairs. He dropped his shopping in the kitchen and went up to the little attic guestroom, walking quietly; he hated making the iron staircase thunder the way his mother did, his footfall was soft and light.

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He opened the door and there was a movement on the bed. White buttocks going up and down. Two surprised faces turned to him. Excuse me, he said, and shut the door. The white buttocks belonged to Julien, the other face was a stranger. He supposed that was what Julien looked like when he was making love to him, the white buttocks going up and down. He crept downstairs and sat on Fanny’s stool. She had left on the table a large book of engravings of the Port Royal area. The ribbon bookmark was at a picture of vegetables being grown at that end of the Luxembourg Gardens. Rows of lovingly delineated cabbages looked like soccer balls blossoming into roses. That was another Montaigne thought, some¯ thing about death finding him in his garden planting his cabbages, and him caring little for death, and not much for the garden either. Caring little, that seemed a good idea. He might look that up too. When he could get to the book. The Montaigne was in crimson morocco with gilt edges, not very old, nothing like original, imagine a sixteenth¯century copy, but nice. Of course planting cabbages was not necessarily simply that, like Voltaire cultivating his garden, which wasn’t really about digging in the earth, though it might involve it, and Montaigne as he remembered was usually pretty literal. Two people came clattering down the stairs. Hi, said Julien, this is Travis, he’s just going. Yes, said Luc. One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave. Julien looked at him. Montaigne, said Luc. I knew a lot of Montaigne at one time. I’ve learned a lot from him today.

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Travis couldn’t open the door so Julien did it for him. The keys were in a little lidded brass box on the windowsill, and there were bolts. Did you practise safe sex? asked Luc. Julien sat heavily in a shabby leather armchair the colour and texture of black pudding. He leaned back and made a net of his fingers. Sex is safe, he said. It’s love that’s dangerous. Which is Travis? There’s no danger in Travis. Who is Travis? A wardsman. Rough trade? If you like. Not love. It’s you I love. You know that. So that’s why you’re fucking Travis in the spare bedroom. You’re falling into the heterosexual fallacy. Monogamy is not fidelity. Monogamy isn’t love. Sex is a game. It’s an entertainment. You wouldn’t mind if I played squash with another partner. We’ve talked about it. You’ve talked about it. So have you. I thought you’d agreed. Maybe I thought I did. In theory. It doesn’t feel like it now. Seeing you fucking Travis—it’s a kick in the guts. Luc slumped over the table. I feel betrayed. I was looking for a book and now I’m betrayed. By that too. Julien’s voice softened, became tender; a strip of sunlight found its way through the old paned window, across the piles of books, to halo his pale spiky hair. I have not betrayed you. I love you as I have always done.

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Have you done this before? Of course. I never promised monogamy. I like sex. It’s fun. It’s not what we have. You have sex with me. It’s different. It’s part of love. And if it changes everything for me? You mustn’t let it. You can’t. Not if you love me. Luc bent his head over the engraving of the vegetables in the Luxembourg Gardens. There were a lot of cabbages, in their rows like solid soccer ball roses. Luc began to sing, but since he didn’t trust himself to get the tune right he vocalised the words in a kind of semi¯musical speaking: Can you plant a cabbage right Like we do it Like we do it Can you plant a cabbage right Like we plant them all round here.

What’s that? said Julien. It’s a song, my mother used to sing it when I was really little. Pretty stupid, isn’t it. It might have a nice tune. Maybe Montaigne’s mother sang it to him. Julien got the whisky and poured lavishly into glasses. Noth¯ ing’s changed, he said. Except I know. Still, nothing’s changed.

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Luc looked helplessly at Julien. Perception is everything. You must know that. Julien shook his head. I’m a nurse. An ordinary practical person. The two men took slow mouthfuls of whisky, Luc on his stool, leaning over the table, Julien sitting straight now in the blackish¯red speckled armchair. The two men so alike, so fair; spiky hair, trans¯ parent skins, pale eyes, but Luc thinking they were more different than he had ever imagined. I suppose you’ll have us going trawling in bath houses next. Julien said, in a wounded voice, You know we both know that’s not our kind of thing, we mustn’t be cheap. Think of it, he said. It’s heterosexuals that are hung up on monogamy. That’s what’s so grand about being gay, sex in its right place, a game, and love so much more important. Was it safe sex? I’m clean, you know that. So’s Travis. We work in a hospital, you know those things. I was looking for my copy of Montaigne, said Luc. I think I’ll go and find it.

Later, holding the red morocco of the book in his hands, turning the pages, remembering the young man he’d been at university, shy and knowing he was gay but not what he could do about it, reading the imperfectly recalled words, half repelled by their humble wisdom but teased too and even enchanted, he came on another remark:

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A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, unencumbered, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.

Well, he had the shop, not quite back, and not exactly owned by him, but small and secluded enough, maybe he should establish his true freedom, throw Julien out, go all the way for seclusion and solitude. But at the thought he felt such a panic, such a suffocation in his chest, far worse than the jolt of seeing Julien’s white buttocks and Travis’s surprised stare, and he knew he didn’t want that. Seclu¯ sion and solitude: a person had to work out if it was right for him, and the churning in his gut at the thought of losing Julien told him no. Montaigne was just a man, four hundred years dead now, you didn’t have to believe all his words. The little back shop. He could talk, he lived in a château. Why the attic? he asked Julien. It seemed—more polite, said Julien. More secret. I thought you’d be more comfortable not knowing. You were being dishonest. Deceiving me. Not wanting to worry you. Deceiving. The old heterosexual trap—you feel guilty other¯ wise you’d have told me about it. You do believe I love you, said Julien. I suppose so. But not quite how I thought. And yes I know life is never as you think or want it to be so I should just get over it, shouldn’t I. He asked Fanny what she thought of monogamy. She was dusting books with a worn clean linen tea towel, he’d worked

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out that was the best thing, must be the molecules of the fabric. Monogamy, she said, surprised, and he said, Yes, I mean, in, um, sex, and she said, Marriage. Or partnership, he said. I think it’s terribly important, she said. The most important thing. What if, what if Gérard were unfaithful to you? Oh, he never would be. Never. He knows it would break my heart. And I never would be, it would break his. Why would you want to? Some people think sex is separate from love. I’ve heard that. Like those hopeless old hippy open marriages you read about. My parents’ generation. They were never equal, were they, people realised that, after a lot of unhappiness. In theory it was both partners living the free life, but in fact it was one having affairs and the other being miserable. I’ve heard people in this present moment saying love isn’t anything to do with monogamy, sex is a game. Well, it is. But it’s love too, isn’t it. Fanny blushed. She stroked a worn leather spine with her duster. I mean, it’s your thing that you do together. Not with anybody else. Luc wanted to remember that, your thing that you do together. But when he rehearsed in his mind saying this to Julien he feared it would not have the candid conviction that Fanny gave the words. He wished Julien had been there for the conversation. Besides, said Fanny, when would there be time? She blushed again, suddenly darkly red. Luc was startled. Yes, he said. He had been thinking of Julien and time. In a different context, not in terms of not enough, but in how it was passed. He’d never bothered before. Julien worked his

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changing hours, came and went, Luc had never asked himself how his absences were to be accounted for. He’d never bothered to do sums. Checking up on your partner was a mean way to live, and you were the one who would be damaged by it. Fanny always spoke so tenderly of Gérard. One of the things Luc liked about Julien was his tenderness. In love¯making, but in ordinary things too, eating breakfast and walking down the street, there was a quiet tender affection. And there was his tender¯heartedness in his job, which was practical and tough as well. The intensive¯care ward he was working in dealt with children’s cardiac surgery. He some¯ times spoke of the bravery and grace of the children he nursed, and the pain of their parents. And the hopelessness of some of the cases, where hearts were born so badly misformed that not even the kind of miracles the surgeons normally and so extraordinarily performed could save them, though they always tried, offering not hope but a terrible odds¯against lottery. Sometimes he was involved in turning off a life¯support system, the doctors and the nurses standing around a curtained cot, standing quietly for some moments, waiting till the parents had made their farewells, leaving them as long as they wanted, gazing at the child, letting them stay there as all the intricate tech¯ nology silently shut down. He sometimes thought of this as a kind of secular last rites, contemplating the mystery of that frail life, real, breathing, but unsustainable, and death so perceptibly, so inexorably, taking over. He would come home and talk about it, sitting quietly with Luc over a cup of tea, paying attention to the small life so many people had tried and failed to save. Maybe, Luc thought, sitting in the black¯pudding armchair— that was Julien’s description of it: You know, he said, the way the

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skin of black pudding rubs and crackles a bit and looks sort of bursting and reddish, the leather and the chair were exactly like that, Luc never didn’t think of the image, especially as one of his favourite things to eat was black pudding with air apples and earth apples, which is real apples and potatoes, fried, his mother used to cook it—maybe, Luc thought, this quiet life with books was calm and safe and enough for him, with none of the despair and pain and fear and endless sadness of Julien’s work. Though sometimes hope was rewarded with joy and hearts were mended and there was a chance for a child to be healed but that also was exhaust¯ ing, as well as exciting. And maybe that was why Julien needed this crude physical relief of loveless sex, it was maybe just a gut reaction and he should believe that it had nothing to do with the love they had for one another. But his chest ached and his brain felt miserable; he’d need to work on that scenario to make his body accept it.

Maurice rang and left a message on the answering machine. Your mother, he said. He often used this phrase, and Luc always had thoughts about it. Your mother . . . rather as though she were Luc’s responsibility, not to do with Maurice at all. He could imagine, just, calling his father and asking, How is my mother? though he wouldn’t, of course he wouldn’t, but there was no way he could ring and ask, How is your wife? Maurice would not say, speaking to Luc, my wife . . . it excluded too much. Luc quite hated this Your mother business. It shrank her to a single role and shut her in a box. Why couldn’t he say Delphine? Let her be a person.

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He wondered: was Maurice faithful to Delphine? As a woman? As a lover? He knew he was devoted to her as his wife, the mother of his children, he admired the way his life ran smoothly, she was his companion and helpmate. Or helpmeet, as they said at church, his father was patriarch enough to like helpmeet. But he knew also that men kept mistresses, for amusement, for relaxation, for irres¯ ponsible hedonism. For sex. Which was what Julien was doing in a more contemporary rougher random way. But then weren’t gay men supposed to be able to avoid the traps that caught heterosexual men? That made them dishonest and two¯faced? So, it would be all right for Maurice to have a mistress if Delphine knew about it? Maybe she did. He shivered. He’d come a long way from Your mother. A father with a mistress and a wife and a mother knowing, or not. He could ask his sister. Madeleine might know, women did. And she lived in Lyon. Or maybe his brother did. A men¯together thing. Thinking these things was like being at a play, with characters performing on a carefully lit stage. Moving, important even, but he wasn’t one of the players, not up there, in the light. He rang Maurice, inquired after his health. Maurice replied, as he always did, Can’t complain. Can’t complain. Then he said, Your mother . . . You mean Delphine? Well, yes. Or your wife? She’s not just my mother. She’s sick, said Maurice. Delphine . . . she’s sick. Luc suddenly felt trivial. What, he said, in a harsh voice. What? Is it serious?

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Maurice seemed to be in his own world. Luc waited for him to form his words. They came out dry, tremulous, in the voice of an old man. It’s cancer, he said. Breast cancer. Diagnosed this morning. Operating tomorrow. His voice gave a hiccup that could have been a laugh. I don’t know what that says. Urgent, I suppose. Well, said Luc, careful. Maybe. They want to catch these things as soon as possible. They have figures. Statistics. Prognoses. They can be quite good. Very good. I’ll come down. No, said Maurice. Wait until she’s through, feeling better. Your brother’s here. And Madeleine. I want it to be routine for her. Not worry her. Luc still had a habit of doing what his father asked. But in the morning, at the time when the operation was about to take place, he thought, I should have gone. I might never see her again, and he sat on Fanny’s stool with his chest squeezing in fear. But Delphine was all right, the doctor was pleased, he’d removed the whole breast and the lymph nodes, he was confident he’d got the whole cancer. In the summer Luc closed the shop and went down for a week. He was surprised to see how well Delphine looked. She lay on a sofa wearing a loose pale blue garment with frills, a frivolous cheerful thing, when he could only recall seeing her formally and heavily dressed in dark suits or skirts and jumpers with neat polished shoes and those legs that looked too frail to hold her up. Her hair which had faded from blond to silver hung in curls round her face and she had a pink spot of

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colour in each cheek. She looked astonishingly young. Well, not young exactly, if you’d asked anybody her age they would have said, Oh, sixty, or so, which was what she was, or if they wanted to pay compliments maybe they’d say, In her fifties I’d guess. It was rather a kind of innocence, childlike¯ness. She looked at the world with wide¯open pale blue eyes, and her mouth pouted a little, as though she was pondering what she saw. He’d seen the same intentness on the faces of his nieces and nephews. In their case the faces were so new and fresh they touched your heart, you understood why people loved their children when you saw these round cheeks, this perfect rosy skin, your heart was caught and you wanted to keep them safe. Nature is so clever, his sister said, making children so adorable. His mother’s face was worn, a little wrinkled, a little pouchy, but the gaze was as fresh and alert and trusting as her grandchildren’s. His father took him aside. It was touch and go at one moment, he said. I didn’t say before, didn’t want to worry you. And now, you can see, she’s right as rain. She seems different, he said. Well, she’s convalescent. She has to rest. He didn’t think her mind was less sharp than it had been, but it was gentler, less anxious. He wondered if he should be troubled by that. Her serenity was lovable as a child’s, he wanted to hug her. Her rosary rested on the arm of the sofa. Now and then she curled her fingers through it. He had a customer, a Greek profes¯ sor interested in old books of classical antiquities. Just so he held his worry beads.

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How is Fanny? Delphine asked. Is she pregnant yet? When he said, Not as far as I know, she shook her head sadly. He told her about the child she and Gérard had adopted for a while. A wild child, he said. Not exactly as in running wild out in the woods, but shut off from civilisation. Gérard had found her tied up in an attic, in a house where the people had died. Impris¯ oned and abandoned at the same time. Thinking of those words that ought not to go together always gave him a shiver of horror. Imprisoned and abandoned. Adopted only for a while? It turned out to be impossible. A child like that, deprived of any love and care for so long, it’s beyond redemption. No soul is beyond redemption. He started to say that some people thought that perhaps such wild children didn’t have souls, that they were the evidence that souls were created by nurture, that as intelligence was developed in a child, by civilising and socialising, so was the soul. He was about to say, It’s a highly exciting field of study, it’s about what makes us human. Are we really just animals, after all? His mother cut in: Soul, Luc, not civilisation, or intelligence. The unborn child in the womb has a soul. I suppose you could say this child was a poor little lost soul, he began to say. The beads of the rosary slid between Delphine’s fingers. He decided this wasn’t a good conversation to be having. Fanny got ill, he said. Gérard took her to Tahiti. Poor Fanny, she said, reproachfully, he thought. Is she trying to have children?

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Mama! How would I know that? She shrugged. These things are to be known, she said.

During the winter the cancer came back. The doctor had said there were no guarantees. It had metastasised, now it was in the bones of her spine. She was having chemotherapy, which made her feel tired and sick. Will that get rid of it? Maurice said, There can be cases of remission. Quite marvel¯ lous improvements, one hears about. But . . . not a cure? Remissions can last a long time.

Fanny who is almost well again is minding the shop. Luc walks along the river to the market in the Place Maubert. It is a high blue day of cold skittery winds and woolly shreds of cloud. The river is brown and rolling. A barge slides past. On its deck is a bicycle and a pram, the windows have lace curtains tied with bows and boxes of dancing yellow daffodils. He leans on an iron railing and watches it pass, moving solidly with the river rolling down to the sea, carrying some lumpy covered cargo and its own home with it. On the terrace¯like deck is a small child tied with wide strong bands to stop it falling in the water, a toddler staggering about and watching the world slip away behind it. What sort of world would that be to grow up in, that was always slipping away astern? The bookshop hardly notices the seasons. The light shines

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brighter or dimmer beyond the small paned windows, but inside it is always charmed yellow lamplight and the air doesn’t move. He imagines living on the river in a barge, so alive to the turning of the years. What about it, Julien? Shall we sell up and go on the river? With bicycles, and daffodils, and a paraffin stove making the cabin warm and fuggy. The barge is a book that he reads for a while and closes with a sigh, perhaps of regret. In the market it is spring, which is why he has come. The asparagus are thick and white, everything else is small. Baby lamb cutlets. Tiny peas. Peas as sweet as your lady¯love, says the stall holder. Fingerling carrots. Goat cheese fresh as curd. Julien is home at a normal hour tonight and he will cook for him a dinner of the first fruits of spring.

Julien was subdued. He smiled into Luc’s eyes and ate the meal with pleasure. He noticed it and mentioned all the right things. Luc stood behind his chair and rubbed his fingers into the cords of Julien’s neck. Tell me, he said. A little girl. Aurore. He gave a tremulous smile. Such a grand name, so full of beginnings. He was silent for a minute. We lost her. Well, we lost her a few days ago, but we finally admitted it. Turned everything off. Four years old, long dark hair, so long for one so small, huge eyes, the most beautiful child. Why should beauty count? But it does, it’s somehow extra sadness. She’s been in before, a number of times, and gone home smiling. Frail. A little dusky. But pulling through. So tiny, and such will, such stamina. This time she didn’t.

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Luc laid his cheek on Julien’s bristle of hair. His fingers contin¯ ued their gentle kneading, turning it into a caress. He got out a bottle of transparent plum spirit that a friend of his father distilled in the traditional way, though quite illegally, and poured out small portions of the velvety strong liquor. He told Julien about the barge and the bicycles and the daffodils. Not the pram, or the toddler in its long restraining band. What a good idea, said Julien. He didn’t usually show he minded the deaths of the children. He knew he would not be able to work if he thought too hard about them, knew that eventually the day would come when he would think too hard about them, and wondered if it was closer than he expected. Or hoped, or feared? He was grateful to Luc for offering him a barge to sail away on. Even though they both knew they would never do it. A barge, he said. Are we working or having fun? Both? I wonder how you become a barge man. A barge family. Answer an advertisement, set up your own boat, whatever? Or are you born into it? Man and boy and your father afore ye? Julien was still full of sadness when they went to bed. They lay and held one another, comforting in the dark. Next evening it was Julien’s turn to do dinner. He stopped at a truly classy food shop and bought little packets of goodies. He was sparkly¯eyed and not excited exactly but somehow taut. He made martinis and put four exotic little nibbles on a plate. Is this your keep¯a¯working¯man’s¯family¯for¯a¯week kind of delicacy? asked Luc. Not quite, said Julien, but you should pay attention.

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You know Claude, said Julien on the second martini. She was a colleague, a pediatrician, working with the babies in intensive care, her partner Agnès was a doctor in a suburban general practice. Sometimes the four of them went out together, and made believe they were two heterosexual couples. The women were thinking of buying a house in the suburbs, an old industrial space. It had a marvellous garden. There was a cherry tree with big blackish fruit and great bushes of roses. The cherries, the cherries were sweet and tart together; was it the cherries or the house that charmed them? Yes, of course Luc knew Claude. She’s got an idea. Well? They want to have a baby. Yes . . . who with? That’s the idea. Me. Or you. Luc’s heart lurched. You may screw around, he said. But with women? No thanks. But that wasn’t what his heart was lurching about. No, nothing like that. The old turkey baster trick. What? You’re such an innocent, Luc. Those plastic things, Americans use them for basting meat. What’s wrong with a spoon? It’s American. A kind of syringe. Plastic. So women baste themselves with semen? Well, insert rather. It’s a commonly known thing. And have our children? Do we get to see them? I suppose all that has to be worked out.

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Visiting rights, once a fortnight kind of thing. All the fun of a divorce without the bother of marriage. Or are we just a sperm donor, anonymous, forgotten. Why don’t they go to a sperm bank? It’s not that simple if you aren’t a ‘proper’ couple. Maybe they could have one for us while they’re about it. I see you’re not keen. Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Surprised. Doubtful. I was . . . sort of charmed by the idea. A child. But what if they didn’t look after her properly? I suppose you have to trust people when you have children with them, even when you’re married to them. Wouldn’t we have faith in Agnès and Claude? But it wouldn’t be with them. It would be them, just them. Yeah. Let’s forget it. No. Let’s talk about it. It’s too big, too all of a sudden . . . Luc gazed at Julien. You could have just done it, not asked me. We’re a couple. It’s not a decision for one to make. Luc looked round the apartment, with its dark walls of books, its warm yellow lamplight, the gin viscous in the triangular glasses, the green knobs of olives on a plate painted with dancing peasant women. It was occasionally haunted by the shades of Julien’s dead children, children he worked so hard to save and mourned a harsh moment when he couldn’t, knowing it would always be so that some would live and some would die and there could be nothing fair or kind about it, only gratitude and luck and grief. And now perhaps the shades of other children, children of their own flesh, his or Julien’s, but not theirs, always irrevocably theirs and not theirs at the same time.

