CONTENTS

FRANCE 1910--PART ONE

FRANCE 1916--PART TWO

ENGLAND 1978--PART THREE

FRANCE 1917--PART FOUR

ENGLAND 1978-79--PART FIVE

FRANCE 1918--PART SIX

ENGLAND 1979--PART SEVEN

When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.

--Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

FRANCE 1910--PART ONE

The boulevard du Gange was a broad, quiet street that marked the eastern flank of the city of Amiens. The wagons that rolled in from Lille and Arras to the north drove directly into the tanneries and mills of the Saint Leu quarter without needing to use this rutted, leafy road. The town side of the boulevard backed on to substantial gardens, which were squared off and apportioned with civic precision to the houses they adjoined. On the damp grass were chestnut trees, lilacs, and willows, cultivated to give shade and quietness to their owners. The gardens had a wild, overgrown look and their deep lawns and bursting hedges could conceal small clearings, quiet pools, and areas unvisited even by the inhabitants, where patches of grass and wild flowers lay beneath the branches of overhanging trees. Behind the gardens the river Somme broke up into small canals that were the picturesque feature of Saint Leu; on the other side of the boulevard these had been made into a series of water gardens, little islands of damp fertility divided by the channels of the split river. Long, flat-bottomed boats propelled by poles took the town dwellers through the waterways on Sunday afternoons. All along the river and its streams sat fishermen, slumped on their rods; in hats and coats beneath the cathedral and in shirtsleeves by the banks of the water gardens, they dipped their lines in search of trout or carp.

The Azaires' house showed a strong, formal front toward the road from behind iron railings. The traffic looping down to the river would have been in no doubt that this was the property of a substantial man. The slate roof plunged in conflicting angles to cover the irregular shape of the house. Beneath one of them a dormer window looked out on to the boulevard. The first floor was dominated by a stone balcony, over whose balustrades the red ivy had crept on its way up to the roof. There was a formidable front door with iron facings on the timber.

Inside, the house was both smaller and larger than it looked. It had no rooms of intimidating grandeur, no gilt ballrooms with dripping chandeliers, yet it had unexpected spaces and corridors that disclosed new corners with steps down into the gardens; there were small salons equipped with writing desks and tapestrycovered chairs that opened inward from unregarded passageways. Even from the end of the lawn, it was difficult to see how the rooms and corridors were fitted into the placid rectangles of stone. Throughout the building the floors made distinctive sounds beneath the press of feet, so that with its closed angles and echoing air, the house was always a place of unseen footsteps.

Stephen Wraysford's metal trunk had been sent ahead and was waiting at the foot of the bed. He unpacked his clothes and hung his spare suit in the giant carved wardrobe. There was an enamel wash bowl and wooden towel rail beneath the window. He had to stand on tiptoe to look out over the boulevard, where a cab was waiting on the other side of the street, the horse shaking its harness and reaching up its neck to nibble at the branches of a lime tree. He tested the resilience of the bed, then lay down on it, resting his head on the concealed bolster. The room was simple but had been decorated with some care. There was a vase of wild flowers on the table and two prints of street scenes in Honfleur on either side of the door. It was a spring evening, with a late sun in the sky beyond the cathedral and the sound of blackbirds from either side of the house. Stephen washed perfunctorily and tried to flatten his black hair in the small mirror. He placed half a dozen cigarettes in a metal case that he tucked inside his jacket. He emptied his pockets of items he no longer needed: railway tickets, a blue leather notebook, and a knife with a single, scrupulously sharpened blade.

He went downstairs to dinner, startled by the sound of his steps on the two staircases that took him to the landing of the first floor and the family bedrooms, and thence down to the hall. He felt hot beneath his waistcoat and jacket. He stood for a moment disorientated, unsure which of the four glass-panelled doors that opened off the hall was the one through which he was supposed to go. He halfopened one and found himself looking into a steam-filled kitchen in the middle of which a maid was loading plates on to a tray on a large deal table.

"This way, Monsieur. Dinner is served," said the maid, squeezing past him in the doorway.

In the dining room the family were already seated. Madame Azaire stood up.

"Ah, Monsieur, your seat is here."

Azaire muttered an introduction of which Stephen heard only the words "my wife." He took her hand and bowed his head briefly. Two children were staring at him from the other side of the table.