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Let’s let it lie for a while, said Luc. Have it in mind and see what our brains make of it. Or our hearts?

Luc and Julien walk along the rue St Jacques. They had met when Julien came into the shop and Luc discovered he too had a passion for the old city, liked to explore its spaces, its crevices, its history spread out in its buildings. Often on Sunday afternoons they wander through it, especially when a new book comes in and tells them some¯ thing they hadn’t known before. Luc would have liked to hold Julien’s hand but didn’t. He wasn’t aware that they might as well have; these two tall thin men with fair hair and transparent skins walking along in the forcefield of their own affection are as evidently a couple as if they’d stood locked in a violent embrace. Fanny sees them out of her window, remembering the time she watched them sitting in a cafe, before she met Gérard, and envied them their enclosedness; now she smiles with pleasure as she looks down on them, watches them look through the door of the apartments built on the site of the Carmelite convent, peering through its vast glass¯walled foyer into the courtyard where a fragment of an old stone doorway is preserved. She doesn’t know Julien very well, just that Luc, spare prickly Luc, so strict about the world around him, so scathing of its shortcom¯ ings, loves him. She stands with her palms on the sill of her closed window, her skirt lifted, her knickers on the floor, Gérard moving gently inside her. The two men glance up at what they know is her apartment, but the rays of the afternoon sun strike across the old wavery glass, they cannot see her standing there.

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They stop outside the Val de Grâce. It’s a bright and silvery day, the rollicking baroque architecture of the church looks washed clean and austere only in colour. There are people walking through its gilded iron gates, up its wide stairs. The two men are looking, not going in. Usually Luc tells Julien the story of Anne of Austria, Queen of France, married twenty¯three years and still childless, making a bargain with God: give me a son and I will give you a church. God did: Louis XIV. And she built the magnificent edifice she had promised. Instead he is telling Julien about the phone call from his father. Your mother, said Maurice, again, and paused and cleared his throat and said again, Your mother. Luc’s chest filled so full of dread it took his breath away, he couldn’t speak. She wants to go to Lourdes, said Maurice. To make a pilgrimage. Luc sighed relief. Is she well enough? It could be managed. I think. Maurice paused. She wants you to go with her. Me? Surely, you. No. She wants you to go with her. So, you see, said Luc, staring at the Val de Grâce, my mother is determined to go to Lourdes. He gave a little snort of sad laughter. It’s odd. My mother believes she will go to heaven. Her faith is very pure and simple. And yet it isn’t easy for her to die. All her will is bent on remaining in this life. It has been full of all that the Lord can give—family, affection, wealth—is completed you might say by the safe transferring of her genes to the next generation and the one after that, she has been fruitful and multiplied, and yet still she cannot bear to leave it. Will fight against it.

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Do you believe she will go to heaven? You know perfectly well that I’m not devout like her. Not even devout like you. I don’t believe. They stared for a while at the silvery riotous facade, the pale glittering windows. Such an earthly church, said Luc. Lucky it’s not coloured, it would be too vilely kitsch for words. He paused. Your dead children, do they go to heaven? I don’t know what heaven means. But I like to believe there’s some space for them, which is beyond our understanding, where they are well, without pain or fear, undamaged, undeformed. Like to believe . . . I do believe. The Church can’t explain it to me, but my faith, it can know. Can you be a good Catholic and think the Church can’t explain? Julien gestured at the edifice in front of them. As you say, such an earthly church. The Church temporal and architectural, of course we know it is fashioned by people, and we have to remember it is in its spiritual form too. Its spirituality is of its own making, even if it is supposed to be from God. I go to Mass and I believe, though I do not know. I am like my mother’s cat, sitting on her balcony, watching the modern mansion being built in the fields across the way. A great ugly marble palace for the local magnate. The cat has no idea how it is done, but that it is there is no doubt. Luc laughed, his sweet laugh. Won’t heaven be beautiful? Well, maybe that was an unfortunate image. What would I know, I’m just an ignorant opinionated Catholic homosexual. A terrible worry to the Church. It wishes my like would go away.

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Luc gave him a light punch in the ribs, instead of a hug. Will you go to Lourdes? asked Julien. Yes, of course. My mother wants it. It fills me with horror, but I’ll go. I tell you what: you think this is kitsch. Wait till you see Lourdes.

The carriages bowl along in an endless loop through the town, along the red painted strip that could recall a yellow brick road, except that it is worn and dingy, flimsily cordoned off from traffic and pedestrians, the carriages rolling up hills and down slopes at such a clip it is as though all the pushers and pullers are determined to contrast to the utmost their virility with the huddled illnesses within. Something desperate in their haste: what are they outrun¯ ning? The carriages are blue, with soft hoods, ribbed and folding, like some idea of a nineteenth¯century governess cart crossed with a big baby’s pram, two large wheels and a long small¯wheeled bar in front. Luc pulls and the nurse¯nun pushes. His mother gazes out from wrappings, with her elderly¯child intentness. The line is endless for a while, as far back and forward as the eye can see, then people drop off, to the churches, to hospices and hotels. Delphine is one of the livelier passengers, others lie back with their deaths so plain in their faces that it’s indecent even to glance at them. A young woman sits upright with a pink bow in her hair and no arms or legs. Some people are in their own wheelchairs, legless, or paralysed. Some are very old, withered to dry skin and bone. Others are children, born with bodies so frail and imperfectly

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made that they look as though they will break at any moment. Some cannot control their trembling. There are people of various ages paralysed by strokes, their eyes blaze angrily and you wonder what the brains in their lost bodies are thinking. Nobody in the carriages smiles or laughs, they glare, or stare, or gaze with vacant eyes; Luc imagines they are fixed on seeing miracles. He is full of fury, it beats out in his striding footsteps as he pulls Delphine’s carriage. Isn’t this energy obscene in the circumstances? His striding feet stamp out questions. What do they expect God to do? Grow arms and legs? Unparalyse spines? Unblock arteries? Breathe life into the nearly dead? Isn’t this why all these healthy people are here, grinning inanely in the high pure Pyrenean light, that their loved ones may cast off their deformities, their damage, their mortality, and walk? Like the crutches and walking sticks hung over the entrance to the grotto, witness to their owners no longer needing them. They are ancient, cobwebbed, rotting away. Are there no newer emblems of miracles? The statue of Our Lady smirks in glabrous gilt and pastels more ghastly than Fanny’s Sainte Geneviève. With gold roses on her feet. After parading through the grotto the supplicants drink water from the spring, piped along a rock wall with brass taps so you can fill cups and jerry cans and the plastic madonnas whose blobby blue crowns unscrew. The madonna bottles come in all sizes and are just one of the great and hideous panoply of souvenirs that spill out of the myriad excrescent souvenir shops that blotch the town. Luc recalls Julien’s story of the cat watching the marble mansion being built. A god that Luc believed in would hate ugliness, would smite it down in mighty thunderbolts from heaven.

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The nurse¯nun fills his mother a cup of the water. It has no water virtues, she says, but it is holy. What do you mean? asks Luc, striving for politeness. It’s not like the water of Salies¯de¯Béarn, down the road, that has salts, good for women and children and bones, or those diges¯ tion waters, like Vichy, it’s just holy. Our Lady’s water, out of her spring. Its virtues aren’t earthly, they’re spiritual. We can’t know when a miracle . . . The nurse¯nun has facts. Seventeen thousand people living in the town, she says, and every year five million visitors. Seventy thousand invalids and people with disabilities. The pilgrimage is bigger than Mecca. Thousands and thousands of miracles. The Church is prudent, it has recognised only sixty¯five as officially miraculous. But people know. Luc wants to ask, how does God choose? Or Our Lady or whoever? Do they have a turnstile ticking over, time for another one? Is there a computer bringing up perfectly random numbers? Or is it based on desert, or maybe merit. Isn’t it immoral to demand of Him to choose you and ignore everyone else? Any way you look at it, it’s a bad joke. Maybe a really evil joke, God playing dice, your number coming up. He can’t ask Delphine: Do you expect a miracle? Do you think that Our Lady will cure you? The nurse¯nun says, But of course Lourdes isn’t about miracles. It’s a spiritual experience. This huge concentration of the love of God. You mean these people are not expecting miracles? God always gives hope, says the nun. But it is the pilgrimage that matters.

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An experience of grace, says Delphine. That’s the true pilgrim¯ age. For the soul’s well¯being. Her cheeks are pink, her eyes bright. He turns to look at her, wondering, is this grace? I didn’t come for a miracle, she says, not where my health is concerned, or . . . or anything else. She smiles at her son. One always has to do the best one can. Delphine is tired. She’ll go back to the hotel and rest. The hotel with its Art Deco exterior and Belle Epoque staircase, its address in avenue du Paradis. How cruel is that. The nurse¯nun gives him a pamphlet to read. He wishes that Julien were here, at least that he weren’t at work so he could telephone him. Maybe his faith could negotiate this absurd set of paradoxes Luc finds himself enmeshed in. He’s not angry now, he’s anxious, it seems to be in the air about him; maybe, he says to himself, it’s the terrible dangerous anxiety of hope. Luc sits at a cafe and drinks a beer. The carriages have disap¯ peared. A few wheelchairs remain, but most of the crowd is healthy, tourists, pilgrims he supposes. A group of young people with Down syndrome dances past, laughing. The light is bright, the great church of Our Lady gleams sugary white as a Carème table piece, its stone spun into fantastical shapes. He shrinks it with his squint¯ ing eyes and breaks off a turret to suck. Except he hates sweet things, and the sight of this makes his teeth ache. A young man asks permission to sit at his table. He is dressed in a black sweater and trousers, rather silky and shiny and not at all sombre in this bright light. He has round rosy¯brown cheeks like polished apples and black curls. A Southerner, and when he opens

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his mouth he speaks with the local accent and very purely, not sloppily the way people do in Paris. There are spare tables, but the young man sits and begins to talk, he seems to want Luc’s company. He orders a cup of coffee and talks idly at first, he is from Mont¯ pellier, to begin with, but now he lives in Lourdes, where is Luc from, ah Paris, and a bookshop, that sounds wonderful. He has never been to Paris, he would like to go one day. He hears it is very different from hereabouts. Luc is surprised to find himself in this conversation, it is as though the young man spins it like a web, skilfully, invisibly, and Luc who has had no intention of staying finds himself ordering another beer. The young man asks is he a pilgrim, and Luc tells him about Delphine. Ah, he says, and lays his hand over Luc’s where it rests on the table, looking sorrowfully into his eyes. Luc feels his hand go still like a trapped animal. He thinks of Julien and his white bottom in the spare room, the young man sliding out the door of the shop. Rough trade. This young man must be a person who picks up tourists, pilgrims, sad people whom he consoles, he is a professional consoler of men whom he recognises as gay. Luc imagines that his bottom wouldn’t be white but a golden biscuity brown like the skin on his face, his hands. But then he thinks that the view he has in his mind of Julien’s white bottom moving is that of the spy, the person who is outside the couple. He is surprised to find himself thinking spy. Would voyeur be better? Given that his seeing was unwitting, he does not think either word describes him. Neither was his intention. Ah, intentions. The hand is soft and cool as it lies over Luc’s. Rough trade— very delicate rough trade this young man is. He is being offered a

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chance to find out if Julien is right about sex and love. Presumably he will have to pay which Julien doesn’t but this young man looks as though he would deserve it. Will they go to his hotel, or probably the young man has somewhere to take people. Maybe he shouldn’t have drunk two beers in the middle of the day. But why not, and why not, this is what life offers, in the midst of death . . . That’s what the young man is saying. He is consoling Luc, but with words. He leans forward, his eyes shining with the hope he is offering, of his mother’s freedom from pain and her glorious welcome before the throne of heaven, and his own eventual reunion with her there one day. The man’s hand curls tight around Luc’s. The high neck of his black sweater pulls away a little, and he sees that the white shirt he glimpsed above the black jumper is in fact a priestly collar. Luc laughs, and the young man looking wounded takes his hand back. I’m sorry, said Luc. I’m laughing at myself, my foolish self. I am afraid, well, no, I mean I’m just not a believer. I think I am going to lose my mother soon and that will be forever. But human life’s always been like that, that’s how it is. The man put his hand out again. This might be your chance, he said. This place of miracles. The greatest miracle is the recovery of faith. Luc stared into the moist brown eyes regarding him so lovingly. He thought of saying, I was supposing you wanted to go to bed with me. That could have been a revelation. But he was not so cruel. Instead he smiled, ruefully, for his lack of faith, or his own sexual confusion. I will pray for you, the man said.

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Thank you. He walked back to the hotel, wondering if he was sorry that his chance for adventure had turned out to be the comfort of the Church. He ought to apologise mentally to that young man for thinking he was a gay hustler. Of course he could be gay, some men did see the Church as a way out. He recalled his soft hand so cool against his. And his mother’s words came back to him . . . a miracle for my health, or anything else. Of course . . . she meant him. That’s why he was here. If he’d thought of it earlier he could have told the young priest; that would have been a good subject to chew on. Well, the Church has saved him from sin this time, though that was not what his mother meant, he knew; she wanted him normal and married. With children. It is terrible to grow old without children, she says to him. Life without children—it is not to be thought of. Delphine was asleep, the nurse¯nun would get her some soup when she woke up, so he went out again, to a small restaurant, and ordered steak and chips and a pitcher of red wine. This was the hot south, he could have a siesta after lunch. Over a piece of local ewe’s milk cheese, salty and rather good, and the last of the wine, he read the nurse¯nun’s pamphlet. The story of Bernadette, the child to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, when everything began in this small mountain village. Bernadette is gathering wood. She’s always hungry; she’s stunted and undernourished. Her father had been a prosperous miller, they’d lived in a large stone house by the stream that turned the mill¯wheel, in a pretty field on the edge of woodland, till someone built a steam mill nearby and put him out of business. Now they

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live in a derelict hut and the parents’ day¯labouring doesn’t bring in enough to feed the family. Her brothers have been caught gnawing church candles to assuage their hunger. Bernadette wanders along the river bank, picking up sticks. There’s a cave on the banks of the river and there Bernadette sees a small girl, no bigger than herself, in a white dress with a blue girdle and a yellow rose on each foot. Over her arm is a string of rosary beads. So, the Virgin says the rosary, does she, mutters Luc. For clearly the girl is she, though the pamphlet takes a while to explain. As though it is stretching out the narrative’s suspense. It describes the number of visitations: eighteen. The miracles. One is the spring, that the small person directs Bernadette to scoop out of the earth. Still flowing—still filling the drinking cups, the plastic madonna bottles with their screwtop crowns. A rosebush is made to bloom in winter. A paralysed hand is cured. The rosebush is the priest’s idea. He wants a sign because he is doubtful about this small person—the same size as me, says Bernadette. The size of an undernourished fourteen¯year¯old. One hundred and forty centimetres, not very tall. The small person says she is the Immaculate Conception. She speaks in the local patois. What gibberish. Of course the priest should be doubtful. Clearly these are the hallucinations of a starved teenager. The lady asks her to come to the cave every day for a fortnight and promises to make her happy not in this world but the next. That’d be right. But then . . . Luc reads the words the lady spoke to Bernadette, the words reported by her. Would you do me the honour of coming here every day for fifteen days, says the vision. But the thing is, she uses the polite plural, vous, not the singular, tu, that is always used to

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address children, intimates, inferiors. And Bernadette is absolutely aware of this. She, the sickly illiterate peasant girl, says: She was the first person who ever said vous to me. The first person ever to speak politely to her, respectfully, as if she were an adult. Luc is shaken by that. If anything could make him believe in Bernadette’s vision of the Virgin Mary it is that vous. She could not have made that up. She would be able to recognise it, but not invent it. That small detail, so much more true than roses flowering in February. If anything could make you believe, that would. Verisi¯ militude. The pamphlet hardly seems to notice, certainly doesn’t recognise how powerful it is. He has a thought to jump up and find the priestly young man and talk to him about this. What would he make of the doubter convinced by grammar? But Luc knows he is not really convinced. He just sees that there might lie some possibility of truth. He doesn’t move, no; what could a devout young man possibly make of the second person polite? He orders a cup of coffee and goes on reading the pamphlet. It finishes with a quotation from Jean¯Marie Demagny, the famous Catholic philosopher, from his book The Lourdes Experience: It is the site par excellence of a paradox, divine in its scope and intent, where the individual soul, in all its singularity yet also at one with millions of other struggling souls, enunciates a powerful cry from the heart that creates a veritable atmosphere of Godly anticipation, almost as tangible as the heavenly manna, and indeed as nourishing. And as so often in this Faith of ours, the way is shown by a child.

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He buys Julien a glittering fridge magnet, not Bernadette’s childish figure nor the simpering pastel demimondaine of the grotto but a clumsy icon radiating blue and silver metal ridges of light that seem to pulse as you look at her. Pretty fancy technology for something so crude and cheap. It’s the kitschest he can find, at that moment. He wasn’t going to buy Fanny anything, but then he notices a rack of postcards of madonnas. And buys her one of the black Virgin of Rocamadour, a simple medieval carving, atavistic, mysterious, magical. Delphine is ready to go home. I have made my pilgrimage, she says. And you, my dear, are you glad you came? He takes up her hand and kisses it. Yes! he says, and does not lie. He would cheerfully perform much harder tasks for her. She smiles, and he believes she is blessing him.

Back in Paris. He came up out of the metro to the late afternoon sun gently gilding the square. The summer evening, the calm cafes spilling over the pavement. The reasonable pleasures of reasonable people. He tried to tell Julien about Lourdes. The horror of the rational man, Julien said. They say it is full of devotion to God, Luc said, but . . . I wish I could explain, that desperate anxiety of hope, and a sort of miasma of fear . . . It sounds bad for the health of mind and body. I thought your robust faith might have made sense of it. I think my robust faith would have enough sense never to go near it.

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I was thinking of Montaigne: the task of life is to construct death. You know, that place was full of death. Everywhere death, and nobody was admitting it. Except perhaps my mother. She was so graceful, Julien. She was constructing her death, she knew that. Julien hugged him. Luc gazed into his glittering eyes. Did you fuck anybody while I was away? No, actually. I sort of didn’t want to. Luc smiled, the pink blood flooding his cheeks. Did you? He explained about the priest he thought was trying to pick him up. Julien laughed so much he didn’t notice Luc’s rather feeble smile. You should have propositioned him. Corrupting a priest, in Lourdes. What devil’s work. Luc was thinking, I shall never know whether I would have done it or not. If I hadn’t gone looking for Montaigne I would never have known about Julien. I should think there’s quite a lot of devil’s work goes on there, he said. What if I’d come back and told you I’d done it? Julien smiled, wickedly perhaps. I’d say hurray, he said. Luc took his hand and bit his finger, not really hard, but sharply enough. Julien yelped. What are we going to do about Claude and Agnès? Ah. Luc bit his own finger. Shall we give them a baby? Why not. Which of us? Both of us? And we won’t tell them which?

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That’s a mad idea. And then I can tell my mother, I am going to have a baby after all. Will she approve? I wonder. He thought of the woman full of grace, looking at her death. She just might, he said.

Delphine died early on the morning of Midsummer’s Day. The doctor had warned them it would be soon. She had a little bottle of morphine to sip if the pain became bad. She lay against her pillows with her big eyes regarding her family but only vaguely, it seemed she was looking where they couldn’t follow. Speaking had become too hard for her. She went to sleep, and slid imperceptibly into death. She didn’t suffer at the end, said Maurice. Thank God.

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Cathérine hoped that the tinkling of the water fountain wasn’t going to make her want to pee again. The restaurant was heavily decorated with the regional artefacts which went with its name, La Table de l’Aveyron. Wide¯brimmed black velour hats hung on the walls, along with a lot of dark ironmongery in the form of clockwork spits and long¯handled basting funnels. There was a great deal of copperware too, bowls, moulds, warming pans, jam basins, and those antique wall fountains made up of a cistern with a tap and a flattened bowl underneath. When she was a child there used to be one of those in the waiting room of the doctor, a stone room, vaulted and groined, in the street that was once the moat of the castle above. The doctor’s house was somehow built into the walls of the old town, and as well as the copper fountain, kept polished to a mirror shine and now of purely decorative purpose, there were faience plates, and on the door a brass knocker in the shape of a lady’s beringed hand. As a child she had taken it for granted that all doctors’ waiting rooms

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were like this, chilly, dim, stony caverns with glowing ancient copper on the walls. The cistern in the restaurant was converted into an ornamen¯ tal fountain; this was the diuretic water that trickled out of the tap, tinkled into the basin and then was pumped back into the reser¯ voir. Round and round. Cathérine had already been to pee once, down a crooked staircase and into a dim smelly lavatory, only one, with a man in it, standing at the urinal, who turned his head to look at her. When she went into the cubicle she couldn’t find the light switch, and realised it was the old¯fashioned system, where the light goes on when you latch the door, so there are seconds of blackness while you are getting it to work. She didn’t think there were any of those in existence any more, not in Paris. Perhaps it was part of the regional décor. I ordered for you, my angel, said André when she got back. I know what she likes, he smiled at his guest: a business colleague. Usually Cathérine was not present when André entertained his business colleagues, but he thought she’d like to meet this one since he came from the Aveyron too, from a little town called Meyrejouls. He was a lean rangy man, with small eyes looking out from a face like one of those natural carvings in the landscape that make up the Chaos of Montpellier, and strings of oiled hair combed over his bald head. One string had become detached and dangled down the side of his face like an earring; it was quite long and flapped languidly when he turned his head. Cathérine wondered how he couldn’t notice it. André said he was very rich, and a nice man when you got to know him. Cathérine had been thinking about people being nice, lately, and had decided that

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mostly they weren’t. People just said that to comfort themselves. She thought that this man, who was called Louis Prouzot, wasn’t nice at all. The first dish was a thrush pâté. It came on an oval platter with moss and a twiggy branch on which sat two tiny stuffed birds, their beady eyes regarding the other but equally grim fate of their fellows. There were two intricate nests perched on the twigs, containing eggs as inedible as the birds. The pâté was a small round pat, and beside was its empty tin. Cathérine didn’t think the provenance was much to boast about. The thrushes were a bit shabby; you wondered how often they had been carried out, once¯inquisitive heads cocked, to proclaim the authenticity of the delicacy offered. If she’d wanted to get out her glasses she could have picked up the tin and read just how much thrush was in it. Much more pig, she guessed. It could be soya bean protein, for all the sad little birds could proclaim otherwise. André had ordered aligot. He was right, it was her favourite dish. But it wasn’t a good one; the potatoes were dry, the cheese was not juicy enough—Cathérine took the metro across to the rue Mouffetard market to buy the very fresh new Cantal cheese, before it had firmed up into its usual hard yellow self, to make her aligot—and there was hardly any garlic in this one. She found it difficult to swallow. The partridge with cabbage wasn’t very much better, an ancient bird, dry and stringy, which is of course quite the normal choice for this dish but it must not end up like this, and the cabbage tasting stewed to death. She was thinking how she could have cooked these dishes, and how delicious they would have been, when she heard

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Louis Prouzot say, Do you not think so, Madame? And she had to beg his pardon, because she hadn’t been listening. I said, a Frenchman has two homes, the place where he is born, and Paris. Do you not agree, Madame? André was nodding, and she said yes, she supposed that was true, and then she thought, does that mean that nobody is born in Paris? But then André wasn’t, and she wasn’t. But Fanny was. She couldn’t get any more flesh off the partridge. She stopped listening to Louis Prouzot talking about the importance of rooted¯ ness in the French provinces to the French character. Instead she remembered a young woman called Henriette who’d lived in the next door flat when Fanny was a little girl. She’d told Cathérine how she’d gone to Isère to have her baby, so the child would be born in the country of her forefathers. And afterwards, she said, I took Claudine to my grandmother’s grave and I talked to her. I said, Grandmother, I am here with my new baby daughter Claudine. Do you know we are here? I would like your blessing, Grandmother. Give me a sign. It was very quiet, said Henriette, the graveyard was nearly in the country, there were hayfields around and that buzzing still feeling of bees in the flowers. Give me a sign, Grandmother, I said, and do you know!—here Henriette opened her eyes wide and looked solemn—do you know, two blue butterflies came and flew just above the grave, round and round in spirals. For minutes. I’d never seen blue butterflies in that place before. I knew it was my grandmother speaking to me. Claudine opened her eyes and held out her hands. To the blue butterflies the same colour as her eyes. I’m certain she understood. She won’t know her great¯ grandmother but maybe one day she’ll remember the blue butterflies she sent to bless the new baby in the family.

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When André came home she told him the story. You don’t believe all that about blue butterflies, do you? he said, and she said, No, not that, but maybe we should have had Fanny born in the country of her ancestors, and he scoffed: No, why ever would you? Leave the safety of Paris for god knows what sort of care in the south? No, he said, Fanny can belong there, without needing to be born there. And they did go back, most years, for their summer holidays, so Fanny was familiar with the Aveyron. Though it was to André’s particular region they went, not hers, she hadn’t been back for a long time. You go back to see people, she thought, not the place, and I have no people left. Cathérine sometimes cooked the dishes of her country, not always, she read magazines and liked to keep up with new recipes. Cathérine’s food always transports me to the Aveyron, said one guest, but she thought he was just saying that, it was the kind of flowery speech people thought suitable for such occasions. Though she knew that if she had been cooking this meal she would have got it right. Louis Prouzot bullied André into another bottle of wine. Well, come, he said, this is an excellent drop, I see you agree with me, can’t beat a good Marcillac, I always drink it when I can, provided it’s a good one, of course, and this is good, very good. He drained his glass and looked at it sadly. Such a melancholy sight, an empty glass, don’t you think? To suppose that it’s time to stop, that’s it, finished. When the waiter brought the new bottle Prouzot took his arm, pincering it above the elbow with his fingers. His hand was big and bony and pulled the young man’s arm at an awkward angle

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from his body. And you, my lad, what about you? Do you come from the Aveyron too? The waiter smiled. Well, it was a grimace, standing there with his arm pulled out from his body in that crab¯claw grip. He shook his head. I come from Normandy, he said. He was a brown young man, with velvety dark hair and eyes. He tried to pull his arm away, but Prouzot’s grip was strong, and he was hampered with the bottle and three fresh glasses he was carrying. You must be a Celt, said Prouzot, and pushed his arm away. Thank you, said André gently, swallowing the taste of wine the waiter poured, nodding, Excellent, excellent, thank you. The dessert was a cake cooked on a spit, one of the famous old recipes of the region. She’d never made it. It involves a mechanical spit turning in front of an open fire, to which you fix a cone made of wood, and then tie oiled paper around it with string. The fire needs a deflector so the heat is not too direct. The batter, resem¯ bling the batter for madeleines, is made of a kilo each of flour, of sugar, of butter; of rum, orange¯flower water and twenty¯four eggs. The spit turns, the cook ladles the batter, slowly, so it hangs off the cone in lacy folds, caught just before they fall and set in place by the heat; only a few drops slide into the pan below. The result is rather like a model of a Christmas tree, a conical cake with lacy frills of batter, cooked golden, crisp, creamy. It takes hours. It’s insanely laborious. Cathérine hasn’t a fire, or a spit, or the faintest inclination. The variables need a lifetime’s experience to get right—the heat of the fire, the speed of the spit, the thick¯ ness of the batter, the quantity ladled out. There are several shops

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in Rodez which sell real gâteau à la broche; if you want to eat it, that’s where you go. Of course it is expensive. The cake at La Table de l’Aveyron is industrial. She wonders how you make it in a factory but you clearly can. It doesn’t taste fresh and eggy but of artificial essences of vanilla and orange and rum, heated and chemical. Louis Prouzot was talking about the cake he always ate, from a certain pastry shop in Rodez, on the square, just along from the cathedral; did they know it? Cathérine thought this probably meant he didn’t think much of the gâteau à la broche either. Cathérine said that yes, she believed she had eaten those cakes, and very good they were. Though she had heard they were a nearly dead art, that quite soon it would not be possible to buy them any more. Which would be a great pity, lost skills are always a pity. The country’s going downhill, said Prouzot. Has been ever since Vichy. Pity they didn’t get a better run. Should never have let things fall into the hands of de Gaulle. The total ruination of the state. Cathérine thought, Almost fifty years have passed, and this man is still mourning that monster Pétain. She said, Can we blame de Gaulle for the disappearance of cake¯making skills in the provinces? Prouzot said that given the ideals of a Vichy¯inspired government—I understand of course, the Marshal could no longer be with us, but his heirs, his heirs—such skills would have been retained because they were valued. His statements hung in the air like gas from a fart, and the hosts had no response to dispel it. Cathérine could think of several but they were all too rude. André said, What about a digestif? A plum liqueur, perhaps? An

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Armagnac? Cathérine wanted to moan. Just when she thought the evening might be going to be over. But Prouzot said, No, better not, best be going, and she almost forgave him the rest of the meal. André called for the bill, which took hours to come, and hours to process, the fountain piddled interminably, but finally they were out in the cold spring night.

By the time they were going to bed she had indigestion. I don’t know why we go out to eat bad food in bad company, she said. It was supposed to be good, he said. I thought it would be pleasant to meet a fellow countryman. And you ought not to turn up your nose at such company; after all it is your bread and butter. Are you sure it’s not mouldy bread and rancid butter? His money’s quite wholesome. He might be a Pétainist but he’s dead keen to buy in that new development. If you’d been listening you’d have known that. He was probably a collaborator. Probably made his money by robbing deported Jews. Cathérine took the pins out of the neat roll she always wore her hair in, so that it fell round her shoulders. It had always been reddish fair, not so dramatic as her mother’s which had been the pale bright red of the region, and now it was fading to greyish fair. She began to brush it. Are you mad, woman? He’d have barely been a baby when all that was happening. André had always liked to brush her hair and now he took over from her and began with vehement strokes.

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In spirit I bet he was—a collaborator. And probably inherited it from his father. His roots are probably deep in collaborators’ gold. Ouch, she said, that’s too hard. What’s got into you tonight? I reckon money’s money. It’s not dirty or clean. It’s real, or it’s not. I don’t run checks on how my clients’ grandfathers made their money. Only that their descend¯ ants have it. Cathérine was looking in the dressing¯table drawer for Vichy pastilles, which she always sucked for indigestion. But we don’t have to eat with them. No. You don’t.

Cathérine had not been born in Véresac, the little town whose doctor’s surgery was in the street that had once been a moat, in a house built into the fortifications of the city’s walls. She had been born in a small place called La Canourgue, at the bottom of the steep road that winds up to the plateau where Véresac perches vigilant on its hill, surrounded by fields. La Canourgue is a town full of water. Once when she was a little girl her grandfather had taken her to see her cradle, as he called it. Little busy streams ran along the streets. Every house had its own bridge from the pavement to the road, and the air was full of the music of the water rushing. When she was very small and the Occupation happening she moved with her parents up to the old city, to a house within the walls, in a small square. It was where her grandparents lived. Most of the houses had barns underneath, where the sheep were kept at

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night. On one side of the square was a wooden door in a wall, that opened into an enormous cistern. It was built of stone and arched and stretched a long way, right under the castle as well. When you unlatched the door and stepped on to a little balcony cold fresh watery air flowed across your face. The house was tall, four storeys, with quite a grand stone staircase at the front and a turret at one side which her grandfather said meant it had once been the house of a nobleman. In the medieval era, that was. When she asked what that meant, he said, Many hundreds of years ago. But the town is older than that, he said, older even than the Romans, though that is where the name comes from. Véresac: ac, he said, when you hear that syllable at the end of a word you know that it is Roman, it means camp. Such a good place for a fortification, no one can surprise you. Stand on top of the hill, you can see a cat creeping, far over the plain. The house belonging to her grandparents had no sheep under it; her grandfather had been a schoolteacher, as her mother was. This is a proud city, the old man said, no one has been illiter¯ ate here for several centuries. Her father wasn’t there much. Her mother sometimes talked to the grandmother about him. Often she seemed cross. Once she said, They are like boys playing games. Like boys, and not thinking how dangerous it is. When he was killed, her mother said, There, I told you, and tears ran down her cheeks, so many tears, they dropped on to the front of her apron and made it soaking wet. Cathérine put her arms around her mother and felt the wetness on her own cheeks. It wasn’t until the Occupation was over that the word Resis¯ tance was used, and the stories began to be told.

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After she left school Cathérine went to Montpellier to live with a cousin who was married to a baker. Her mother would have liked her to be a teacher but she didn’t want that, she did a business course. It was there that she met André who came from near Rodez. She was pregnant when they got married. She couldn’t believe that so shameful a thing had happened to her, certainly couldn’t talk about it. She told people they wanted to get married quickly, with no fuss, and her mother, being a widow and never having much money, didn’t mind. But shortly after the marriage she miscarried, and then several more times. Sometimes she imagined a priest saying these miscarriages were a punishment for the sin of conceiving out of wedlock but she didn’t believe that. She loved André and didn’t think that getting pregnant was ever a sin to be punished. Eventually Fanny was born, and the doctor said, no more children. No one but André knew that Cathérine had been pregnant before her marriage. She felt rather clever, having got away with it. So many girls hadn’t. Years afterwards she thought of telling people, her family, but it was too late for that now, or Fanny. But then she decided it was a silly idea. She stuck with the narrative, which was certainly a truth: a number of miscarriages, misery, despair, then, such luck, Fanny. Cathérine Picard. Née Delmas. A daughter. A wife. A mother. A grandmother? Who knows. She can define herself thus. It is not all there is but it is of value to her. Whereas André? A man. A builder. He makes his place in the world as himself, not in relation to others. Though the possibility is there. •

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The day after the dinner at La Table de l’Aveyron Fanny called in to visit. She stood at the sitting¯room window as she always did and looked down into the small square of formal garden. It was a simple maze of box hedges in rectangles, paths of reddish gravel, two towering walls covered in a pelt of ivy and another lower one of stone. It never changes, said Fanny. Year after year, the hedges the same height, the gravel the same red. The man in the bottom flat manicures it, said Cathérine. Fanny knows the story of the garden. How when the original mansion was being knocked down ready for André to build his apartments he had been going to bulldoze the garden as well, but Cathérine had said: Let’s keep that little bit. Can’t do that, said André. You know what that patch of land is worth? You’ll beggar me with these fancy notions. It’s such a small scrap, said Cathérine. And think of the value the view of it will add to the apartments. The light. The air. Histor¯ ical. And people will love looking down on it. And so it was. People did. Including Fanny and Cathérine. Standing at the window, gazing down, letting their eyes follow the unmysterious maze, they feel comforted. Cathérine made tea and put out a plate of the little cakes called nun’s farts that Fanny was fond of. They sat at the dining¯room table. Fanny still looked a bit peaky and pale, even though it was a long time since her illness and the departure of Charlotte. Every time her daughter came Cathérine wondered if she were pregnant, but she never asked. She believed that if Fanny were she would be incandescent, she would not be able to hide it, she would burst in and the news would overflow.

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The teapot was a present from Fanny; it was Chinese, and fitted into a padded basket. André thought it was a funny object, but it was good for keeping hot the pale milkless tea they both liked. There were two little shallow cups to go with it. I met a man from Meyrejouls, said Cathérine. Oh yes? Your father invited him to dinner. In a restaurant, not at home. It wasn’t very good. Fanny asked about the restaurant, and the meal, so Cathérine had to describe all that. Then she said: I went to Meyrejouls once, when I was a little girl. My mother took me. My grandfather drove us there in his old claptrap of a car. It was just after the liberation. Cathérine paused. Fanny listened. We went to see some old ladies. They seemed old to me. I suppose they were younger than I am now. Barely fifty. My mother called them aunts. They were some sort of cousin of my father’s, several times removed, I think. My grandfather dropped us in this huge cobbled square, there was an obelisk in the middle of it, with rows of names. I remember we stood and looked at them, and I was reading them, I was a good reader for my age, the war did that for me, and I said to my mother, Why are so many of them the same? Because there’d be lists of two or three or six, all of the same name. And she said, They aren’t exactly, the family names are the same, but see, there are mostly different initials, they have different first names. They are all different people. They’re brothers, or cousins, or maybe sons and fathers. The same family, not the same person. It was a memorial, this obelisk, to the Great War, and here were the names of all the men from the village and the farms

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round about who’d been killed. There were heavy metal spikes around it, rusty, with a rusty chain making a fence. I remember staring up at it, and the blue sky behind it, these high rows of the names of men killed. Round three sides of the square were narrow tall houses. They looked like old people, shaky on their hidden legs, leaning against one another for support; if one fell down they all would. In rusty black clothes. Not drunk, decrepit. We walked up some steps to one of them. There was a knocker in the shape of a lady’s hand, with a ring on it, and nailed above that one of those lucky thistles you find in the fields, like the rays of a round yellow sun. An old woman came to the door and took us through a hall into a dark room with big looming furniture. I was a child, but not that small, I think it really was very big and gloomy furniture. There were thick lace curtains over the window and not much light came through, though it was a bright day outside; you could see the light but it was shut out. Cathérine paused. Fanny waited. There were two more old ladies, one was the other aunt and the third was a visitor, a neighbour. They brought a big brown jug of water, from their well, they said, very sweet, and gave us glasses of that with raspberry vinegar in. They made the vinegar themselves, they said, they grew the raspberries and made the vinegar. The garden had been good to them in difficult times. There was a bowl of walnuts and the visitor cracked them, holding two together in the palms of her hands and squeezing. It’s easy, she said, if you get the angle right. They grew those, too. The tree had been planted when the elder aunt was born, to be cut down and made into a

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chest of drawers for her wedding, to keep her trousseau in. That had never happened, the tree was still standing, producing excel¯ lent walnuts. You remember this very well, Mama. Yes I do, don’t I. The first aunt gave me an album of postcards to look at; she pulled up a chair in front of me and put it on that. Turn the pages carefully from the top right hand corner, she said. They were pale sepia photographs of places, I remember Vichy, and Saint¯Nectaire, where people went to take the waters. There were a lot of marvellous buildings, they looked like palaces, with ladies in long frothy dresses, so I thought this was interesting, that they were princesses, and I stopped listening to my mother and the aunts. Then I heard my mother say, in a very soft tight voice that I knew meant she was stopping herself crying, My husband was a hero. He died a hero’s death. One of the aunts said, We should have trusted the Marshal. He was the one to save us. The visitor said, Ah, the Marshal. The hero of Verdun. He was the one betrayed. She was taking a gulp of the vinegar drink and started to say something about traitors but it came out in a kind of bray and the drink spurted out. I wanted to laugh, you know how you do when you’re a child, but I was frightened too. She spluttered and had to be hit on the back. Then I thought she looked like a witch, with her mouth open and no teeth, well maybe one at the side, and she was skinny and hunched in the back. Very thin. Everybody was thin, then. They all wore pinafores of that soft black cotton with tiny flowers on it, you can still see it in the market, sometimes.

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The visitor stopped choking long enough to get out, The dear Marshal, and then spluttered again. I could see my mother not saying anything, sitting with her mouth tight and her hands wrapped together and her eyes opened wide and hard so no tears could squeeze out. An aunt looked at her. Well, she said, of course we are sorry that Fleuret died. The other said, Very sad, he was a lovely boy. Then they offered more raspberry vinegar, so good in the hot weather. My mother said, No thank you. The aunt closed up the photograph album. My mother said we had to go. We said goodbye, with kisses on musty old cheeks, and went down the steps and across the square. But it wasn’t time for Grandfather to come. We walked past the obelisk and along the road through the village and looked at the sleeping fields yellow with the end of summer. My mother said, They are the widows of the Great War, widows though they never married. Living out their lives in the family homes, nursing their ageing parents, till they too died and left them orphans. That obelisk, and the names on it, they’re all that’s left. Maybe no specific names, maybe no actual lovers, spoken or declared, no fiancés, intendeds, maybe not even that. So there is no person to remember, no name to mourn, just the lists of the men who might have been and the loss of the life they should have had. She sighed when she said that. She was speaking to me but really to herself. We walked back down the dusty street, hot and empty. My mother said, The death of the village. That’s written on the obelisk too. All the children never born. When I looked sideways at her, I saw that tears were running down her face. I looked away, and held her hand tight. I was used

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to her overflowing in tears like that, after my father died. Poor old things, she said. We can’t blame them. I’m a widow, too, but at least I had a marriage. Who’s the Marshal? I asked. Marshal Pétain. He was a hero in the Great War. But then, in the next one, he just gave in. Surrendered. So quickly, so quickly. He betrayed the French people. He sold us out to the Nazis. I climbed over the chain and sat on the steps of the obelisk. But only for a minute. I could feel all those dead men silently waiting at my back. All the brothers and cousins and fathers and sons, the husbands and lovers and fiancés, all crowded on to a narrow pillar, and I couldn’t bear it. I ran away to the edge of the road, watching for Grandfather in his old car, hearing it churning along the sleepy lane before I saw it. Grandfather said, How were the old ladies? and Mama said, Old. And poor. I think of that now, said Cathérine: Old—they can’t have been fifty. They were lean, and fit, as I remember, but they seemed so ancient. Still the same, then, said Grandfather. Yes. Still grieving for the Marshal. So many traitors, said Grandfather. So many traitors. There was a flock of sheep walking along the road and we had to crawl behind them. After a bit we stopped, and waited for them to turn off into a village. Was my father a traitor? I said. They both turned to me. Their eyes had gone large, they made me think of the dog with saucer eyes. He was a hero, they said, both at once, my mother in that angry voice she always had when my father was mentioned, my grandfather with . . . I wondered if it was pride.