"Lisette," Madame Azaire said, gesturing to a girl of perhaps sixteen with dark hair in a ribbon, who smirked and held out her hand, "and Gré-aoire." This was a boy of about ten, whose small head was barely visible above the table, beneath which he was swinging his legs vigorously backward and forward.

The maid hovered at Stephen's shoulder with a tureen of soup. Stephen lowered a ladleful of it into his plate and smelt the scent of some unfamiliar herb. Beneath the concentric rings of swirling green the soup was thickened with potato. Azaire had already finished his and sat rapping his knife in a persistent rhythm against its silver rest. Stephen lifted searching eyes above the soup spoon as he sucked the liquid over his teeth.

"How old are you?" said the boy.

"Grégoire!"

"It doesn't matter," said Stephen to Madame Azaire. "Twenty."

"Do you drink wine?" said Azaire, holding a bottle over Stephen's glass.

"Thank you."

Azaire poured out an inch or two for Stephen and for his wife before returning the bottle to its place.

"So what do you know about textiles?" said Azaire. He was only forty years old but could have been ten years more. His body was of a kind that would neither harden nor sag with age. His eyes had an alert, humourless glare.

"A little," said Stephen. "I have worked in the business for nearly four years, though mostly dealing with financial matters. My employer wanted me to understand more of the manufacturing process."

The maid took away the soup plates and Azaire began to talk about the local industries and the difficulties he had had with his work force. He owned a factory in town and another a few miles outside.

"The organization of the men into their syndicates leaves me very little room for manoeuvre. They complain they are losing their jobs because we have introduced machinery, but if we cannot compete with our competitors in Spain and England, then we have no hope."

The maid brought in a dish of sliced meat in thin gravy that she placed in front of Madame Azaire. Lisette began to tell a story of her day at school. She tossed her head and giggled as she spoke. The story concerned a prank played by one girl on another, but Lisette's telling of it contained a second level. It was as though she recognized the childish nature or what she said and wanted to intimate to Stephen and her parents that she herself was too grown-up for such things. But where her own interests and tastes now lay she seemed unsure; she stammered a little before tailing off and turning to rebuke her brother for his laughter. Stephen watched her as she spoke, his dark eyes scrutinizing her face. Azaire ignored his daughter as he helped himself to salad and passed the bowl to his wife. He ran a piece of bread round the rim of the plate where traces of gravy remained.

Madame Azaire had not fully engaged Stephen's eye. In return he avoided hers, as though waiting to be addressed, but within his peripheral view fell the sweep of her strawberry-chestnut hair, caught and held up off her face. She wore a white lace blouse with a dark red stone at the throat.

As they finished dinner there was a ring at the front door and they heard a hearty male voice in the hall.

Azaire smiled for the first time. "Good old Bérard. On the dot as usual!"

"Monsieur and Madame Bérard," said the maid as she opened the door.

"Good evening to you, Azaire. Madame, delighted." Bérard, a heavyset greyhaired man in his fifties, lowered his lips to Madame Azaire's hand. His wife, almost equally well built, though with thick hair wound up on top of her head, shook hands and kissed the children on the cheek.

"I am sorry, I didn't hear your name when René introduced us," said Bérard to Stephen.

While Stephen repeated it and spelled it out for him, the children were dismissed and the Bérards installed in their place.

Azaire seemed rejuvenated by their arrival. "Brandy for you, Bérard? And for you, Madame, a little tisane, I think? Isabelle, ring for coffee also, please. Now then--"

"Before you go any further," said Bérard, holding up his fleshy hand, "I have some bad news. The dyers have called for a strike to begin tomorrow. The syndicate chiefs met the employers' representatives at five this evening and that is their decision."

Azaire snorted. "I thought the meeting was tomorrow."

"It was brought forward to today. I don't like to bring you bad tidings, my dear René, but you would not have thanked me if you had learned it from your foreman tomorrow. At least I suppose it won't affect your factory immediately." Bérard in fact appeared to have enjoyed delivering the news. His face expressed a quiet satisfaction at the importance it had conferred on him. Madame Bérard looked admiringly at her husband.

Azaire continued to curse the work force and to ask how they expected him to keep his factories going. Stephen and the women were reluctant to give an opinion and Bérard, having delivered the news, seemed to have no further contribution to make on the subject.

"So," he said, when Azaire had run on long enough, "a strike of dyers. There it is, there it is."

This conclusion was taken by all, including Azaire, as the termination of the subject.

"How did you travel?" said Bérard.

"By train," said Stephen, assuming he was being addressed. "It was a long journey."