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I knew that he was my father. And that he was dead. And that my mother did not like it. I’d like to go back, said Cathérine, now. Back to Véresac. I spent all my childhood there, and I’ve never been back since. See the plaque on the cliff beside the road where my father was shot. Go back to Meyrejouls and look at the obelisk. The old ladies must be dead now, I suppose, or maybe not, maybe they’re still going, they’d be well over a hundred, probably look no older now than they did then. Still serving raspberry vinegar in well water. I thought it was rather nice. A treat. Fanny poured more tea, still hot in its nest. Why don’t I come with you? We could take the train. Hire a car when we get there. You’ve never told me about my grandfather, not really.

To have your father shot when you are a small child is to lack a sense of him as a person. Even if you can remember a man who swung you up in his arms, who wore fleshy leather clothes and pressed you to cold prickling cheeks smelling of the night and ciga¯ rettes, or you learn him from a photograph smiling out from his wedding to your mother, or sitting on the parapet of a hump¯backed bridge laughing at the cow in the stream below, even so your father becomes a figurine, like the small bronzes in the grand¯ father’s cabinet; you can take him out and hold him, cold and metal in your hand, but you cannot talk to him, not in any way that he can answer you. He is fixed in his one gesture, shot, a hero dead for his country, source of the tears that run down your mother’s face,

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the pride in your grandfather’s voice, but beyond tears or pride himself. The years pass and the heroism becomes harder, solider, with none of the doubt that may have shadowed the voices of old aunts, who were in fact only cousins several times removed, the hardening occurring when it becomes quite certain who the victors are and that yes the father is on the side that won and certainly helped it to do so. He was an engineer, a man whose peace job was building bridges, so that in war he was good at blowing them up. He did a lot of damage, until he was betrayed by a citizen of his own town, a man who was a carpenter by trade and lived in a house across the little square from the grandfather, a man who also knew about the well spreading deep below the castle and would have opened its wooden door and felt its cool watery air on his cheeks. Perhaps there had been betrayals connected with that well, once, perhaps somebody had poisoned it, or somehow fouled it, so the besieged city had no good water. But possibly not; the citizens of a besieged city are usually all on the same side. But the carpenter thought the people of the Resistance were traitors to the Marshal and his government in Vichy; he believed that he was not betraying good men but himself putting a stop to treason. And so the father, with three other men and a woman, was lined up against the little cliff that edged the road just out of town, and shot. Later a plaque was put up, giving the names, information, the date. There are a lot of these plaques. These things Cathérine tried to explain to her daughter Fanny about Fanny’s grandfather, who was called Fleuret. Oh, says Fanny, that’s a romantic name. He came from Estaing, said Cathérine,

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Fleuret is the patron saint of that town. Though I expect you won’t find him in any calendars of saints any more. A lot of children used to be named Fleuret, in that part of the country. Fanny walked quite a lot of the way home, across the river and into the rue St Jacques before catching a bus, because she wanted solitude to think about these things her mother had so amazingly found words to tell her.

In the shop Fanny said to Luc, Do you know anything about the Occupation? And Luc replied, Yes, a great deal. What do you want to know? I’ve just found out that my grandfather was a member of the Resistance. He was shot by the Germans. Oh, said Luc. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t think that I was being flippant. I really meant, what a huge topic, where can one begin? With a book? Do we have a book . . . Luc stood by the big table and thought. She could see his brain scanning the shelves of the shop. Not really our thing, he said. Fanny couldn’t recall anything. The Vieux Latin specialised in books about the Latin Quarter, and Paris generally. It had a lot of old and magnificent books on architecture, history, gardens. The arts of peace. There is one thing, said Luc, not the Resistance, but the Nazis. It came the other day in a box of books from a deceased estate. I stuck it in a cupboard. It was a sort of magazine, coloured in livid inks, intense and pale at the same time. The front had a photograph of a burnt¯out

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church, its bricks pink with black soot drizzling down them. It was called The Death of Oradour¯sur-Glâne. Fanny sat at the table and turned the pages. Page after page of burnt¯out ruins, their stones jagged against the sky, the soot staining them like black tears washing down. A pleasant minding¯its¯own¯business sort of village it seemed to have been, until a troop of Nazis marched in, an elite SS Regiment of Panzers, shut the men in barns and the women in the church, shot them in the legs, piled in hay and straw, and set it on fire. Then they barricaded the doors. They’d stacked up church pews to make a good bonfire. Shooting them in the legs was so they couldn’t escape, and would die from burning. A baby they found they baked in the bakery oven. There are pictures of the town from various angles. De Gaulle decreed that it be preserved as a ruin, to be an emblem of all the towns and villages destroyed by the Nazis, all the ordinary people murdered. Fanny feels her eyes cloud as she reads. Her head feels stormy. How can anybody do these things, she says to herself. She imagines herself, her mother, her child, so hard¯won and beloved, herded into a church, wounded, set on fire. Her husband, her father, in a barn nearby. Their fates meant to harm, as well as to kill, to make them suffer slow agonising deaths. No answers, no explanations. The times themselves hard enough, but now this meaningless, merciless violence. She cannot think of the baby in the bakery oven. At least its mother wouldn’t have known. That’s no help, but at least its mother was spared ever having to think of her baby, and that fate. It was the time of the Normandy landings, de Gaulle and

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Eisenhower had asked the French to harass the Germans, to keep them busy, away from the northern front. But Oradour¯sur¯Glâne didn’t seem to have done anything. Was it a random act of power, a warning, a deed of vengeance in advance for the defeat the Nazis could see coming? A reprisal for acts of resistance commit¯ ted in some quite other place? Another Oradour, miles away? The whole village was burned: 642 people died. It was erased from the map. That’s what the Nazis said was their intention. In the back of the magazine is a newspaper clipping from 1974, frail and yellow now, about the opening of a memorial to the dead. A cemetery, blocks of ossuaries, a tall column, and bank upon bank of names which appear as black rectangles on the picture of the whole monument. There is a close¯up of several of them. The same surnames repeat, repeat; young parents, their three tiny children, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts, brothers, elderly sisters, she can tell by the ages of each person, written after the name. Always, the lists of names, the ghosts of the families that will never be, haunting the lists of names. The magazine says it is hard to find photographs of the village before it was destroyed, since most of them burned in the fires. It reproduces some postcards, sent elsewhere, before the war; thus you can construct the peaceful, handsome place it once was, its trees, its buildings, its tramway that ran from Limoges. The few survivors of the village were those who happened to take the tram to Limoges that day. Pale and sepia¯coloured the place is in the photographs, as though history had already started leaching its life away. In some of the pictures, across fields and along streets, a number of children in deep hats stare at the camera. Their names will be on the lists on the monument.

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Ouf, she said, closing the covers. She felt tired out. She wanted to put her head down and sleep for a long time. You had to be tough to be a member of the Resistance, said Luc. Tough physically but tough¯minded too. The Nazis exacted terrible punishments. And the reprisals! They’d hang ninety¯nine Frenchmen in return for one German killed—you had to have faith in what you were doing to put your fellows at that sort of risk. The Nazis didn’t bother finding the perpetrators; the first ninety¯nine to hand would do. So you knew that innocent people would die as a result of your actions. Fanny thought of her grandfather Fleuret. How many people would have been executed as a result of his blown¯up bridges? He must have been tough enough to make sacrifices for what he believed in. Of others, and finally himself. Her grandmother would have said, No, not finally, finally belongs to me, to his daughter, we suffered the finally. But lived and prospered, said Fanny to herself. Here she was, heir to that. Cathérine and Fanny made plans to go in late spring, when the days are long and not too hot. Fanny talked to Luc about the 1940s. He told her to see a film called The Sorrow and the Pity. We have not been good at paying attention to what happened then, he said. This film has a good go at it.

Cathérine’s friend Sabine Demagny rang and asked her to lunch. That was a surprise, usually they met for ladylike refreshments in tea rooms, sitting on spindly gilt chairs nibbling tiny cakes. This

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would be the first time she had been invited to Sabine’s house. She told Fanny about this, and Fanny said, It’s near that house that Gérard bought. Where he found Charlotte. For a moment her face went thin and peaky again, and very pale. Tears welled in her eyes. I hear news of her, you know. Not very often, but sometimes I get through. She isn’t doing well. She’s having the best care. The doctors are looking after her. Nobody is loving her, said Fanny. That’s what matters. We don’t know that. There will be people there who will love her. It’ll be too hard. Such damage. So long shut up like an animal. Animals have other animals. She had nothing. Fanny stood up and stretched her shoulders back, as though Charlotte was a small monkey she was shaking off. Her mother knew she never could. How will you get to Sabine’s? she asked. I’ll take the train from Luxembourg. Sabine has given me directions.

Cathérine pushed open the iron gate, climbed up the steps and pressed the bell. She turned and looked at the round gravel drive, the rose garden in the middle of it, the espaliered fruit trees lining the walls. Sabine opened the door. She had a half¯naked baby under her arm and smudges of white powder on her brown cashmere jumper. She smiled proudly, upending the baby, sitting her on her hand. This is Louise, she said. Hello, little one, said Cathérine, stroking the baby’s rose¯petal

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cheek with her finger. The baby chuckled, and peed through Sabine’s hand on to the black and white tiles of the entrance hall. You are so wicked, said Sabine, with delight, your nappy off for half a minute and this is how you behave. She led the way through the house and out to a sunny pavilion in the garden. It was full of baby things. Sabine laid the baby on a table and washed her bottom, cooing and warbling and blowing raspberries in her tummy. Isn’t she so lovely? Sabine turned and caught Cathérine’s politely amazed expression. She belongs to a friend of mine. I look after her whenever I can. These young mothers, with their jobs and all. She dressed the child in soft blue cotton overalls over a white jumper. They went into the kitchen. Sabine gave her the little girl to nurse, such a sweet little thing, to smell, to touch, to taste; Cathérine kissed her ear and secretly nibbled it while her hostess took a bottle of extremely good chablis from the fridge and poured each of them a glass. She opened a small jar of foie gras and turned it on to a plate. I know we should have sauternes with it, she said, but for lunch . . . She put small savoury tarts into the oven to heat and tipped little packets of salad from the charcuterie into bowls. It’s rather a scratch meal, she said, without any sense of apology, it always is when Louise comes. She took a plate of vegetables out of the fridge and put them in a steamer to heat. She quickly seared a little fillet steak in a pan. When it was cool she gave the steak to Louise to eat; the little girl sat strapped into a high chair with a big white napkin tied round her neck and gnawed at the rare meat. How often does she come to you?

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Oh, a number of days a week. Sabine sat down at the table. We have a lovely time, she said. Her mother has a job at one of the Paris universities, and she’s doing her PhD, she has her career to make. And there’s not exactly a father. So you’re a fairy godmother. Sabine laughed, and frowned. In ways, she said. There was a little pot of jelly and a plate of toast to eat with the foie gras. It’s very good, said Cathérine. Sabine showed her the jar. It comes from my village, she said, my family has always eaten it. And Jean¯Marie adores it. She ate hungrily but distractedly while helping Louise feed herself from the plate of vegetables. Louise is good at food, said Sabine proudly. She mashed half a banana in some yoghurt and fed her that. Then Louise began to rub her eyes clumsily with her fists. Sabine took her off to the pavilion for a nap. She came back and poured more wine. Now tell me about you, she said. And Cathérine did, about the planned trip south, and her father the Resistance fighter. While Sabine passed tarts, and salads, and then an enormous piece of brie de Melun. Ah, said Sabine. My grandfather was a country solicitor—she waved her hand at the foie gras. We lived with him during the war. I remember, every time he emptied a bottle of wine, quite a few there were—she poured more chablis—right up until he died, years later, he would thump it down on the table and say, There! That’s one more the Boche won’t get. My grandmother would jump, and frown, and pat the table as though to soothe it. Always the same. That’s one more the Boche won’t get. She made coffee, and said, Let’s have it in the garden. She put

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the foie gras in the fridge but left the rest of the food out, taking a linen cloth out of a drawer and covering it up. It’s nicely preserved food and here it is all ready for dinner. She giggled. Jean¯Marie won’t be very impressed, but never mind. Cathérine wanted to ask how Jean¯Marie felt about the child. She remembered Sabine telling her about the clockwork func¯ tioning of the house around the great philosopher’s needs. Sabine glanced at her as though she divined the question. He’s not all that keen on the baby, to tell you the truth. But there you are. Where, Cathérine wondered, where are we, and why. What can he do? Sabine said, softly. Sometimes you can’t control babies. Her eyes gleamed. That’s the point, isn’t it. A lot of things you can’t control. I remember, she said, when we were first married, we went to visit my grandfather. Jean¯Marie was writing something about some German philosopher, and needed to look up a word. My grandfather’s study was in fact a library, full of books. Jean¯Marie asked him did he have a German dictionary. Young man, said my grandfather, in his best courtroom voice, young man, there has not been a German dictionary in this house since the war. Since the war. And I mean the Prussian war of 1860. Sabine laughed. I think my grandfather would have got on with your grand¯ father, said Cathérine. I am beginning to realise a lot of people were quite friendly with the Germans, but ours clearly weren’t. Oh no. Unbending enmity. This war, the great war, the Prussian war: no forgiveness. Whereas my mother¯in¯law, she claimed to be a great supporter of the Resistance, but once she said that she stopped going to the cinema during the war because you never

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knew when a terrorist might suddenly do something wicked. And I realised she meant, someone anti¯German, a member of the Maquis. I didn’t say anything, and I don’t think she noticed how she had given herself away. She was mostly careful enough not to say how she had admired Pétain but it was pretty clear. The shadows were lengthening in the garden. There was a yell from Louise. I should be going, said Cathérine. I’ll just change her and put her in the pusher, said Sabine, and we’ll take a little walk with you to the train. When they came to the front door there was the puddle of pee, almost dry. Sabine laughed. Oh dear, she said, what a bad housekeeper I am. There was such glee in her voice that Cathérine laughed too. Maybe we should have a roundabout walk, said Sabine. It’s such a nice afternoon. You’re not in a hurry? Cathérine shook her head. She looked around at the big old houses in their vast gardens. My son¯in¯law bought a house round here, she said. Oh yes, I know. Shall we go and have a look at it? Sabine turned and walked back past her house and round several corners, finally stopping at a house very like her own, really a country manor house, on a corner with big iron gates, a circular gravel drive, a fine flight of steps up to a double front door with a glass fan porch over it. The white shutters were all closed, but the garden wasn’t neglected. Can you imagine Fanny living here? It’s very grand. A lot of work. She does love the apartment. It was Gérard’s idea. Of course, they couldn’t, not after . . .

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No. I think if ever a house was haunted this one should be. The poor dead girl. And the lost child . . . Sabine’s face was suddenly red, she bent over and tucked Louise more closely into her anorak, though she was already very cosy. The baby smiled and chuckled, and then so did Sabine. Jean¯Marie knew her mother. She was a student of his. Very clever, he said, and very beautiful. Sabine was frowning again. How cruel of the parents . . . So much cruelty. You can’t make up for it. Except in loving someone else. They were silent. The big houses sat, serene and somehow fat, in the warm afternoon, their gardens ready to burst with new growing. There’s a train in fifteen minutes, Sabine said. If we walk in a leisurely way we’ll catch it easily. The railway station was downhill, the line ran along the side of the valley below the big houses. They walked along side streets that were not steep. They didn’t have to cross the line to get to the platform. Sabine picked the baby out of her pusher so Cathérine could give her a hug goodbye, and they stood on the platform and both waved. That’s one more the Boche won’t get. The clicking of the wheels on the rails beat out a monotonous refrain. Cathérine was over¯ whelmed with the events of the day. She’d expected an elegant little lunch, the glamorous home equivalent of spindly gilt chairs and tiny cakes, some small classy egg dish, perhaps, even a soufflé, with starched cloth and Limoges porcelain, sitting in hushed luxury in a dining room that she examined avidly while Sabine fetched and

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removed plates. It had been a luxurious lunch, with the foie gras and the wonderful chablis, and of course Sabine knew where to buy her tarts and salads, but there was something makeshift, picnicky, jolly about it, that she had not expected. And Sabine doing every¯ thing well, but slightly distractedly, nothing at all precious in a formal kind of way, throwing things together rather, and her atten¯ tion so full of delight with the little girl. A kind of carelessness that was magnificent, you had to say. Cathérine wondered if she would be like that with a grandchild. Except Louise wasn’t a grandchild, she was the daughter of a friend, a young friend. Who had a job and was studying. Would she be a student of Jean¯Marie’s? She hadn’t thought to ask. She sat in the train and thought how familiar this trip would have been if Gérard’s house had not been so haunted by its past. Out here, in these fresh and prosperous gardens: would Fanny maybe have got pregnant? Life is full of questions that probably have excellent and accurate answers, but we can never know them. The rails clicked. That’s one more the Boche won’t get. How firm the syllables were. How equal.

André wasn’t keen on the excursion south. He made jokes about being neglected, deserted, left all alone. Fanny laughed at him. You and Gérard can be bachelors together, she said. Gérard was quite a good cook. André had never tried. Cathérine left instructions on pieces of paper stuck up all over the house and a long list on the door of the refrigerator of all the good things inside. She didn’t tell

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him that it was obvious from all of this that it was time he got some practice in managing on his own. Whereas Fanny just packed her clothes and went. Gérard knew how to manage without her, even though he felt gloomy at the prospect. By the time the train had been going for half a day Fanny and Cathérine had talked themselves hoarse. When Fanny described the booklet on Oradour¯sur¯Glâne, Cathérine recalled that her grand¯ father had had a cousin in the town (there were a lot of cousins if you kept track of the family); every year on the anniversary of the massacre he mourned them. A family—the cousin Jean, his wife, their son and his wife and a little girl of two. Once again Fanny thinks of all the babies born at such cost, with such delight, because she cannot comprehend a baby conceived in anything but desire, and that desire flowering and flourishing all its life; all the babies, born and lost. But then she remembers Char¯ lotte, whatever joy had been in her conceiving there was none at her birth, or in any of her life. She’s alive, but she is irredeemably lost. Fanny gazes out the window. There’s nearly always a village to be seen, or a town, a group of houses clustered together, each roof sheltering its own little family. Though that may be a romantic thought; how populated are some of these remote communities? Are they in the process of turning into ruined villages, not in a day like Oradour¯sur¯Glâne, but over decades? It’s not a Very Fast Train. They’ve ordered lunch; it helps to pass the time. Cathérine knows they are getting close to home country when there start to be ruined castles on the tops of hills. It’s twilight when they arrive, a cool grey evening, this castle darker and brooding over the town. Not illuminated; it has to be high

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summer for that. They cross the road and walk up the street a little to the Hotel Terminus, and after a meal consisting of many courses of excellent meats, including a fine thrush pâté, which Fanny is sure will keep her awake all night, they fall fast asleep. After breakfast they walked up the hill to the old town, for the Hotel Terminus is in the nineteenth¯century railway town. It’s a steep hill. An excellent place for a fortification. It’s why the old people were so lean and fit, said Cathérine; going up and down this hill. She remembered her grandfather, that leathery brown man, though he had been a schoolteacher all his life; even after he’d retired he’d gone back to work because there were no young men. He was the head teacher in the school with the plane trees in the courtyard. The child Cathérine stood modestly in line, not drawing attention to herself. She watched his hand shoot out to rest on the shoulder of an irritable boy. The same hands deli¯ cately bringing in a lettuce, like a bunch of green frilled flowers. Batavia, he liked to grow, there was some substance to them. And small baskets of tiny tomatoes. His garden was small, not a lot of room in the old town, but the vegetable rows were dense and productive. The stone walls soaked up the sun, their aged worn surfaces warming the fruit trees, the fruit canes, as they had for centuries, cosseting them. The passing sheep provided manure. Part of the walk up the hill went past fields, with hedgerows and roadside ditches blooming with flowers, cow parsley, Queen Anne’s lace, little yellow daisies and poppies like scraps of scarlet silk. When she put out her hand to touch, Cathérine suddenly remembered herself as a small person pushing in among them, their tallness, their blossoming scented stickiness, the booming of

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bees. Picking posies and taking them home for her mother, the cow parsley lasting but the limp flesh of the poppies almost immedi¯ ately darkening, bruising, shrinking. The two women were out of breath when they got to the Moat Street, and leaned on a wall to look back the way they had come. Cathérine remembered walking along this path with a girl called Ginette, and Ginette pointing to the farmhouse across the valley. See that farmhouse there, Cathérine said, using the same words fifty years later to her daughter, with the trees, and the barns. Collaborators lived there. A mother, a grandmother, and a little girl. She was called Jacqueline. Ginette hadn’t said collaborators. She said, Dirty collabos. Ginette’s mother reckoned they should be paraded through the streets naked, and people would whip them. What did happen to them? asked Fanny. I think they had their heads shaved. And people ostracised them. Jacqueline had come to school with her head covered in brown stubble and her eyes downcast. Nobody talked to her but nobody teased her, either. Cathérine thought that might have been her grandfather’s doing. He ran his school very strictly. But he could not of course make them be kind to the little girl. Jacqueline had brown eyes, liquid brown eyes like the cow in the field by the glove factory, but she kept them hooded. People didn’t like to be near her, she gave off too much misery. What were they supposed to have done? It was very dark. No one ever said, really. It seemed to be some disgusting secret. Now, I suppose the mother slept with a German.

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They had officers staying in the house, no choice in that, and I guess the mother slept with one. Or all. Or she didn’t, people just supposed she did. There were no men in the house, both women were widows, they ran the farm on their own. Cathérine at home had reported what Ginette had told her. Her grandfather snorted. Ginette’s mother. And I suppose she would cast the first stone. Oh yes. And if there were any justice it would turn in the air and come back to smite her. Like a boomer¯ ang, he said. Like a boomerang. Cathérine didn’t know what a boomerang was, so he explained. She liked the sound, it sounded like the thing it was. Boom! She didn’t think to ask, though, why the stone should turn and come back in that way. In Australia it was so you could throw the curved weapon again. The man who lived in the same square, the carpenter who had betrayed Fleuret and his companions, which resulted in them being shot, somehow turned out to be a member of the Resistance. He told everybody he had always been totally anti¯German. Of course he had to have dealings with them, to preserve his cover, all sorts of secret things have to happen when so much is at stake. Cathérine’s mother did not believe this, and neither perhaps did many other people in the town, but the man said it, whenever the occasion arose, even if just a chance meeting in the square, he would make a speech about the black years that were now thankfully past. I don’t approve of those vigilantes murdering collaborators, said Cathérine’s mother, but sometimes I can see that could be no bad thing. If the Germans had won . . . said Fanny.

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If the Germans had won, said Cathérine, Jacqueline’s mother and grandmother would have been seen as wise women. My family never let themselves entertain the idea, they never gave up hope, but often it wasn’t any more than hope, there was no evidence that France would ever be free of the Germans, in fact for a long time the evidence was all that they were here to stay. My mama was angry at the foolhardiness of my father. Still, she was on his side. That mother and the grandmother could have been safeguarding their futures, and the little girl’s. No, not even that, it was day to day in those times; they were surviving. And they did survive. And your father didn’t. Well, Jacqueline’s father had died in a labour camp. But by fate, or chance, or simply luck, I am the daughter of a hero, she of traitors. Where is she now? I don’t know. She stopped coming to school. I suppose they sold the farm and went somewhere people didn’t know them. They walked along the street of the old moat. The doctor’s house set into the ancient wall had a different brass plate on it now, that of an architect specialising in renovation and restoration. They came to the cafe and ordered coffee. Inside was full of babyfoot machines, but there was a table outside. You wanted to keep your legs tucked under the chair in case a car ran over your toes. Cathérine said: I’ve wondered, you know. If I’d been grown up then, would I have been a member of the Resistance? I like to think I would have been. But I don’t know; I think if I’d had children I would have done whatever I thought was necessary to keep them alive. Maybe that would have been collaborating.

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Wouldn’t you have been your father’s daughter? Leaving that aside. He was a man. Being a woman, I think I’d have been ruthless, saving my children. Yes, said Fanny. I think anyone would. Lucky you didn’t have to make the choice. Or me. They went through one of the great arched openings in what had been the city wall and climbed up cobbled streets and laneways. Until they came to a small flattish terrace¯like area which was the square where the old house was. It wasn’t really a square: a space, sloping slightly uphill, with several houses giving on to it, and a number of cobbled lanes leading off it, and on one side, in the stone¯built wall of the hill, the wooden door to the cistern. There, said Cathérine, pointing to a tall house opposite, with a round tower at one side and a flight of stairs leading to a door which was actually on the first floor; below were the barns. All the windows were firmly shuttered, the shutters painted a pale greeny¯ blue, the colour of water. My grandfather’s house. It’s changed so much, she said, and yet I recognised it straight¯ away. There were always people about here. The buildings were a bit tumbledown but people lived in them. There were children. And dogs. And morning and night the sheep, going down and up. Those people there had a cow. And the traitor? Who suddenly converted to ardent member of the Resistance? Cathérine pointed to a narrow house. It was solidly shuttered too but the paint had worn off them and the walls were covered with ancient scruffy stucco. He went away quite soon too, she said. Didn’t want to push his luck I suppose. I don’t know if he sold the house, or if he had any heirs.

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Most of the houses were shuttered. Holiday houses, said Cathérine. Children go to Rodez or Millau to work, or to Paris, they inherit but they don’t want to live here, they come once a year, maybe. You can get money to keep them in order, repointing the stone, that kind of thing: restoring the fabric of the patrimony, I think it’s called. Who lives in your house? I don’t know. My mother went to Béziers when I left home. She didn’t hide the fact that she couldn’t stand this place. It killed her husband, was what she said. She lived on a boat, in the port, she loved it. I used to go and see her sometimes, but it was a bit crowded. She never married again. I read an article in a magazine, that the younger women are when they are widowed the less likely they are to marry again. She never showed the slightest interest. I didn’t ever know her, did I? No. She died shortly after you were born. She never saw you, but she knew about you. As for the house . . . Grandfather had other children, I suppose they got it. Or their heirs. I suppose they come once a year. They’re not here now. No. Otherwise we could knock on the door and introduce our¯ selves. Cathérine made a grimace. She went over to the cistern door and opened it, stepped against the low stone wall, found the button for the light and stared down into the green deeps of the water, lying still and heavy and cold in its underground caverns. Some¯ where there was a dripping noise. The air wafted over their faces,

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cool, smelling of cold water. You couldn’t see how deep it was. You seemed to see the neat stones on the bottom but then you realised it was the reflection of the vaulted roof. Little brilliant green fronds of fern grew in the cracks. You couldn’t lean in, there was a netting of wire to stop you. Both of them pressed against it, gazing. Maybe it was not necessary now that the town had its water piped, though when Cathérine was a child the only water in the house was a pump in the back court, but you couldn’t forget its ancient importance. Impregnable castle walls, and this great cistern of sweet water. Both powerful. They took one of the alleys, which led to other alleys, past crowding houses and stone walls surrounding little gardens, some in cultivation, others gone to waste. Finally they scrambled up a steep flight of stairs and stood before the first portal into the castle. A couple of young people were running a makeshift booth, charging an entry fee to go in. The castle was being restored, it was an expensive business. We’ll come back another day and make a proper visit, said Cathérine. Mother and daughter turned to look across the valley, shim¯ mering emerald in the spring sunshine, irregular fields shaped by hedgerows, and then walked back down the road past the cemetery, back to the hotel for lunch.

They took the train to Rodez and hired a car. But first they found the grand pastry shop and bought a piece of cake cooked on a spit. It cost quite a lot of money. It tasted of egg, vanilla, orange, rum.

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I suppose for some people this might be the taste of their child¯ hood, Cathérine said, but not of mine, not at that time. What was the taste of your childhood? asked Fanny. Her mother laughed. Horrible stewed ratatouille. It sat on the stove and any vegetables you could find got added. Every time I see ratatouille in a shop I think what frightful raggy stuff it was, and how I learnt to hate it. Yet it’s quite nice if it’s fresh, said Fanny. And the right ingredients. Yes, said Cathérine. But that wasn’t, awful stuff stewing endlessly away. Still, we survived on it, I suppose I should be grateful. Even if we were always hungry. There was never enough. And bread was so short. I remember at one time when Grandmother’s father lived with us, he was very old, and he was always asking for more bread. And my grandmother would say, Papa, there is no bread. It’s rationed, we can’t get any more. And the old man would say, in a piteous voice, I never thought I would see the day when my own daughter would deny me bread. And tears would run down his face. It’s funny; I’d forgotten all about him, until you made me remember the ratatouille. Fanny said, And now, all the bread in the world. And we must get some gâteau à la broche to take back to Gérard, and to Father.

A man staying in the hotel told them they should go and look at the dolmen, so they did that. They parked the car in shallow ditches beside muddy fields and climbed stiles to look at these mysterious great slabs of rock resting on other rocks, the space

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underneath worn hollow by sheep. Mysterious because nobody seemed to know why or how they were there. And then they kept going up on the plateau to Meyrejouls. The roads and lanes didn’t look much different to fifty years ago. The square was the same, too, a large cobbled space, though maybe not so large as Cathérine remembered it. The obelisk alone in the middle. The iron spikes of its fence remained, but the chains were gone. The houses were less ramshackle, and there were pots of geraniums blooming. Cathérine stood with her back to the obelisk and oriented herself. That one, she said, that’s where the old ladies lived. The shutters were open, and so were the upstairs windows. Let’s knock on the door, said Fanny. Cathérine didn’t want to, but Fanny pulled her arm. Yes, she said, come on, we’ll be sorry if we don’t. They went up the steps and lifted the hand knocker and let it fall with a deep knell. The thistle was gone. Disintegrated, said Cathérine. Blown into dust. A young woman opened the door with a little girl on her hip. They began to explain. She looked doubtful. Fanny told her the story of the little girl her mother coming to this house fifty years ago just after the Germans went. The woman smiled a little, the visitors did look like Paris ladies when you paid attention, and the idea of the old aunts, well, it is necessary to be filial. She under¯ stood that. And anyway, not much happens in a village like this. She invited them into the sitting room. It was pale now, light. Beyond the clear windows was a sun¯filled garden. There were bunches of the lacy white hedgerow flowers in vases of blue glass, and a basket of red and blue and yellow wooden toys. Cathérine had to sit down suddenly. Suddenly the frowstiness of the old house, the old ladies

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in their worn print overalls, the raspberry vinegar and the well water in a brown pitcher were there and clamouring at her. Are you all right? said the young woman. Cathérine didn’t nod. Her eyes were wide open and bright with fear. The young woman went away and came back with a plastic bottle of Volvic water and poured a glass. Cathérine drank, but her eyes still gazed. It’s still there, she said, pointing to the bookshelf, to where an album rested on top of books. The postcards? The woman grimaced. Those old things, they’re quite fashionable these days. Fanny asked her questions. The woman had a faint recollec¯ tion of mention of an old woman. She’d never met her. She was the cousin of her husband’s father’s grandfather, she it was who left her husband’s father the house. Searching through the relations, even so distant, to find one who’d appreciate it. The father¯in¯law had. He’d restored it, modernised it, but in a sensitive way, bathrooms, a good stove, hot water, but keeping the character of the house. But still. They only got down from Paris once, maybe twice, a year. My grandfather was a cousin of the old ladies, too, said Fanny. Really? Does that mean we are related? said the young woman, but not as though she was interested. Fanny looked out the window. The garden was big, narrow, but stretching a long way. With tall stone walls separating it from the gardens of the houses on either side. Two little boys were playing on swings. There was a paved area with tables and chairs and a barbecue. It’s a lovely garden, she said.

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Not bad. The air’s good for the children. Of course when they get older they’ll be bored witless. I doubt anything will persuade them to spend their holidays in a dead village. The young woman sighed. Thank you, said Fanny, for letting us visit. It is very kind of you. Not at all, she said. They went out from the pale impeccable house. Cathérine looked up at its honeyed stone facade, which had been repointed, it almost looked newly built. More government money for main¯ taining the fabric of the patrimony. The obelisk wasn’t looking very cosseted. They stopped to read the names. All the young men, lost. A long time ago now. Another panel had been added since Cathérine last saw it. The men dead in the last war. Only two of these. None left to die, she said. The aunts, the cousins, had kept the faith, had lived their lives here and seeing death had tried to find someone who would take over. And they had, in a way, this relation distant enough in space and time but still family. But history was against them. The young woman was on the way to being fed up with her husband’s inheritance, and was sure her children would not want it. Maybe she wanted her children not to want it. Fanny said, I wonder what it is you do in a place like this? Is there a cafe, even? A shop? The old ladies eked out an existence. That kept them busy. Yes, but that was a war. A time of no choices. You can’t do that now. Grow your raspberries and make your own vinegar. Live

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on boiled rags of vegetables. Those days are gone. They won’t ever come back and isn’t that a good thing? It would be good if choices meant you could choose what you lose and what you keep. Cathérine suddenly remembered the man from Meyrejouls. Under a Vichy¯type regime the cake¯making skills in the provinces would not have died out; of course, he hadn’t said exactly that, she’d drawn the conclusion. She knew no govern¯ ment has such magic powers. Maybe it will turn into a deserted village, said Fanny. Windows broken, doors flapping, shutters loose, the wind moaning through derelict rooms. It looks far too flourishing for that.

Fanny suggested driving over to see Oradour¯sur¯Glâne but her mother said it was too far and besides it would be too depressing. I know about it, she said, it’s a ruined village preserved exactly as it was when the Nazis tried to erase it from the face of the earth. Except that it keeps destroying itself still further, it is very hard to keep a place at exactly one stage of ruin, it keeps wanting to continue decaying. How do you know that? Cathérine gave a glint of a smile. I read, don’t I. I watch tele¯ vision. I learn things. I think of them. Fanny felt a pang of guilt because she’d never thought of her mother doing any of those things, or not particularly usefully. They drove down the highway and found the plaque on the wall where the father had been shot. It nearly killed them too, it

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was on a steep bend of the busy road, a place impossible to stop the car and almost as dangerous to walk back to, to stand and read the words. Names, again, a list of four men and one woman, shot by the Nazis, on this spot on that date, dead for their country. So close to the end, said Fanny. Maybe they were a reason why the end was so close. On that drive they saw the chapel built by a local duke who’d murdered his wife, built as a penance, not because he’d regretted what he’d done but because the Church needed a formal repen¯ tance. Cathérine read in the guidebook that his heart had been buried under the door sill but during the Revolution it had been dug up. What did they do with it? Fanny asked. She told her mother the story of the royal hearts of the Val de Grâce, plundered by painters to make glazes for their work. I doubt they used them for that here, said Cathérine. All they found was a pinch of dust, anyway. Sounds suitable for the heart of a murderer, said Fanny. Another day they walked along the lane to the farm where the women who collaborated had lived. Cathérine thought of Jacqueline: what form had her collaboration taken, that she deserved to have her head shaved? Had she sat on the knee of a German soldier and let him pretend that she was his own daughter? Had she shown him her homework? There was a stone wall around the house and wide iron gates, open; they could see pleasant sunlit buildings, green grass, a pond, a huge oak tree with a long table and chairs under it. Farther away flowery meadows. It was a peaceful scene, orderly and full of repose. At dinner that night the woman

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who owned the hotel, a stout and elderly lady in black taffeta who roamed the dining room and did little but chat with her guests, told them it belonged to a millionaire from Montpellier, who’d made his money from frozen foods, he had a big family and they liked to spend time there. The woman said that she had lived in Véresac for fifty years, not like her husband, who was born here. He was the one who knew everything. Everything. But he alas is dead. He’d remember the war, then, said Cathérine. Better not to, said the woman, her stick striking the floor as she stalked away.

André met the train when they came home. He hugged Cathérine. Fanny knew he wouldn’t tell her how much he’d missed her, but that Cathérine knew. The apartment was neat, he’d tidied up. He said: There’s a letter for you. Funny kind of letter. She looked at the ragged envelope. Did you open it? Well, my angel, I had to see if it was important, didn’t I. Can’t tell from looking at it. She took it, turned it over. You couldn’t tell much at all from looking at it. The address was handwritten, there was no sender’s name. The stamp was French, the postmark indistinct. It was a letter that began, Dear Cathérine. It was from a woman who wanted to come and see her. It was important, she said. She signed herself Monique Delmas Anderson. Maybe she’s a cousin. She didn’t know of any Delmas cousins,

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not after the old ladies. Plenty of Picards, but not Delmas. And what about the Anderson? I gave her a ring, said André. She’s coming tomorrow morning. I said coffee. Cathérine was a bit surprised. What’s it about? She said she’d tell you face to face. You. It’s you she wants to see. I’ll be at work. There was still food in the freezer to eat. I went out a bit, said André. Saw Gérard a couple of times. He opened one of his good burgundies and told her all the things that had happened while she was away. He didn’t seem to think she might have things to tell him. After dinner he helped to clean up so they could get to bed. Yes, he had missed her.

Monique Delmas Anderson was a small dark¯haired woman who looked intently at Cathérine. How old was she? Her eyes crinkled when she smiled and there were grey threads in her hair. Her skin was fine and her cheeks were bright red like a child’s in the wind. She seemed a quiet person. Cathérine was too polite to ask why she was there. She invited her to sit down and went to make the coffee. When she came back the woman was looking out the window. The formal garden, she said, it’s so very beautiful. Is it old? She sat down on the sofa. You are wondering why I am here, she said. I am wondering how to tell you. I have been wondering ever since I traced you. Traced me?

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The woman gave a crooked smile. It sounds very sinister, doesn’t it. Suddenly she shrugged her shoulders. I am your half¯sister. I am five years younger than you. Cathérine gave such a start she spilled her coffee. She had to get a cloth to clean it up. She knelt on the rug and scrubbed at the dark mark. My half¯sister? Yes. I am also the daughter of Fleuret. My mother was an English woman who had lived in France, she could pass as French. She was in the Resistance. She was pregnant when our father was killed. She went back to England and I was brought up there. She would not tell me anything about my father. She said he was a hero, that was all she would say. Then, a year ago, she told me his name, and the story. She said she did not want to take the secret to her grave. Cathérine stared at this stranger. You are telling me that my father betrayed my mother, she said. Betrayed, said Monique. I do not think the word is betrayed. Betrayed was what his countrymen did to him. It is difficult to live the life of a hero. It is necessary to take what comfort you can. My mother loved him. Did my mother know? I don’t think so. How could she have? Our father could not have told her. I have been an only child all my life, said Cathérine, and now you are telling me that I have a sister. She stared at the woman, her fine pale skin, those shining red patches on her cheeks, her grey¯threaded hair. Could she see anything of Fleuret in her? Could she see anything of Fleuret in herself?