"Aah, the trains," said Bérard. "What a system! We are a great junction here. Trains to Paris, to Lille, to Boulogne... Tell me, do you have trains in England?"

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Let me see... For about seventy years."

"But you have problems in England, I think."

"I'm not sure. I wasn't aware of any."

Bérard smiled happily as he drank his brandy. "So there it is. They have trains now in England."

The course of the conversation depended on Bérard; he took it as his burden to act as a conductor, to bring in the different voices, and then summarize what they had contributed.

"And in England you eat meat for breakfast every day," he said.

"I think most people do," said Stephen.

"Imagine, dear Madame Azaire, roast meat for breakfast every day!" Bérard invited his hostess to speak.

She declined, but murmured something about the need to open a window.

"Perhaps one day we shall do the same, eh René?"

"Oh, I doubt it, I doubt it," said Azaire. "Unless one day we have the London fog as well."

"Oh, and the rain." Bérard laughed. "It rains five days out of six in London, I believe." He looked toward Stephen again.

"I read in a newspaper that last year it rained a little less in London than in Paris, though--"

"Five days out of six," beamed Bérard. "Can you imagine?"

"Papa can't stand the rain," Madame Bérard told Stephen.

"And how have you passed this beautiful spring day, dear Madame?" said Bérard, again inviting a contribution from his hostess. This time he was successful, and Madame Azaire, out of politeness or enthusiasm, addressed him directly. This morning I was out doing some errands in the town. There was a window open in a house near the cathedral and someone was playing the piano." Madame Azaire's voice was cool and low. She spent some time describing what she had heard. "It was a beautiful thing," she concluded, though just a few notes. I wanted to stop and knock on the door of the house and ask whoever was playing it what it was called."

Monsieur and Madame Bérard looked startled. It was evidently not the kind of thing they had expected. Azaire spoke with the soothing voice of one used to such fancies. "And what was the tune, my dear?"

"I don't know. I had never heard it before. It was just a tune like... Beethoven or Chopin."

"I doubt it was Beethoven if you failed to recognize it, Madame," said Bérard gallantly. "It was one of those folksongs, I'll bet you anything."

"It didn't sound like that," said Madame Azaire.

"I can't bear these folk tunes you hear so much of these days," Bérard continued. "When I was a young man it was different. Of course, everything was different then." He laughed with wry self-recognition. "But give me a proper melody that's been written by one of our great composers any day. A song by Schubert or a nocturne by Chopin, something that will make the hairs of your head stand on end!

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up in the heart. The great composers of the past were able to do this, but the musicians of today are satisfied with four notes in a line you can sell on a songsheet at the street corner. Genius does not find its recognition quite as easily as that, my dear Madame Azaire!"

Stephen watched as Madame Azaire turned her head slowly so that her eyes met those of Bérard. He saw them open wider as they focused on his smiling face, on which small drops of perspiration stood out in the still air of the dining room. How on earth, he wondered, could she be the mother of the girl and boy who had been with them at dinner?

"I do think I should open that window," she said coldly, and stood up with a rustle of silk skirt.

"And you too are a musical man, Azaire?" said Bérard. "It's a good thing to have music in a household where there are children. Madame Bérard and I always encouraged our children in their singing."

Stephen's mind was racing as Bérard's voice went on and on. There was something magnificent about the way Madame Azaire turned this absurd man aside. He was only a small-town bully, it was true, but he was clearly used to having his own way.

"I have enjoyed evenings at the concert hall," said Azaire modestly, "though I should hesitate to describe myself as a 'musical man' on account of that. I merely--"

"Nonsense. Music is a democratic form of art. You don't need money to buy it or education to study it. All you need is a pair of these." Bérard took hold of his large pink ears and shook them. "Ears. The gift of God at birth. You must not be shy about your preference, Azaire. That can only lead to the triumph of inferior taste through the failing of false modesty." Bérard sat back in his chair and glanced toward the now open window. The draught seemed to spoil his enjoyment of the epigram he had pretended to invent. "But forgive me, Bené," he said. "I cut you off." Azaire was working at his black briar pipe, tamping down the tobacco with his fingers and testing its draw by sucking noisily on it. When it was done to his satisfaction he struck a match and for a moment a blue spiral of smoke encircled his bald head. In the silence before he could reply to his friend, they heard the birds in the garden outside.