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What do you want me to do? she asked. I don’t want you to do anything, said Monique. Except know. I think of those old sad times, the danger, and the courage, and those young people doing such difficult things. I think we just owe it to them to know. Do you have the right to come here and turn my idea of my father completely upside down? The man I thought I knew, he loved my mother, he was faithful to her. Loved. Yes, he loved her. But he loved my mother too. I think the truth is important. Why should I believe you? The truth, you say. But how do I know what the truth is? What have I got to gain by coming here and telling lies? Monique opened her bag and took out a folded paper. It was a birth certificate. In English. She could see that under father’s name it said: Delmas Fleuret Etienne. The child’s given names were Monique Fleurette. All that proves is that your mother said he was the father. Monique’s lips trembled. My mother was a hero too. She did not lie. And certainly not in so official a document. It occurred to Cathérine that the nature of the mother’s heroism was great skill in lying; to begin with, an Englishwoman passing herself off as a Frenchwoman. That her whole job would have been to deceive Germans. But she knew that there are differ¯ ent kinds of truth, that Monique would be right when she said her mother did not lie. She poured more coffee. It was cold now. Monique said: That war. It was so very very bad. Friends and neighbours betrayed one another. The government betrayed the

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people. There was so much treachery, so many lies of so great a magnitude. Like what was happening to the Jews, the denuncia¯ tions, the deportations. And I thought, this is a fine thing, this small war¯time connection of two young people, this birth coming out of death, we should be honest about it. It is good to know the truth. Cathérine said: I do not know if it is good for me. My mother told me, she knew there was no future with Fleuret. She knew his life belonged with his wife and little girl. But there was so much danger, so much death, they needed to love one another, at that moment. You are the result, said Cathérine. She thought of her mother and her father, both dead, so long ago, and this woman, alive in front of her. Not to blame for their death or her life. What good to hold grudges? She said: Your mother . . . She’s dead. I realised that’s why she told me. She thought that the knowledge shouldn’t die with her; I didn’t know how close the grave was when she said the words. So: I know, you know. I should go now. Wait a minute. Don’t go yet. You’ve traced me. I suppose you know quite a lot about me. What about you? Do you want to know about me? Monique looked doubtful. Cathérine said with sudden gaiety: Why not? We’re sisters, aren’t we? Why don’t we go and have some lunch? Do you have to be anywhere? No, not really. But I’ll ring my godmother, if you’ll permit me. I stay with her when I come to Paris. She and my mother were at school together, some severe convent in the suburbs. No wonder my mother joined the Resistance.

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They went to the bistro on the corner. They do excellent tripe sausage, said Cathérine, but Monique decided to have a minute steak. Both came with chips, thin, crisp, hot. Roland Barthes said that steak and chips is the alimentary sign of Frenchness, said Monique. Yes? Monique laughed. I am a teacher of French, she said. After that spectacular beginning, my life has been uneventful. We lived in the country with my grandparents; when I was about ten Mama got married, but I stayed with the grandparents, then boarding school, university, teaching, marriage, three boys. My husband is a chemical engineer. The boys have all left home now, and when my mother told me about my father, well, I thought I should find out more. I’d always believed she was a widow, so many women of her generation were. She always gave to understand she was. I think she even told my grandparents that, or maybe they chose to believe it. She was always famously wilful, that’s why the French convent. An uneventful life? said Cathérine. But full of incident. But not adventure. My mother clearly had a taste for adven¯ ture. She was very young when she was in the Resistance, and when she married it was to an anthropologist, they spent most of their time in the Amazon. What about you? Oh, even less eventful. Marriage, a daughter. I help my husband in his business. I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps. We didn’t need to. That was lucky, don’t you think? My mother, she was brave, yes, but reckless, foolhardy even. She was young, she wanted an exciting life. I don’t mean she didn’t believe in the cause she worked for—she did, passionately—but she loved the excitement.

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What about Fleuret? Well, of course, I never knew him, and you hardly did. But I think, from things she said, that for him it was more of a stark necessity. Nothing of the game in it, for him. My mother was angry with him, Cathérine said. Well, not perhaps with him, but angry with the circumstances that took him away. Even though she believed completely in the cause. I suppose it was fear for his safety; and of course, she was right. She paused. Did he know about you? No. My mother didn’t know until after he was shot. Fathering me must have been one of the last things he did. Cathérine didn’t want to think of that conception. She picked up the pitcher of rather anodyne Bordeaux they were drinking and poured the last of it into their glasses. Both women were pensive as they picked them up and took a sip. Cathérine looked across the room and saw their reflections in a foxy old turn¯of¯the¯century mirror; there was something about the angle of their heads, their fingers curled round the stems of the glasses, that made them look like a pair. But then Monique put down her glass and pushed her fingers through her hair, a gesture that Cathérine with her smoothly coiled roll never made, and that illusion, if it was an illusion, faded. Cathérine was looking intently at the mirror, Monique had her head tipped sideways and was gazing idly at nothing. Two women eating lunch in an old bistro that would have looked exactly like this when their father was making love to their mothers. But that was in another place as well as another time, in a country that nearly wasn’t this France that they were both now enjoying. And both the women are dead.

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Monique put two lumps of sugar in her tiny cup of coffee, Cathérine drank hers bitter and straight. What now? she said. Monique scooped up another lump of sugar with her spoon and dipped it into the coffee and then crunched it. My children used to love that, she said. I still do. But I can’t when my husband is around. What now? she repeated. We exchange addresses, I suppose. You already have mine. So I do. Well, here’s mine. She handed over a card with an address in Norwich on it. And then? We wait and see, I suppose. I come to Paris several times a year. You might write, or I could, if we wanted to see one another. Cathérine put the card in her purse. Monique said, We are sisters. We are of the same blood. I suppose that counts for something. Cathérine thought about Sabine and Louise, about Fanny and Charlotte. There was love, though there was no blood between them. Could blood command love? This woman was her half¯sister; would she be her friend? Would she ever come to love her? She couldn’t see it yet. Maybe. Maybe our children will be interested in thinking of one another as family, said Monique. Maybe not right away, when they are settled. Have their own children. Cathérine wondered what Fanny would think of three English boy cousins. You didn’t say half¯cousins. They would just be cousins. I suppose, she said, you could think of Fleuret being glad his line continued. Three grandsons.

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But Fleuret was shot against a cliff beside the highway. Not thinking of his descendants. He was dead and they were alive; she was already twice his age. In life you might be comforted by the thought of future progeny; in death you never could be. Cathérine insisted on paying for lunch. You must be my guest, she said. They stood for a moment on the pavement outside the restaurant. Monique’s metro station was in the opposite direction from Cathérine’s apartment. Monique shook Cathérine’s hand. I am pleased to have met you, she said. Cathérine suddenly leaned forward and kissed her lightly, formally, on each of her rosy red English cheeks. Till next time, she said. Walking back to the apartment she knew that was a manner of speaking. You never say goodbye on such occasions. Would either write to the other? She couldn’t wait to talk to Fanny. André would want to know all about it, but it was Fanny who would help her think what it all might mean.

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They didn’t have any trouble deciding who was to carry the child. Both were very keen on a baby, on the idea of it, on the fact of it, but Agnès was the one who could imagine it inside her own body. And she was six years younger than Claude, so that was a factor. Claude was more ambitious for her career, Agnès was happy to put pregnancy and child¯rearing first. This was lucky, each privately thought, that the matter was so clear¯cut; suppose they had both passionately wanted to be pregnant? Claude was lean and her face had handsome bones that gave her a shapely pointed chin and deep eye sockets. Her hair was brown and shoulder length, held back by a black velvet band. She always wore linen shirts and trousers, or tailored wool, in natural colours, creams, beige, straw, and exquisite lace¯up leather shoes always highly polished. Agnès was shorter, narrow¯hipped and small¯waisted. She wore linen too, white shirts and trousers in the vivid colours of jewels, ruby, emerald, sapphire. Her shoes were ballerina flats and she walked as though she was about to dance.

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They liked to think they were equal partners, both being very happily women, but people saw them in defined roles; Claude the husband figure, Agnès the wife. But the women didn’t know this, so did not have to refute the notion to themselves, or others. They started coming into the bookshop when they were looking at their new house. They were buying it with Agnès’s inheritance from her mother. Agnès was an only child, her father had died some years before and all the family property came to her. Her mother was a thrifty woman who’d taken out considerable life insurance to cover death duties. Neither of the women wanted to live in any of the family’s Paris properties; both wanted to buy a house just for themselves. The place they had chosen was in the suburbs, just east of Paris. It had belonged to an artist, a flower painter. When Claude said this to Luc and saw the look on his face she said, Not a pretty flower painter, a tough one. Marvellous stormy colours. Her flowers have terrific weight and presence; she knows about decay, and starkness too. The garden is just fabulous, said Claude. Simply tumbling with roses everywhere. And herbs and fruit trees. And lovely humble things like geraniums and nasturtiums. The place was apparently some sort of factory once, said Agnès. Then this woman bought it and made it into an artist’s workshop, with part of it the house. Do you need an artist’s workshop? asked Luc. Well, I’ve always wanted to paint, said Agnès. And I love indus¯ trial spaces. Lofts, and so on. Anyway, the woman had a husband and two children. There’s plenty of house.

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What sort of factory was it? asked Luc. I don’t know. Carpentry or something, I imagine. She didn’t say. When Claude spoke to people she looked at them with firm eyes, not accusing exactly, but as though she was insisting they take notice of her. Perhaps it was a habit of being a doctor, Luc thought, that she demanded attention, and acquiescence. They came to the bookshop in search of books about the suburb. We know the higher part used to be industrial, said Claude. With rows of little narrow houses. And where we are used to be rural, market gardens, with rich soil. Up until the middle of the century. Both women were wearing handkerchief¯fine white linen shirts with rows of tucking. Fanny imagined somewhere a washing line with weekly rows of white linen shirts. Or perhaps there was a high bourgeois laundry, that washed and ironed them and sent them back wrapped in cellophane. She found a book with engravings of the Sun King’s vegetable and fruit gardens on Montreuil hill. There were rows of cabbages and cane pyramids of runner beans and clumps of bristling artichokes. He liked his food, Louis XIV did, said Luc. Do you know, he was supposed to have an extraordinarily long gut, that’s how he could eat so much. Is that true? asked Claude. I read it in a book, said Luc. Fanny murmured, Good old Louis. His mother bargains his conception for a church. And his heart ends up glazing a bad painting.

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What? said Claude, so Fanny had to explain. It’s a way of getting pregnant, I suppose, said Claude. Agnès said, I must ask our flower¯painter does she know about heart glazing. Luc said, It has to be the hearts of kings, remember. Not easy to come by. The older the better, I suppose, said Claude. Or the more royal the better. Luc was smiling, his translucent skin and eyes and hair gleaming. Can’t think of a better use. We know you’re an ancient republican, said Claude. Agnès said, Actually, we haven’t absolutely said we’ll take the place yet. We thought we should get somebody to have a look at it first, see if it’s okay. It’s a bit unfinished, said Claude. Experimental. Playful. Agnès was stern about it. Fanny’s husband’s a builder, said Luc. Ah. Would he, do you think . . . ? And so it was arranged. Gérard would examine the building, and report on its structural soundness. He was surprised by the size of its spaces. There were nine¯metre¯high ceilings in places. A mezzanine floor with a metal mesh balustrade and behind it shelves for books. Walls in the form of partitions, not reaching to the ceiling, but not flimsy, built of stuccoed brick. It might be cold, he said. You could think of extending some of the partitions, enclosing some spaces completely, if you want some cosiness. I thought the point was maybe not cosy, said Claude.

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There’s a powerful heating system, said Agnès. Industrial strength. What about the floor? said Claude. It’s just concrete. Polished concrete, said Gérard. That’s a thing to do. It’s a good finish. He told them the structure was solid though there were odd gaps and holes which would make it draughty but they could be fixed if that was desirable. It would be a good summer house, cool and lofty. The artist had moved out so they couldn’t see how she’d organ¯ ised her home in it. She’d left them a painting, hung on the wire mesh of the mezzanine, a grey sky heavy with storm clouds and against it twisted branches clumped with pine needles. It belongs there, the woman said, I would like to make you a present of it. Half of the wide southern end of the building was a wall of glass panels with a powdery blue¯grey metal shutter that slid over it like a great factory door. The sun should pour in during the winter, said Gérard. This was the side with the garden, with its marvellous roses climbing the walls, its pots, its herb beds and cherry tree. There was a paved area and a seat the same blue¯grey as the shutter, under a wisteria vine that climbed over a frame on the brick wall. This wall was rather clumsy, with messy mortar and ill¯matched bricks, it looked as though it were waiting to be finished in stucco, but there had clearly been no intention of that. The house’s charm was this crude unfinished industrial nature, set in a garden that was pretty, frilly, old¯fashioned. Is it a house you can be happy in? asked Gérard, that is your question. I can tell you that it is solid, that it will keep you safe,

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that is my answer to the questions you ask me, but I do not know the answer to your question. The light falls very beautifully in it, which is important. I just love it, said Agnès. I can so imagine how it will be, living here, how happy we’ll be. Gérard could tell that Claude didn’t love the house as Agnès did, but she smiled and said, That’s our answer, then, we’re buying it, and she and Agnès hugged one another and danced around the small paved terrace, danced to a passionate invisible music that gave rhythm and meaning and grace to their steps. Gérard hoped for them that they would always hear that music. Some fabric would be good, said Gérard. The right kind, heavy linen, wool, something plain and natural, to soften it, warm it, you could draw it over windows or pull it back. Yes, said Claude, we’ll do that, right away. Oh, this garden is heavenly, said Agnès. Gérard could have said, It’s a new garden, you can make a garden like this, it wouldn’t take long. He thought of the garden in Charlotte’s house, what ought to have been Charlotte’s house, ought to have been her inheritance, not the hush¯money of a not¯kind neighbour, the house and the garden which should have been hers, along with the humanity her grandparents had stolen from her. That was old, layered in the earth, the espaliered fruit trees with their gnarled and ancient limbs, the hazelnut copse with its perennial harvest, the bulbs repeating and multiplying. He could have said, Don’t think about the garden, he knew Claude could have been happy with a reason for not buying the house, but it was strong, solid, safe, it would endure. Like love. So he didn’t say, you

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could soon make a garden like this. Sometimes you have to let a couple choose their happiness, however lopsided the balance. Sometimes he thought, and knew it was unprofitable and tried not to, but sometimes he couldn’t help thinking, that there had been some strange bargain that he had stumbled into: that if he had managed to buy the house and there had been no Char¯ lotte then they would be living in it now, with their own children. And sometimes he thought if he had never found Charlotte that too would have allowed him and Fanny to get pregnant, in their apartment with the cupid dome. He knew there was no logic or sense but still the thoughts wormed their maggoty ways through his brain. At least Agnès and Claude would not have to wonder in superstition or science why they didn’t get pregnant. So they bought it, and at the time of the cherries had a party. The small garden was full of sunshine, the guests ate the sweetly tart fruit straight from the tree. It turned out to be a wonderful house for a party, with the massive shutter rolled back, the glass doors open. Fanny, who wasn’t keen on the expedition, had been charmed. She had been truly grumpy before they left. Have we got enough supplies to last us the journey? she asked with such elab¯ orate sarcasm that Gérard wondered why she was fearful. He said, It’s six kilometres from the centre of the city. They must be very long kilometres, said Fanny. Gérard suddenly realised why she was grumpy. Her period had been late, and this morning it had come. He knew how hopeful she was each time it was absent, and how it upset her to have her hopes dashed again. Only if you travel with someone you don’t like, he said.

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Do I like you? said Fanny, and he showed her that she did, and afterwards she put her face in his neck and wept, that so much love¯making didn’t make babies. Even though they were now running late Gérard said, Shall I go down to Verdant and get some flowers? Remembering the garden full of traditional flowers he bought a strange bouquet of lotus pods with tortured twiggy branches hung with what seemed to be chillies in a dark shining red. And couldn’t resist buying the boxy old glass battery case that they looked so good in. When they got to Montreuil she shuddered at the ugly blocks of public housing, but was happier when they turned into an anciently rural street with high walls and barns and found sturdy farm gates standing open on a small green wilderness of garden. And Claude and Agnès so proud of everything. The spaces in the house were enormous, in every direction, the furniture stood shyly in small family groups like timid animals in a savannah. Every now and then a piece of wall offered shelter. Claude pushed aside an arrangement of worn silver spoons on an old country table and put there the glass box with its curious bouquet; It looks stunning, she said. The old studio had an enormous trestle table covered in heavy damask linen tablecloths—the sort of thing women used to wash in streams and spread on lavender bushes to dry—and set on these were a great many lacquer trays, red and black, square and round, containing Japanese food. It was all in small discrete pieces, highly coloured and patterned, not overlapping, set out as a display, something you would look at, perhaps pointing to a chosen one that later could become yours. So far nobody had broken the

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arrangement. Sushi, sashimi, little morsels of raw fish, vegetables carved into flowers, the whiteness of rice studded with the pale green of cucumber. Fanny looked at it and admired it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to eat any of it. Claude said, We’ve found a Japanese shop just round the corner. Caterers. They do this wonderful stuff. Do have some. She put a piece of raw salmon curved round rice into her mouth. It’s so healthy, too, she said. A man with a red beard said in a mournful voice, And far too beautiful to eat. On another smaller table were bottles of wine, rows of red and an enormous copper bowl with ice and bottles of white. What will you have? asked Agnès. There was a girl in jeans and a frilly apron to serve them. In the centre of the garden was a circular stone wall forming a platform on which the cherry tree grew. There were faded chintz cushions making it a seat. Fanny sat next to Ilse, the previous owner of the house. I hear you are a painter of flowers, said Fanny. Ilse laughed. You know, when you say that I always think of a person going round with a brush, colouring buttercups yellow, irises blue, roses red. I’m just a painter, really, whose subject is usually flowers. Plants. I saw the one on the mezzanine. It’s very strong. You know, people think flowers are pretty. Sentimental. Frivolous even. But the fact is, everything begins in the garden. Humans. Society. Civilisation. Evil. Things bud, bloom, weather,

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age, die. There is as much decay as there is burgeoning. Gardens offer emblems of our passage through the world. Ilse was a small brown woman with shaggy short hair cropped close to her head. She wore thick black glasses and when she smiled her face screwed up into irresistible little lines and dimples so you had to smile back. She had a sizzling sort of intensity that seemed constantly on the point of bursting out of its small package. I do fabrics too, she said, I design for a firm called Estancia. Contem¯ porary chintz, I call them. There my flowers are fairly pretty. But it’s all about energy, that’s what it is. She reached up and picked sprigs of cherries, passing some to Fanny. So good to eat, she said. There, you see, I have given you fruit and you have eaten. She laughed loudly. So dangerous a garden is! You know, I am glad I found such nice people to sell the house to. So important, don’t you think, to pass your house into good hands when you have to leave it? Houses must be happy. Of course, I think the man I bought it from would have liked it to continue in his trade. What was that? He was a boilermaker. This was his factory, and this was his yard. Maybe not so much another boilermaker to buy it, but to have it continue as a factory. I invited him to an exhibition of my work I had here. The garden was just beginning then. I think he was happy. He could see that it was still a workshop, in its way. She laughed. Pity I wasn’t a sculptor, working metal, welding things. It might have been too close, said Fanny. Too like, reminding him it wasn’t his trade. Whereas painting he could look at with a little distance.

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Ilse screwed up her face. You may be right, she said. He actually bought one, that half¯ruined wall with the hydrangea climbing up. It was like that in his time. The wall, not the hydrangea. Fanny chewed the tart¯sweet berries. How could you bear to leave? Yes, said Ilse, with a sudden black frown. Well, you have to move on. Do you? said Fanny. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean I was wondering, for me . . . She was trying to think if this was a good idea, moving on, if one should always do it. But why, if you liked what you had? The fact is, said Ilse, my husband’s parents live in Normandy. They had this idea, the big house getting too much for them, they could move into the gate house, and we would live in the big house. So much garden for the children, such good air. And doting grand¯ parents, they’re keen to see more of the girls, before they get too decrepit, they say. It’s quite close to Trouville, it’s nice there. And turns out my husband always fancied the idea of being a country solicitor, he’s a lawyer you know. There’s a barn, ancient, but a big space, it’s open on one side and I’ve had glass put in, it faces north, it makes a good studio. That cold light, it’s better than this, for painting. This is my husband, said Ilse, putting her hand out to a man who’d come up. Marc, this is Fanny. Delighted, he said, offering his hand which was limp as a squid. He had a smooth pale face and didn’t seem able to smile. Although it was Sunday he wore a lawyerish suit, and his hair showed the marks of the comb. Fanny thought that marriages often seemed like this, one partner languid, the other pent¯up and sizzling.

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We’ve got the drive back to Normandy, Ilse, remember, said Marc. We’d better be getting along. Ilse screwed up her nose, the sunburst wrinkles flashed. Always when there’s such a nice time being had, she said, it has to stop. Such a pity. She put out a short sinewy arm and touched Fanny’s shoulder, kissing her lightly on each cheek. So nice to meet you, I hope to see you again before too long. Marc gave a small correct bow and turned away. Ilse said, Where are the ladies of the house? I must say farewell. Isn’t she lovely? said Claude, when she’d seen Ilse to her car. Such vitality. I reckon it’s her personality that makes the house so charming. Fanny laughed. Is that a scientific observation? Oh. There’s science, and then there’s people. More myster¯ ious than we ever give credit to. She waved her hand at the house. Would you like the tour? They went inside, acquiring more tourists on the way. Gérard had told Fanny that he thought Claude was less keen on the place than Agnès, but she couldn’t see that this was so. Claude talked about the rooms, what they’d done, what they planned to do. Gérard’s idea, she said, pointing to the woollen curtains now bunched to one side, they were the terracotta colour of ancient bricks. We pull them across and it’s almost cosy. I love the mezzanine, she said. That whole marvellous long double row of bookshelves. There was also a small table with two chairs and a lamp that made Fanny think of Luc’s bookshop, and a brown leather arm¯ chair, also with a lamp.

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The kitchen had a long cherrywood table and several large glass¯fronted cupboards ranged with glassware and china. Family stuff, said Claude, amazing what gets collected. The partitioning walls made odd little corners. In one was a curious marquetry desk. Another family piece, said Claude. Agnès’s. Everything is, Agnès’s family. That’s the period of Mazarin. They’ve probably had it since it was new. The wood was the colour of polished amber, translucent with layers of time. Most of its surfaces were faintly curved, and set into them were strips of black wood in squares and diagonals. The legs were ponderously shapely. The odd thing was there was nowhere to put your knees, the front was all drawers. How would you sit at it to write? Nobody did, in this house, its top was covered with small enamel objects, snuff boxes, card cases, a mirror with lilies on it. Fanny had to think how long ago Mazarin was. She was supposing seventeenth¯century, those legs were very seventeenth¯ century, when she was caught by a group of photographs on the wall. There were a lot of them so that at first they seemed a pattern of black frames with white mounts and grey shadowed abstrac¯ tions . . . about the size of a page from a paperback book. When she looked closely they were all of babies, peering out from jungles of machinery, of wires and tubes and gauges, new wizened babies with old sad eyes, or sometimes their eyes closed under heavy lids, in all cases completely invaded by life support systems, monitors, the most abrupt of technology. Their little bodies were almost completely obscured by the machinery, its clumsiness and complication. But when their eyes were open you could not avoid their gaze. I started taking them for the parents, said Claude. Now it’s for

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me. As well. Still for the parents, too. Such tiny lives, we have to record them. Such courage. Do they always die? Luc asked. Oh no. Sometimes they go home. They often come back, though. They need a lot of care. Continuing operations. Such damage to be remedied. Aren’t they sometimes . . . Fanny spoke somehow desperately, and heard the words come crude from her mouth, aren’t they, sometimes, better off, dying . . . ? We have to try, said Claude. It’s our job to save them. But what about their lives, said Luc, if they live in pain, and need endless intervention . . . Everybody clutches on to life, said Claude. Nobody wants to die. We have to try to help them. It’s our job. Fanny looked at the photographs. Perhaps they’d been made so small because their subject matter was so difficult. She found herself looking at the eyes of these tiny withered creatures; there was something so conscious about them, so knowing, so ancient, as if they were saying: If you knew what we have seen, ah, what we have seen . . . She did not think anybody should have seen those things. She found Gérard standing beside her and held on to his arm, clutched it to her body. Claude was saying, I’ve become rather keen on photography, as a matter of fact, and there’s a little cubbyhole here, perfect for a darkroom. Julien who had only just come in glanced at the photos. He gave a shrug which was more of a wriggle and turned away. Luc said, She brings her work home with her.

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Fanny slid her fingers over the old satiny wood of the writing desk. From around a corner she heard a voice, speaking in a tentative manner: Have you had a look round, Patricia? So many beautiful things. This writing desk, it’s so old, and so lovely. The speaker stepped into view, a young woman with long fair hair falling in a waterfall over her shoulders, dressed in tight jeans with high¯heeled boots and a pleated silk shirt. I wouldn’t have thought you’d care about old things, said an insolent voice. Fanny moved so she could see; a girl, in her teens, also with long fair hair and jeans, and a face curling away from itself in a ferocious sneer. Julien said, Hello, Céline, how are you? I’m fine, thanks, the older girl said, in a voice that was ready to burst into tears. And Patricia! How nice to see you. Is it? muttered Patricia, and walked past them, clumping her boots on the wooden floor. Julien was kissing Céline’s cheeks, and they walked away out of sight beyond the wall. Fanny thought you would have to be careful what you said in this house, who knew who might be standing just round a corner, in full earshot. Luc murmured, Céline is Patricia’s newish stepmother. Patri¯ cia’s father is a colleague of Claude’s. A rather famous cardiac surgeon. Patricia’s goal in life seems to be to make her stepmother as miserable as possible. Has she got a mother? Oh yes, she’s not dead or anything. And luckily Patricia lives half the time with her. Still, it makes you wonder, the old fairy

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stories . . . I’m not sure I believe any more in poisoned apples or children abandoned in forests. I think the truly poisonous one might be the stepchild. Still, said Fanny, you can see how it might be hard for her: a new mother who looks remarkably like you and hardly older. Teenage daughters want to be the only girls in their fathers’ lives. Luc looked at her. That’s a point, of course. But is it a reason for being filthy rude? If she’s desperately unhappy. Céline tries. Patricia doesn’t. They could be friends, have fun together. Oh, it’s all sooo simple. What about the girl’s anger, that her mother should have been deserted by her father? Preferring the younger woman? That might be breaking her heart. It doesn’t seem to be breaking the mother’s. She’s got a lover. And a very fancy little shop in the rue Jacob, sells smelly things and candles and that sort of stuff, you know, that nobody actually needs, and lives in a very nice apartment overlooking the courtyard behind it. So? That doesn’t mean she wanted to be abandoned by her husband for a woman half her age. Same model, only much newer. How do you know that? I’m guessing her daughter takes after her. Maybe. I believe it was an amicable separation. How can we ever know, said Gérard, who’d been examining the Mazarin writing desk. Other people’s marriages are the most mysterious things in the world. And this. Look at it, the wood,

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the finish. And these locks, the little brass surrounds, so pretty, so simple, yet quite audacious really. He was kneeling in front of it. The craftsmanship, he said. You can only feel awe. He was smoothing his hands over it, as though his flesh could learn it. They’re lucky, having this in their lives. Luc had joined him, kneeling in front of the desk. So many lives it’s been in, since it was made. Nearly four hundred years ago, it must be. Mazarin’s period was . . . when? The middle of the seventeenth . . . ? Fanny remembered that Mazarin had been prime minister in Anne of Austria’s time, when she was regent to her son, Louis XIV, after her husband died. A cardinal, and a mightily unpopular one, she recalled. Of course it wasn’t his actual writing desk, just his period. Still, you could imagine him writing at it, in the gaudy pink taffeta cardinal’s robes he wears in his portrait, sideways because there’s no room for his knees. Writing a letter to the queen, running the country, everybody said. He had a splendid library, said Luc. During the rebellion, the Fronde, parliament ordered all his books to be sold. Some forty thousand. But he got them all back. Imagine, how small the intel¯ lectual world of Paris must have been in those days, for him to be able to get them all back. Céline said, in her tentative little voice, The queen was so fond of him, it was said she married him. Secretly. What’s more— her voice dropped, as though the Mazarin writing desk might be listening—some people said he was the father of her son. Louis, Louis XIV. Could explain how she managed it, after so many years of marriage.

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Yes, said Luc. It’s a great rumour. Who knows if it’s true? DNA testing? said Julien. Dig up Louis, dig up the cardinal, see if they match. One thing that is fact, Luc went on, he had seven excessively beautiful nieces. All of whom made grand marriages. Louis was keen on two of them, but Mazarin didn’t seem to want to become the king’s uncle¯in¯law. Or uncle¯out¯law. As well as his dad, said Julien. The cardinal’s nieces? Are they like the pope’s nephews? Oh no, they weren’t his daughters, he had two sisters and organised great marriages for them too. He wasn’t a very holy cardinal, said Céline. Not even actually a priest. And rich! He had a fortune of forty million dollars, in current terms. How? Oh, he collected abbeys and such, amassed a whole lot of church benefits and got incomes from them. He loved jewels, she sighed. Fanny thought, maybe that’s how God gave Anne of Austria a son. Sent his cardinal to do it. Luc was looking at Céline with admiration. I’m doing postgraduate work in history, she said. I’m writing a thesis on Louis XIV. The Sun King and the Mantle of Apollo, I think it will be called. Wow, said Julien. Céline’s cheeks were very pink. Louis XIV is the person who really started the idea that the state should sup¯ port the arts, she said. We’ve done so ever since, it’s really the most important thing in our culture. Not the Church, or patrons, but the state.

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Sounds as if you’re having fun, said Luc. Oh, I am. There’s a lot of weird history around, said Gérard. All those stories and who knows if they’re true? Cardinals cuckolding kings and cuckoo children. But the furniture, that’s true, all right. Agnès called, We’re going to have champagne, to toast the house. Fanny saw a rather thin man in a biscuit¯coloured suede jacket and a black silk skivvy talking to Patricia. He had a high bulbous forehead and tipped his head to one side as though the weight of it made him lean. He spoke softly: Just have half a glass, it won’t kill you, just a couple of mouthfuls, shit, it wouldn’t hurt. The girl shook her head. When she wasn’t sneering she was pretty, but still her mouth turned down, her face was hard and obstinate. It is her mission, Fanny thought, to make her father and his wife unhappy. The father reached out his hand as if to put his arm round her shoulders but she flounced away. That knocked him off balance and the glass of red wine he was holding spilled over his jacket. The soft suede sucked it up greedily. Oh Papa, said Patricia, oh Papa, I am sorry, oh, the beautiful jacket . . . He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and patted the stain. It made no difference. Shall I try, said Patricia, trying to take the handkerchief. Perhaps we should put salt on it. He shook his head. I will take it to the cleaner and either it will come back nearly as good as new or it will not. It doesn’t matter. It is just a jacket. Other things matter so much more.

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She bent her head, and when Agnès came past with shallow glasses of champagne she took one.

The girl in jeans and white frilly apron carried round the lacquered trays of Japanese food. People began eating it. She carried also an ornate silver basket with compartments for bottles of wine. That was a family heirloom too. Nobody would make such a thing now, but it was cutely useful. Gérard thought so. We should look out for a thing like that, he said. For our parties. You can carry round food and wine at the same time. You can go shopping, said Fanny. She hated shopping; Gérard loved it. She liked buying food, searching out the most interesting vegetables, the fresh fish, the good foie gras, but that was differ¯ ent, it was the daily business of life, it had its rituals, its seasons, it was necessary. But objects, traipsing fruitlessly after things you didn’t know you wanted, that was boring. Even buying clothes was a chore. She had formed the habit of going always to a small shop in the rue Bonaparte, where the woman and her daughters brought out appropriate things. Not cheap, but worth it for the classical garments that suited her, and for the effort saved. Whereas Gérard loved fossicking around, seeking out old doors and the furniture for them, windows, architraves, ancient floorboards, new plumbing, the latest in mixer taps and artful bidets. He had come home thrilled with the old zinc bath he’d found in a derelict mansion near Sens. They say it’s warm and comfortable and sort of soft to sit in, he said, and would have got keen on installing it in their apartment

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had Fanny not pointed out how perfect it would be for the place he was renovating in the rue de Fleurus. It was hipped at both ends, just the shape for those bourgeois spaces, she said. The champagne was good, an excellent though unfamiliar vintage that they got from a cousin’s estate. Claude made a little speech saying that now their friends had visited their house it really existed, it was now a home. It was a pretty speech. Agnès moved from group to group, drinking toasts, her cheeks flushed, laying her hand on arms, raising her glass, narrowing her eyes, drawing close, smiling into faces, flirting with everybody, dancing in and out of cheerful embraces. She’s a flirty girl, Agnès, said Luc. Oh yes, said Julien. Does she flirt with you? Abominably. Why not? What could be safer? He jumped on to the raised bed round the cherry tree, pulled Luc up beside him and kissed his lips, quickly and sexily. The ripe fruits bumped against their heads.

Julien drove them home from the party. When they were both in the car Julien always drove, though Luc often took the car into the country on his own to look at libraries for sale. He was thinking about how couples divided things up, not actually talking about them, just doing it. They were sitting in silence, not discussing the party, both knew the time for that would come later, until Julien said: Claude’s photographs . . . After another silence Luc said, Hmmm?

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They worry me. I know what she’s doing. I understand it. I even approve of it. Those damaged babies, needing not to be forgotten. He was silent. Luc waited. I suppose, Julien said, what I am trying to say . . . it’s not so much the photographs that worry me as the subject, I mean, what’s going on in them. The meaning. I think about that and I think, is this the right thing. I know it’s my job, and Claude’s, but some¯ times . . . I’m afraid we’re all mistaken. I see what you mean, said Luc, though he wasn’t sure that he did, but he wanted to give Julien time to go on. I do wonder, said Julien, if we should not do any of those things, if we should just hold them, gently and closely, and love them and let them die. But some of them get better, don’t they? We could still photograph them, but as babies being held, as themselves, not this brutal mass of technology. It frightens me; what does it do to them? Julien finally heard Luc’s question. Yes, he said, some of them get better. Well, they survive, which isn’t always the same thing. Some of them, they have terrible lives, operation after operation, never really well, their days blighted by constant interventions. But some no doubt manage to have good lives, in their way. I don’t know how you can know. Playing God, said Luc. Choosing who lives, who dies. I’m not saying that. I’m not saying choose who lives. Try to work out who is going to be able to do it, with some sort of hope. The thing is, their parents so long for them, all those months

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before birth they’ve cherished this baby, the idea of it, the growing of it, they can’t bear to give it up to death. They have such mad hopes. Such mad faith. And the doctors, they want to save them, they always want to see if they can. It’s compassion but it’s ambition too. And then there’s this tiny scrap of humanity so damaged, by whatever disease and then by our clumsy attempts to ameliorate it. You see their eyes, you can see the things they have seen, nobody should have such things in their eyes. Shit, he said, as a van swung in front of them and he had to brake, nearly ramming it. Halfwit. Luc said, So, what can you do? Oh, I can’t do anything. I’m only a nurse. Doctors make policy. Save at all costs. There’s cleverness too, the brilliant performance, but let’s not go there. No, I can only think about it, and worry some¯ times. But mostly I’m caught up in the business of saving too. Luc was thinking he was lucky, to deal with books. No moral dilemmas in books. If it is moral dilemmas we’re talking about. Maybe it is nature¯of¯love dilemmas. Love, said Luc, resting his hand on Julien’s thigh, in that light and through¯thick¯cloth touch that so strongly links flesh with flesh. It’s not often easy. Julien flashed him a smile. Very wise, he said. Very very wise.

Claude and Agnès spent the rest of summer moving into their house. It was August when they arranged with Julien the conceiv¯ ing of a child. That way, said Agnès, we’ll have a summer baby. May. Or June. She had done charts and temperatures and knew when

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her fertile period would be. They were going to use the teacup method: the sperm would be expressed into a teacup and they would go on from there. The turkey baster wasn’t mentioned but presumably was borne in mind. You mean we have to go round to their house and wank? said Luc. Express semen into a teacup, is the expression. Wank, said Luc. Both of us? They are charmed by that idea. They’re like those promiscuous birds who mate with a number of partners to make sure they get good sperm. Well, if it works for birds. The poor kid’ll never know who his father was. Isn’t that the idea? I suppose in these days of DNA they can find out if they have to. We can have fun gazing at the little beggar trying to find out who it looks like. He. Or she. I thought we weren’t supposed to be involved. We’ll be friends of the family. Uncle Luc and Uncle Julien. Terribly good to them. Fairy god¯papas. Masturbating into a teacup proved difficult. Luc hadn’t done any masturbating for years and seemed to have lost the knack. When it

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finally worked there didn’t seem much in the container but Agnès said it was fine. Afterwards Claude offered them a cup of tea but that didn’t seem inviting. A martini would be good, said Julien. I’ll fix us all one. But the women didn’t have any gin in the house. Besides, I can’t drink alcohol now, said Agnès. But she didn’t get pregnant that time and they had to do it again, in her next cycle. This time Claude produced a bottle of the champagne from the cousin’s estate, and maybe it was the toasting that worked because this time the pregnancy took. They didn’t see much of the women after that, everybody seemed busy, but each time they did see Agnès she was at a differ¯ ent stage of bloom. Pregnancy suited her, she grew round and rosy, luminous. Fanny met her, coming out of Séverine’s chocolate shop. She was going to l’Île Enchantée to buy her mother¯in¯law’s pralines. Agnès was wearing a coat of black Mongolian lamb, all little black curls of sheepskin, with a big collar turned up round her neck. Her own shiny brown curly hair caught its tendrils in the curls of the lambskin coat, her skin was white, her cheeks rosy red. She looked like Snow White: black as ebony, white as snow, red as roses. The thought made Fanny squirm. You did not wish to think of fairy stories, of dead mothers and wicked stepmothers in a late twentieth¯century planned and monitored pregnancy; no room for falling on evil times there. It was like casting yourself in the role of wicked fairy godmother, wishing evil spells on the child in the womb. Chocolate, said Agnès, smiling a greedy smile. I crave choco¯ late. I’m allowed one a day, Claude says, provided it’s very black. She

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held out the packet to Fanny, who took one. It was bitter orange, wrapped in folds of the black chocolate Claude was permitting. Agnès had a second one. I’ll say you ate most of them, she said to Fanny. Chocolate’s good stuff, you know, it’s the theobromine, good for serotonin levels in the brain. Not to mention fertility, in the first place. Really? said Fanny. Séverine wasn’t in the shop. Her mother¯in¯law kissed Fanny. She’s upstairs with Sylvain, she said. Go up. Fanny didn’t want to. She started to say that she wouldn’t intrude but the woman took her arm and pushed her through the door at the back. The shop was crowded, she turned immediately to the customers, trilling her responses to their demands, so Fanny went up the stairs and knocked on the apartment door. Séverine was surprised to see her, they hadn’t met in months, and drew her into the kitchen where Sylvain was eating his after school snack, a bowl of hot milk into which he was dipping chocolate bread. Tea? she said, sitting down at the table and picking up the teapot. There were extra cups and she filled one. Sylvain was too busy with his food to do more than smile. The kitchen was a big room, warm, the copper pans hanging on the walls shone with a burnished orange glow. On the stove a blue iron pot gave off a scent of simmering savoury meat. Séverine closed the magazine she had been reading, about houses and gardens in Provence. There was a kind of heaviness in the calm of the room, as though you had to sit down and give in to it, let yourself be pressed into a comfortable rush¯bottomed chair and slowly drink your tea. Some kitchens invite work. Food to prepare, mess to clean up. This one

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was clean, tidy. And drowsy. The busyness of the chocolate shop was shut away through several doors. No sound penetrated. Fanny didn’t want to apologise for not having seen Séverine for so long, and it seemed Séverine didn’t either. Fanny said: How’s Sylvain’s little Australian friend? Oh, Amy. She went home. It was time. She’s invited Sylvain to go and visit her. Maybe you should go, in the summer. Yes, but it’s winter there. And so far away. People say it’s thirty hours in the plane. Amy, said Sylvain. Amy Amy Amy. He dipped another mouthful of chocolate bread. I was very sad, he said. Amy was very sad. We had to cry. I will go and visit her. They talked about the summer holidays, a clumsy unintimate conversation. There didn’t seem to be anything real to say. Fanny wondered where Ghislaine was. Asleep, she supposed. Séverine boiled more water and refilled the teapot. She poured out more cups. It’s delicious tea, said Fanny. It’s called Marco Polo. Just faintly spicy. Sylvain wanted some so she put a dash in the remains of his milk. She got some little cakes out of a tin and put them on a plate. Sorry, she said. I forget about eating. Fanny looked at her. Séverine was pale, and calm as the kitchen. The lilting chocolate¯box girl with bright eyes and dimples and dancing hair was muted now. Fanny thought, I suppose it is time

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passing. We are all getting older. Quieter. Are we wiser? Perhaps we just know more terrible things. Séverine said: Ghislaine’s gone to the country. There’s a place . . . it’s very good. They help people like her. Look after them. Fanny wanted to say, You mean an institution? Séverine said: Not an institution. It’s a kind of household. A home, you could say. Wonderful care. They know what they’re doing. Will they let her wear dresses with roses on? Oh yes. They’re hugely kind. It’s a kind of big friendly family, with professional care. We’re very happy we’ve found such a good place. She didn’t look happy, Fanny said to Gérard that night. She looked miserable. Maybe it’s her mother¯in¯law’s idea. Was the child very damaged? asked Gérard. I don’t know. Séverine would never talk about it. In fact I think that’s why I haven’t seen much of her for a while, she didn’t want to talk about her. I thought, maybe, autism. Séverine said once how intelligent she was. Not brain damage, then. No. And not Down syndrome. I think it must be autism. Or Asperger’s. That anger she had. And obsessions. Lining up seashells. Having to have dresses with roses on. Maybe the place in the country will cure her. I don’t think you cure. I think you cope. And help them cope. Fanny shivered. I don’t blame Séverine, she said. It’s hard, too hard.