"Patriotic songs," said Azaire. "I have a particular fondness for them. The sound of bands playing and a thousand voices lifted together to sing the

'Marseillaise' as the army went off to fight the Prussians. What a day that must have been!"

"But if you'll forgive me," said Bérard, "that is an example of music being used for a purpose--to instill a fighting valour in the hearts of our soldiers. When any art is put to practical ends it loses its essential purity. Am I not right, Madame Azaire?"

"I daresay you are, Monsieur. What does Monsieur Wraysford think?" Stephen, momentarily startled, looked at Madame Azaire and found her eyes on his for the first time. "I have no view on that, Madame," he said, recovering his composure. "But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it." Bérard suddenly held out his hand. "A little brandy, if you please, Azaire. Thank you. Now then. I am going to do something in which I risk playing the fool and making you think ill of me."

Madame Bérard laughed incredulously.

"I am going to sing. Yes, there's no point in trying to dissuade me. I am going to sing a little song that was popular when I was a boy, and that, I can assure you, was very many years ago."

It was the speed with which, having made his declaration, Bérard launched into his song that surprised his listeners. One moment they had been making formal after-dinner conversation, the next they had been turned into a trapped audience as Bérard leant forward in his chair, elbows on the table, and sang in a warbling baritone.

He fixed his eyes on Madame Azaire, who was sitting opposite. She was unable to hold his gaze, but looked down at her plate. Her discomfort did not deflect Bérard. Azaire was fiddling with his pipe and Stephen studied the wall above Bérard's head. Madame Bérard watched with a proud smile as her husband made the gift of his song to his hostess. Madame Azaire blushed and squirmed in her chair under the unblinking stare of the singer.

The dewlaps on his neck wobbled as he turned his head for emphasis at a touching part of the song. It was a sentimental ballad about the different times of a man's life. Its chorus ran, "But then I was young and the eaves were green/Now the corn is cut and the little boat sailed away."

At the end of each refrain Bérard would pause dramatically and Stephen would allow his eyes a quick glance to see if he had finished. For a moment there was utter silence in the hot dining room, but then would come another deep inhalation and a further verse.

" 'One day the young men came back from the war, The corn was high and our sweethearts were waiting Bérard's head revolved a little as he sang, and his voice grew louder as he warmed to the song, but his bloodshot eyes remained fixed on Madame Azaire, as though his head could turn only on the axis of his stare. By an effort of will she appeared to compose herself and stiffen her body against the intimacy of his attention.

" '... and the little boat sailed away-y-y.' There," said Bérard, coming abruptly to an end, "I told you I should make a fool of myself!"

The others all protested that, on the contrary, the song had been magnificent.

"Papa has a beautiful voice," said Madame Bérard, flushed with pride. Madame Azaire's face was also pink, though not from the same emotion. Azaire became falsely jovial and Stephen felt a drop of sweat run down inside the back of his collar. Only Bérard himself was completely unembarrassed.

"Now, Azaire, what about a game of cards. What shall it be?"

"Excuse me, René," said Madame Azaire, "I have a slight headache. I think I shall go to bed. Perhaps Monsieur Wraysford would like to take my place." Stephen stood up as Madame Azaire rose from her chair. There were protests and anxious enquiries from the Bérards that Madame Azaire waved away with a smile, assuring them she was perfectly all right. Bérard lowered his face to her hand and Madame Bérard kissed the still-pink skin of Madame Azaire's cheek. There were a few freckles on her bare forearm, Stephen noticed as she turned to the door, a tall, suddenly commanding figure in a blood-red skirt that swept over the floor of the hall.

"Let's go into the sitting room," said Azaire. "Monsieur, I trust you will join us to make up our card game."

"Yes, of course," said Stephen, forcing a smile of acquiescence.

"Poor Madame Azaire," said Madame Bérard, as they settled at the card table.

"I hope she hasn't caught a chill."

Azaire laughed. "No, no. It's just her nerves. Think nothing of it."

"Such a delicate creature," murmured Bérard. "Your deal, I think, Azaire."

"Nevertheless, a headache can mean the beginning of a fever," said Madame Bérard.

"Madame," said Azaire, "I assure you that Isabelle has no fever. She is a woman of a nervous temperament. She suffers from headaches and various minor maladies. It signifies nothing. Believe me, I know her very well and I have learned how to live with her little ways." He gave a glance of complicity toward Bérard, who chuckled. "You yourself are fortunate in having a robust constitution."

"Has she always suffered from headaches?" Madame Bérard was persistent. Azaire's lips stretched into a narrow smile. "It is a small price one pays. It is you to play, Monsieur."

"What?" Stephen looked down at his cards. "I'm sorry. I wasn't concentrating." He had been watching Azaire's smile and wondering what it meant.

Bérard talked to Azaire about the strike as they laid down their cards on the table with swift assurance.

Stephen tried to concentrate on the game and to engage Madame Bérard in some sort of conversation. She seemed indifferent to his attention, though her face lit up whenever her husband addressed her.

"What these strikers need," said Azaire, "is for someone to call their bluff. I'm not prepared to see my business stagnate because of the gross demands of a few idle men. Some owner has to have the strength to stand up to them and sack the whole lot."

"I fear there would be violence. The mobs would rampage," said Bérard.

"Not without food in their stomachs."

"I'm not sure it would be wise for a town councillor like yourself, René, to be involved in such a dispute."

Bérard took up the pack to shuffle it; his thick fingers moved dexterously over the rippling cards. When he had dealt, he lit a cigar and sat back in his chair, pulling his waistcoat smartly down over his belly.

The maid came in to ask if there was anything further. Stephen stifled a yawn. He had been travelling since the previous day and was drawn to the idea of his modest room with the starched sheets and the view across the boulevard. No, thank you," said Azaire. "Please go to Madame Azaire's room on your way to bed and tell her I shall look in to see if she's all right later." For a moment Stephen thought he had seen another half-glance of complicity between the two men, but when he looked at Bérard his face was absorbed in the cards that were fanned out in his hand.

Stephen said good-bye to the visitors when they finally got up to leave. He stood at the window of the sitting room, watching them in the light of the porch. Bérard put on a top hat as though he were some baron on his way home from the opera; Madame Bérard, her face glowing, wrapped her cape round her and took his arm. Azaire leant forward from the waist and talked in what looked like an urgent whisper.

A soft rain had begun to fall outside, loosening the earth at the sides of the rutted tracks on the road and sounding the leaves on the plane trees. It gave a greasy film to the window of the sitting room and then formed larger drops, which began to run down the glass. Behind it Stephen's pale face was visible as he watched the departing guests--a tall figure, his hands thrust into his pockets, his eyes patient and intent, the angle of his body that of a youthful indifference cultivated by willpower and necessity. It was a face that in turn most people treated cautiously, unsure whether its ambivalent expressions would resolve themselves into passion or acquiescence.

Up in his room, Stephen listened to the noises of the night. A loose shutter turned slowly on its hinges and banged against the wall at the back of the house. There was an owl somewhere deep in the gardens, where the cultivation gave way to wildness. There was also the irregular wheeze and rush of the plumbing in its narrow pipes.

Stephen sat down at the writing table by the window and opened a notebook with pages ruled in thick blue lines. It was half-full of inky writing that spread over the lines in clusters that erupted from the red margin on the left. There were dates at intervals in the text, though there were gaps of days and sometimes weeks between them.

He had kept a notebook for five years, since a master at the grammar school had suggested it. The hours of Greek and Latin study had given him an unwanted but ingrained knowledge of the languages that he used as the basis of a code. When the subject matter was sensitive, he would change the sex of the characters and note their actions or his responses with phrases that could not mean anything to a chance reader.

He laughed softly to himself as he wrote. This sense of secrecy was something he had had to develop in order to overcome a natural openness and a quick temper. At the age of ten or eleven his artless enthusiasm and outraged sense of right and wrong had made him the despair of his teachers, but he had slowly learned to breathe and keep calm, not to trust his responses, but to wait and be watchful.

His cuffs loosened, he held his face in his hands and looked at the blank wall ahead of him. There came a noise that this time was not the shutter or the sound of water but something shriller and more human. It came again, and Stephen crossed the room to listen for it. He opened the door on to the landing and stepped out gently, remembering the sound his feet had made before. The noise was a woman's voice, he was almost sure, and it was coming from the floor below.

He took off his shoes, slid them quietly over the threshold of his room, and began to creep down the stairs. It was completely dark in the house; Azaire must have turned off all the lights on his way to bed. Stephen felt the spring of the wooden treads beneath his socks and the line of the bannister under his exploring hand. He had no fear.