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Gérard knew she was thinking of Charlotte. People try to love, as best they can, said Fanny. Except sometimes, said Gérard. There’s a spectacular absence of trying, sometimes. It’s hard, said Fanny again. But necessary, said Gérard.

Ilse the painter of flowers sent all the party guests invitations to an exhibition of her work in the rue de Seine. It was like a reprise of the house warming, Luc said. He wondered if any of them would buy a painting. People kept remarking how beautiful they were. Gérard particularly admired one of drifts of red peonies washing out of a stormy grey background but didn’t think it would be right in their apartment. I can’t see it, he said to Fanny. She put her head on one side, narrowed her eyes, and agreed. For her part she liked lilies, yellowish and withering, stuffed into an old crystal jug, itself decaying, discoloured and chipped. They were in water that was greenish and scummy, you could tell it would have an odour of swamp and festering. There was something precious in its ancient greenish¯yellow colours, like metals tarnish¯ ing, and yet so fleshy. She thought it would look good in their apartment. Gérard said the colours would be okay but he didn’t like the idea of looking at dying all day. Claude liked one of fat Pierre de Ronsard roses, their full¯ blown petals painted in pinks and creams in such subtlety that it took a lot of looking at, climbing up a rough red brick wall. We could buy it, she said to Agnès, and have the rose outside in the

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summer and in the house all year round. Agnès was charmed by this idea until they picked up the catalogue of prices and discov¯ ered it was far too expensive. Julien and Luc had no walls that did not have bookcases on them so did not even consider buying one. Julien recognised a vase stuffed with random bunches of flowers as those that were blooming in the garden at the time of the party. It’s a magnificent garden, he said to Ilse. What sort of factory was it, before? Isn’t it marvellous, said Ilse. It was a boilermaker’s factory. All that fire and metal, and the countless vats of acid he poured into it. And see how it blossoms. Of course, it was fabulous soil to begin with. The Sun King’s kitchen garden, you know. The royal gardener grew peaches and pears on espaliers in the next street. You didn’t tell me it had been a boilermaker’s factory, said Claude. I didn’t know, said Agnès. Ilse said, That’s him over there. The boilermaker. At first I think he was kind of puzzled by all the flowers, but now he’s quite interested. He always comes to my openings. The boilermaker was a tall and rather portly man in a fine grey suit. He and Gérard were deep in conversation in front of the Pierre de Ronsard rose. How are you finding it, working in the country? asked Fanny. Ilse shrugged. Ah. I work well there, that is me, I work well. But you notice, no Marc! Fanny remembered the curt husband with the comb marks in his hair.

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No, said Ilse. No Marc. Takes me to the country, dumps me with his parents, then buggers off with his girlfriend. The milky Miss Maqueau, his personal assistant. She spoke with a savage, gay bitterness. Leaves me in the big house, all alone. But you know, it suits me. I think, I could have stayed in my lovely boilermaker’s factory. But it is good for the children. The country. And the grand¯ parents. They are excellent babysitters, the grandparents. Perhaps he thought of that. As for him. Poo. He is no loss. Oh no. Good riddance to bad Marc. Fanny wondered if she was putting on a brave face, but thought she did mean her dismissiveness. She was angry, yes, but she was getting on with her own life. I think it is good for my work, said Ilse. Look. Much fiercer. Normandy, it is peaceful, so one can be fierce. And come to Paris when the mood takes, thanks to grandparents. Who think it is not to the family honour to behave like that, and so they make amends. Afterwards people went for dinner in a nearby bistro. The cooking came from the Périgord district, the specialty was foie gras. Nobody could resist it. Agnès explained that she did not really suffer from cravings in her pregnant state, except for chocolate, but sometimes when she thought of something she just had to have it, like foie gras. Still she was the luminous rosy creature whom Fanny had met at the door of l’Île Enchantée. She was wearing pale brown trousers and a fitted black jersey top with a kind of ruching right down the middle of her front, so her big round belly was perfectly delineated by it. Her hair was cut in short curls over her head. She said she was tired; she was still working, it was probably time

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to give it up. She didn’t look tired, she looked like an irresistible urchin who had mysteriously become pregnant. Claude couldn’t take her eyes off her, couldn’t stop smiling her delight with her. Agnès told funny stories of the old doctor in her practice who in theory was retired but still came in a couple of days a week; there were old ladies who had been coming to him for fifty years and would see no one else. He heard that she was suffering from cramps in her legs, sometimes woken in the night by them. A glass of brandy, he said, gets the circulation going wonderfully, a glass of brandy before going to bed will fix it. When she said, But I can’t do that, I’m pregnant remember, he looked surprised. So, he said. So. I’m not advocating taking to drink, you know, mustn’t drink so much you fall over, that would hurt the baby, but otherwise . . . Lucky, said Claude, none of his old ladies is likely to get pregnant. He recommends a glass of red wine for nursing mothers, said Agnès, does wonders for babies’ sleeping habits. That sounds very attractive to me. Mmm, said Claude. There was an older woman there, who seemed to be a long¯time fan of Ilse’s, and a client; it turned out that she’d bought the lilies. She looked at Agnès with a beaming smile. You know, she said, I do so envy you girls your pregnancies, these days, you look so beauti¯ ful. In my time—she rolled her eyes and grimaced—we wore tents, absolute tents, stiff as a board, with stupid great pussy¯cat bows under our chins; they were supposed to distract attention from the bump below. The whole thing was so ugly, and so secretive, and so designed to make us look as though sex was the last thing that had

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got us in that situation. She laughed. And now, look at you, so sexy, and flaunting it. Agnès gave a demure smile. Claude put her arm round her shoulders. Luc said, in Julien’s ear, Well, sex was the last thing. Julien muttered back, But I reckon there’s a lot of it about. The woman looked from Agnès to Claude. Oh dear, she said, and let out a great peal of laughter. Ilse joined in. Very early next morning Claude woke to find Agnès absent. She got up and hurried through the house, finding her sitting with her elbows on the Mazarin desk. She was crying, and when Claude put her arms around her the crying turned to hiccupping sobs and then to hysterical cries. She was saying something, Claude could not work out what, the sobs so distorted her words. She held her and soothed her until she could make sense of them. Somewhere in the sobs, the fragments, the tears, they are about fear. About panic. About damage. Agnès knows there is something wrong with the baby. That it’s dead. That it will die being born. That it will have something hideously wrong with it. Deformities. Diseases. Hooked up to life support. Resuscitation. Operations. Brain damage, death. Shh, says Claude, we’ve had all the tests. Nothing wrong, remember? Everything perfectly normal, perfectly healthy. They’re mistaken, I know they’re mistaken. Nothing is safe, not in the end. That’s foie gras speaking, says Claude. What? Indigestion. Too much rich food too late. Foie gras. Confit of duck, for god’s sake. What was I thinking of to let you? Claude’s

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voice is practical, a little scolding. She puts her hand on Agnès’s stomach. Ouch. He’s got a kick like a donkey, this child. Agnès feels her tummy. Oh yes, she says, and giggles a bit. Remember, says Claude, how many times do I have to say, you’ve had every test available. Everything is known about this baby. It is perfectly healthy. Wonderfully healthy. Just because you’ve eaten yourself sick doesn’t mean the baby is. Everything is known. Including its sex. But they have chosen not to be told that. Health is all that interests them. Completeness. Claude made her an infusion of ginger tea, took her back to bed and wrapped the duvet round her, held her close until she slept again. Then she got up and went to the room with the Mazarin desk and took all the photographs of ailing babies down from the wall. She looked at the rows of hooks. The Pierre de Ronsard roses would have covered them up nicely. She put the photos in a box and carried it up to the mezzanine and put it on a high shelf. The sky was beginning to fill with grey light. Claude shivered. A new day. She liked the ends of days better than their beginnings. There could be terror in beginnings. The cold light was clammy over her skin. She liked days that had been safely negotiated, that could be comfortably put away. Draw the curtains, light the lamps. New days could hold threats. Promises too, of course, but threats were heavier, more potent. Nights were kind. Down in the garden the tiny daffodils were intensely yellow in the grey light. This was the women’s first spring in the garden, it would be full of surprises. Countless vats of acid, said Ilse. But the flowers and trees didn’t mind. That must be what mattered. Still,

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had they known . . . countless vats. But those tests, so many tests, all auguring well. And Ilse had lived there with her children, she seemed to have had no qualms. Yet . . . had they known . . . had they known . . . The next day Claude rang around to find somebody who could test soil for toxic chemicals and heavy metals. She went in her lunch hour to a little gift shop near the hospital. She remem¯ bered seeing in the window small glass vessels, bubbled glass with loops blown onto them, tiny vases for hanging up. She bought as many as there were empty hooks by the Mazarin desk, set them in place, poured water in them, and went round the garden collecting odd flowers and leaves and placing them in the small vases. Now it was not a matter of the absence of the photographs of the babies, it was a charming arrangement of plants, calling a different kind of attention to themselves from their presence in the garden.

Fanny told her mother about the exhibition of the painter of flowers and Cathérine invited Sabine to go with her. Sabine brought Louise. They met for lunch in one of the big old cafes on the boulevard St Germain. The place had a highchair; Louise sat up and ate scrambled eggs and ice cream with enthusiasm. Then they walked along to the gallery. Sabine bought the Pierre de Ronsard roses painting. I love that full¯blown paint, she said. She said she was going to give it to Jean¯Marie as a cheering up present. He wasn’t well at the moment, he’d scalded his hand making coffee and it had become infected. He was having to stay home in bed. Shouldn’t you be home looking after him? asked Cathérine,

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with a certain mischief; she had been struck with the somehow light¯hearted way Sabine had spoken of her husband. Light¯hearted. Satisfied, even. Oh no, said Sabine. I did that for years. He’s quite capable, you know. Of scalding himself, thought Cathérine. This was the second time; it had been his foot, before. Well, said Sabine, I don’t know about capable. He’s learning. A lot of things to learn, I have to admit. Jean¯Marie’s quite late starting. And quite slow. She handed over her credit card to pay for the painting with a curious smile on her face. Of pleasure? That’s what you’d expect, buying a work of art. Cathérine wondered. Of malice, perhaps? Self¯satisfaction? Smugness? No, not that. Delight, certainly. Triumph. All those things, flitting across her lips. Cathérine was impressed that Sabine could so easily spend so much money. Louise lay back in her pusher and gurgled, holding her foot in her hand and waving it in the air. She’s such a happy child, said Sabine. She spends a lot of time with me, these days. Her mother is working very hard, finishing her thesis. She tilted the pusher to get it down the stairs on its back wheels. I’m getting good at this, she said. Even on the metro. And people help. You’d be surprised. I owe it to Louise, she said, so softly she seemed to be talking to herself. All the others . . . I failed . . . all the others. Well. Louise is here. Cathérine knew she couldn’t ask her what she meant though she didn’t know why. Afterwards she thought about the words, and

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what they might mean, and wondered if she had heard them aright. Who were the others? Had Sabine lost children, as Cathérine herself had done, little lost might¯have¯beens, could¯have¯beens? She still remembered her terror for Fanny, that something might happen to her; even now, something might happen to her. It was deeply subter¯ ranean, now, but it could lumber to the surface at any time.

Gérard had made a habit of finding out how Charlotte was. He didn’t say anything of this to Fanny, since there never was any good news. She lived with different foster families, but that never lasted very long; they began with great optimism, confident that they could make it work where others hadn’t, but within a matter of weeks she would be sent back to hospital. The doctors admitted that the words they’d thought she said were not in fact words, they were random grunts. Mostly she was silent, occasionally she screamed. It was her silence that was particularly unnerving, one foster mother said. Just looking at you, and doing those truly obscene things. Gérard wondered about obscene. That was in the person observ¯ ing; Charlotte knew nothing of obscenity. Then he learned that she had died. What of? he asked. The doctor shrugged. It’s not simple, he said. Failure to stay alive, perhaps? Not from neglect, or ill¯treatment, she was always well looked after, but it was impos¯ sible to love her, however much anyone tried. She was so damaged. It doesn’t sound very scientific, I know, but I think, finally, she died of not being able to live. We certainly couldn’t keep her alive. There’ll be words on the death certificate, but that’s what it is, really. Pneumonia, but that doesn’t explain anything.

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He told Fanny. Fanny cried. Silently, tears rolling down her cheeks, while she sat and looked at him, desolation in her welling eyes. He held her close, and the tears flowed, till he wondered how her light body could hold so many. You know, she said, what is so bad . . . she was born so healthy. Exceptionally healthy. She couldn’t have survived that abuse if she hadn’t had a strong and perfect little body. And they destroyed her. She blew her nose hard. All those babies of Claude’s, so damaged. And people trying so hard to keep them alive. And it would have been so little effort to rear Charlotte. She had a good body, and I know she would have had a good mind. I hope those grandparents are rotting in hell. Fanny, you don’t believe in hell. I know. And I hope they are rotting in it. Luc said to her, I hear your little wild child died. He looked away from Fanny’s swollen eyes. You know, Julien likes to think that damaged children find a perfect life in some sort of heaven, that there they are whole. Some people said she didn’t even have a soul. That her brain was so neglected that she had no soul. But anyway I don’t believe in heaven. Neither quite does Julien. But he’d like to, for the sake of the sick children. I suppose you’re going to say it’s a merciful release. On no, said Luc, his voice full of horror. Why not? I would. It is. She’s better out of it. I see now that nobody could save her.

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You tried. I failed. I think she knew a little happiness with you. But she was a wild child. It sounds so disgustingly romantic. A wild child. Wild suggests freedom. She had none of that. We don’t know what she had. She might have had quite a real inner life. They said it wasn’t human. They don’t always know. I’m not supposed to know, but I do; it was; she was human. I knew her; she was human. There, said Luc. You paid attention. That is the best any of us can hope for.

The baby of Claude and Agnès was born in June, a little early, but a healthy three kilos. They gazed at her in wonder. Her fuzz of dark hair, her little round cheeks, her beautiful flat ears, her mouth that really was a rosebud. Claude said, So, are we calling her Amalie? Because that was the name they had chosen for a girl. Mmm, said Agnès, I think maybe I like Amandine better. Oh no. Too clumsy. Or Albertine. Claude looked at her in horror. For days they bickered. Luxur¯ iously, it has to be said, as they doted over their little daughter. We have to get her registered, said Claude.

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Oh, all right, Amalie, said Agnès. Who are we saying the father is? Unknown. Amalie, Agnès said. Amalie. And suddenly she was. No other name could be possible. A perfect baby. All her limbs, her fingers and toes. Her palate uncleft, her brain undamaged, her internal organs all present and functioning. An excellent drinker of mother’s milk. But a person, not yet but soon to be her own person, and who knows how she will turn out? What she will make of herself.

Fanny said, Summer holidays. Let’s not go to the old place this year. Let’s go somewhere different. Exciting. Exotic. Where? said Gérard. What about Turkey? I’d like to take one of those boats around the coast. What are they called? Gulets. So they did that. The boat sailed round this ancient coast that was mostly steep whitish rock cliffs with inhospitable vegeta¯ tion—You can imagine Ulysses seeing exactly this when he was trying to get home from Troy, said Fanny. They swam in trans¯ parent waters, cold, buoyant, deep. The bottom was dim and very far away; maybe if you peered you would find a ship that hadn’t made it all those centuries ago. They shivered at the thought of so much water to fall down through. Swimming was such a pleasure, yet there was this occasional terror, too. They ate stews with barley and yoghurt, and endless salads of tomatoes, onions, olives, fetta, with green olive oil and basil. Or curious fish in remote village taverns.

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The wine was coarse and full of flavour. Fanny was hungry all the time. Gérard teased her about getting plump, but in fact he was delighted with her rounding flesh, still slender, just not peaky and gaunt as she had become at the time of Charlotte. They climbed through ancient ruined cities, stood in amphitheatres and forums and marble bath houses. The boat moored in remote coves over¯ night, or sometimes in new¯old city ports with castles and shonky hotels and lobster¯pink English tourists. They had an ugly luxuri¯ ous stateroom furnished like a brothel with crimson draperies and wrought iron painted gold and accents of turquoise chenille. They made love in the quiet nights when the waters of still anchorages washed against the boat, and during afternoon siestas as the little ship sailed through slapping seas. For eighteen days they inhabited a world different from anything they’d known. Their skins were sun¯tanned and salty. What made you think of it, coming to Turkey? asked Gérard. Oh, an inspiration, said Fanny. They went to Ephesus, climbing downhill through the sloping ruins of this immemorial city. The stones were sun¯bleached, the grasses yellow. It was harsh, and pure, poignant. Imagine Paris, thousands of years after its death, said Gérard, and people like us gazing at the fall of its great buildings. Fanny said, I don’t know, Paris would huddle. It would rain and rot and decay, there wouldn’t be this glorious casting of stones down the hillside. Gérard said, I bet the people of Ephesus couldn’t have imagined this ruin. So little left, and yet so powerful. Occasionally there were almost complete facades, and rooms

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that still sketched their original shapes, often there was little more than rubble, carved occasionally with heartbreaking beauty. Out of our pebbles we make boulders, said Fanny. That’s my new resolution. To see pebbles as the pebbles they are. Oh, that’s a noble aim. The sun shone down, burning, it was as though the whole landscape was not so much desiccated as purged by it, as if all dangerous fluids had been burned away, leaving the stone, the rocks, the golden grasses. People living here, not the flabby visitors passing through but dwelling here, would be purged too, honed down to long muscles under burnished skin, their bones as light and strong as the landscape. A terrifying process, possibly, and yet how exhilarating it would be. It would have to be earned though, not plucked in passing. They looked at the site of the temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, destroyed many times, by flood and fire, by pagan plunder, and more than once by Chris¯ tian rage. They marvelled at the one immensely tall column, all that remained of the temple. In the museum they saw the hieratic sculpture of Artemis herself. She wears a mural crown, the walls of a city on her head, she doesn’t have legs but a kind of pillar, and she is many¯breasted. Many¯breasted Artemis, goddess of fertility and birth, nurturer of all living things. And capable of bringing down the creatures she brings forth. Fanny stares at her, at the multiplicity of breasts festooning her chest like large egg¯shaped jewels. She counts thirty of them. The rest of the goddess is covered in creatures, cats, bees, people, winged beasts that might be horses, deer. Her temple is destroyed,

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her cult is no more, she is imprisoned in an antiquities museum, gawped at by prurient and unheeding eyes, but she is a figure of power. The stern and irresistible power of procreation. Fanny leaves Gérard in the cafe drinking apple tea and writing postcards that are unlikely to arrive home before they do, and goes back for another look at Artemis. Her large blank eyes stare at Fanny, her mouth is unsmiling and sensual. Those blank eyes see everything, know everything. Gaze back into them and you begin to know too. Her will is implacable. Fanny looks around quickly, reaches out and touches one of the egg breasts. No voice thunders out, no guard marches up. The stone is very stony. She buys a postcard of her but doesn’t send it to anyone. It’s a good holiday. They laugh into one another’s faces. They feel like children, just beginning.

Back home, Paris was autumn, and the return. The whole city putting the leisure of summer behind, and getting back to work. There was the bookshop, and Gérard had a grand house in the Marais to work on. The air was chill and bracing, the holidays a past golden time, only their sun¯tanned skins retaining the memory of it. Fanny slid the postcard of Artemis into the frame of her dressing¯table mirror and met that implacable but not unkind, that knowing, understanding, forgiving gaze every time she brushed her hair. Her period was late but she carefully took little notice of that, it had been late before. But then it was nearly time for the next one and still it had not come and so she began to wonder and of course

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to think that perhaps she could hope. Her breasts were tight and then she was missing a second period. She went to the doctor. Yes, she was pregnant. She didn’t believe Artemis had anything to do with it. A stone idol long gone from power. But sometimes she would put her fingers to her lips and press them to the postcard. The sensual mouth almost smiled—with pleasure; with irony. Fertility is so normal, when it is not a rare gift.

Leave Fanny there, with her happy beginning. Who knows about happy endings? There will, with luck, with good fortune, with all the care that young women take of their pregnancies these days, be another happy beginning, when the child is born. Don’t think of happy endings. Who wants happy endings? A series of happy beginnings, hope for that.

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