On the first-floor landing he hesitated. The size of the house and the number of possible directions from which the noise could have come became dauntingly clear. Three passageways opened from the landing, one of them up a small step leading toward the front of the house and two going sideways along the length of it before breaking up into further corridors. A whole family and its servants, to say nothing of bathrooms, laundries, or stores, was on this floor. He could wander by chance into a cook's bedroom or an upstairs salon with Chinese ornaments and Louis XVI silks.

He listened intently, stifling his own breath for a moment. There was a different sound now, not identifiably a woman's voice, but a lower note, almost like sobbing, interrupted by a more material sound of brief impact. Stephen wondered if he should continue. He had left his room impulsively in the belief that something was wrong; now it seemed to him he might merely be trespassing on the privacy of some member of the household. But he did not falter long because he knew that the noise was not a normal one.

He took a passageway to the right, walking with exaggerated care, one arm in front of him to protect his eyes from harm, and one feeling along the wall. The passageway came to a junction, and looking to the left Stephen saw a narrow bar of light coming from beneath a closed door. He calculated how close to the door he should go. He wanted to remain sufficiently near to the turn in the corridor that he would have time to double back into it and out of sight of anyone emerging from the room.

He went to within half a dozen paces, which was as close as he dared. He stopped and listened, again quelling his own breathing so he would not miss a sound. He could feel the swell of his heart against his chest and a light pulse in the flesh of his neck.

He heard a woman's voice, cool and low, though made intense by desperation. She was pleading, and the words, though indistinct because of the way she kept her voice down, were made audible in places by the urgency of the feeling behind them. Stephen could distinguish the words René," and later "I implore you," and then "children." The voice, which he recognized even on this slight evidence as Madame Azaire's, was cut short by the thudding sound he had heard before. It turned to a gasp which, because of its sudden move into a higher register, was clearly one of pain.

Stephen moved forward along the corridor, his hands no longer raised cautiously in front of him but tensed into fists against his ribs. A step or two short of the door he managed to control his sense of confused anger. For the first time he heard a man's voice. It was repeating a single word in a broken, unconvinced tone that gave way to a sob. Then there were footsteps.

Stephen turned and ran for the corner of the passageway, knowing he had advanced beyond the limit he had set himself. As he turned the corner he heard Azaire's quizzical voice. "Is there anyone there?" He tried to remember whether there had been any hazards on his way as he ran back toward the landing without time to check that his path was clear. From the foot of the stairs going up to the second floor he could see that some light was coming from his room. He took the steps two at a time and plunged toward the switch on the table lamp, causing it to rock and bang as he reached it.

He stood still in the middle of the room, listening. He could hear footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs below. If Azaire came up he would wonder why he was standing fully dressed in the middle of a dark room. He moved to the bed and slid under the covers.

After ten minutes he thought it safe to undress for bed. He closed the door and the shutter on the small window and sat down in his night-clothes at the writing table. He read over the entry he had written earlier, which described his journey from London, the train in France, and the arrival in the boulevard du Gange. It made brief comments on the character of Bérard and his wife, under heavy disguise, and gave his impressions of Azaire and the two children. He saw, with some surprise, that what had struck him most he had not written about at all.

*

Rising in the morning with a clear head, rested, and full of interest in his new surroundings, Stephen put the happenings of the night from his mind and submitted to a full tour of Azaire's business operations.

They left the prosperity of the boulevard and walked to the Saint Leu quarter, which looked to Stephen like a medieval engraving, with gabled houses leaning over cobbled streets above the canals. There were washing lines attached to crooked walls and drainpipes; small children in ragged clothes played hide-and-seek on the bridges and ran sticks along the iron railings at the water's edge. Women carried buckets of drinking water collected from the fountains in the better areas of town to their numerous offspring, some of whom waited in the family's single room, while others, mostly immigrants from the countryside of Picardy who had come in search of work, lodged in makeshift shelters in the backyards of the bursting houses. There was the noise of poverty that comes from children on the streets, whose mothers are screaming threats or admonitions or calling out important news to neighbours. There was the racket of cohabitation that exists when no household is closed to another; there were voices from the crowded bakeries and shops, while the men with barrows and horse-drawn carts cried up their goods a dozen times on each street.

Azaire moved nimbly through the crowd, took Stephen's arm as they crossed a wooden bridge, turned from the shouted abuse of a surly adolescent boy, led the way up a wrought-iron staircase on the side of a building and delivered them both into a first-floor office that looked down on to a factory floor.

Sit down. I have a meeting now with Meyraux, who is my senior man and also, as a punishment for whatever sins I have committed, the head or the syndicate." Azaire pointed to a leather-covered seat on the far side or a desk piled with papers. He went down the internal steps to the factory floor, leaving Stephen to look out through the glass walls of the office on to the scene below. The workers were mostly women, sitting at spinning machines at the far end of the room, though there were also men and boys in flat leather caps at work on the machines or transporting yarn or bolts of material on little wooden-wheeled wagons. There was a rhythmical clatter from the antiquated jennies that almost drowned the shouts of the foreman, a red-faced man with a moustache who strode up and down in a coat that reached almost to his ankles. At the near end of the factory were rows of workers at Singer sewing machines, their knees rising and falling as they pumped the mechanism, their hands working in flat opposition to one another, going rapidly this way then that, as though adjusting the pressure on a huge tap. To Stephen, who had spent many hours on such premises in England, the process looked old-fashioned, in the same way that the streets of Saint Leu seemed to belong to a different century from the terraces of the mill towns of Lancashire. Azaire returned with Meyraux, a small, fleshy man with thick dark hair swept across his forehead. Meyraux had the look of someone honest who had been driven to suspicion and a profound stubbornness. He shook hands with Stephen, though the reserved look in his eye seemed to indicate that Stephen should read nothing into the formality. When Azaire offered him a seat, Meyraux hovered for a moment before apparently deciding that this did not necessarily amount to a capitulation. He sat square and unbudgeable in the chair, though his fingers fluttered in his lap as though weaving invisible strands of cotton.

"As you know, Meyraux, Monsieur Wraysford has come to visit us from England. He is a young man and wants to learn a little more about our business." Meyraux nodded. Stephen smiled at him. He enjoyed the feeling of being unlicensed, disqualified by his age from responsibility or commitment. He could see the entrenched weariness of the older men.

"However," Azaire went on, "as you also know, Monsieur Wraysford's compatriots in Manchester are able to produce the same cloth as we do for twothirds of the price. Since the company he works for is one of our major customers in England, it is only fair that we should try to impress him. I understand from his employer, who is a most farsighted man, that he would like to see more cooperation between the two countries. He has talked about taking shares in the company." Meyraux's fingers were jabbing faster. "Another Cosserat," he said dismissively. Azaire smiled. "My dear Meyraux, you mustn't be so suspicious." He turned to Stephen. "He is referring to one of the great producers, Eugène Cosserat, who many years ago imported English workers and techniques--"

"At the cost of several jobs among local people."

Azaire continued to address Stephen. "The government wants us to rationalize our operations, to try to bring more of them under one roof. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do, but it inevitably means greater use of machinery and a consequent loss of jobs."

"What the industry needs," said Meyraux, "as the government has been saying since my father's day, is more investment and a less mean and timid attitude on the part of the owners."

Azaire's face became suddenly rigid, whether from anger or simple distaste was impossible to say. He sat down, put on a pair of spectacles and pulled a piece of paper toward him from the pile on the table.

"We are in difficult times. We have no money to invest and we can therefore only retrench. These are my specific proposals. Employees on salaries will take a cut of one per cent. Those on piecework will be paid at the same rate but will have to raise output by an average of five per cent. Their output will no longer be measured by the metre but by the piece. Those not qualified to use the new machinery, about half the work force, will be reclassified as untrained workers and their rate of pay will be adjusted accordingly."

He took off his glasses and pushed the piece of paper toward Meyraux. Stephen was surprised by the simplicity of Azaire's assault. He had made no pretence that the work force had anything to gain from the new arrangements or that they would make up in some other way for what they were clearly being asked to forgo. Perhaps it was just a first bargaining position.

Meyraux, confronted with the details, was impressively calm. "It's about what I expected," he said. "You appear to be asking us to settle for even less than the dyers, Monsieur. I need hardly remind you what situation they are in." Azaire began to fill his pipe. "Who is behind that nonsense?" he said.

"What is behind it," said Meyraux, "are the attempts of the owners to use slave labour at diminishing levels of pay." You know what I mean," said Azaire. The name of Lucien Lebrun is being mentioned." Little Lucien! I didn't think he had the courage."

It was bright in the glass office, the sunlight streaming in across the books and papers on the table beneath the window and illuminating the faces of the two antagonists. Stephen watched their fierce exchange but felt dissociated from it, as though they spoke only in slogans. From the subject of Azaire's wealth, his mind moved naturally to possessions, to the house on the boulevard, the garden, the plump children, Grégoire with his bored eyes, Lisette with her suggestive smile, and above all to Madame Azaire, a figure he viewed with an incompatible mixture of feelings.

"... the natural consequence of a production with so many separate processes," said Azaire.

"Well, I too would like to see the dyeing done here," said Meyraux, "but as you know... "

He could not be sure of her age, and there was something in the vulnerability of her skin where he had seen the goosepimples rise on her arm in a draught from the garden. There was something above all in the impatience he had seen in the turn of her head that concealed the expression of her eyes.

"... would you not agree, Monsieur Wraysford?"

"I certainly would."

"Not if we were to invest in larger premises," said Meyraux. I am mad, thought Stephen, quelling a desire to laugh; I must be insane to be sitting in this hot glass office watching the face of this man discussing the employment of hundreds and I am thinking things I can't admit even to myself while smiling my complicity to...

"I will not discuss it further in the presence of this young man," said Meyraux.

"Forgive me, Monsieur." He stood up and inclined his head formally toward Stephen.

"It's nothing personal."

"Of course," said Stephen, also standing up. "Nothing personal." In his notebook the code word Stephen used when describing a certain aspect of Madame Azaire and of his confused feeling towards her was "pulse." It seemed to him to be sufficiently cryptic, yet also to suggest something of his suspicion that she was animated by a different kind of rhythm from that which beat in her husband's blood. It also referred to an unusual aspect of her physical presence. No one could have been more proper in her dress and her toilet than Madame Azaire. She spent long parts of the day bathing or changing her clothes; she carried a light scent of rose soap or perfume when she brushed past him in the passageways. Her clothes were more fashionable than those of other women in the town yet revealed less. She carried herself modestly when she sat or stood; she slid into chairs with her feet close together, so that beneath the folds of her skirts her knees too must have been almost touching. When she rose again it was without any leverage from her hands or arms but with a spontaneous upward movement of grace and propriety. Her white hands seemed barely to touch the cutlery when they ate at the family dinner table and her lips left no trace of their presence on the wine glass. On one occasion, Stephen had noticed, some tiny adhesion caused the membrane of her lower lip to linger for a fraction of a second as she pulled the glass away to return it to its place, but still the surface of it had remained clear and shining. She caught him staring at it.

Yet despite her formality toward him and her punctilious ease of manner, Stephen sensed some other element in what he had termed the pulse of her. It was impossible to say through which sense he had the impression, but somehow, perhaps only in the tiny white hairs on the skin of her bare arm or the blood he had seen rise beneath the light freckles of her cheekbones, he felt certain there was some keener physical life than she was actually living in the calm, restrictive rooms of her husband's house with its oval door handles of polished china and its neatly inlaid parquet floors.

*

A week later Azaire suggested to Meyraux that he should bring Stephen to eat with the men in a room at the back of the factory where they had lunch. There were two or three long refectory tables at which they could either eat the food they had brought or buy whatever dish had been cooked by a woman with a white head scarf and missing teeth.

On the third day, in the middle of a general conversation, Stephen stood up abruptly, said, "Excuse me," and rushed from the room.

An elderly man called Jacques Bonnet followed him outside and found him leaning against the wall of the factory. He put a friendly hand on Stephen's shoulder and asked if he was all right.

Stephen's face was pale and two lines of sweat ran from his forehead. "Yes, I'm fine," he said.

"What was the matter? Don't you feel well?"

"It was probably just too hot. I'll be fine." He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

Bonnet said, "Why don't you come back inside and finish your lunch? It looked a_ _nice bit of rabbit the old woman had cooked up."

"No!" Stephen was trembling. "I won't go back. I'm sorry." He pulled himself away from Bonnet's paternal hand and moved off briskly into the town. "Tell Azaire I'll be back later," he called over his shoulder. At dinner the following day Azaire asked him if he had recovered.

"Yes, thank you," said Stephen. "There was nothing the matter with me. I just felt a little faint."

"Faint? It sounds like a problem of the circulation."

"I don't know. There's something in the air, it may be one of the chemicals used by the dyers, I'm not sure. It makes it hard for me to breathe."

"Perhaps you should see a doctor, then. I can easily arrange an appointment."

"No, thank you. It's nothing."

Azaire's gaze had filled with something like amusement. "I don't like to think of you having some kind of fit. I could easily--"

"For goodness' sake, René," said Madame Azaire. "He's told you that there's nothing to worry about. Why don t you leave him alone?"

Azaire's fork made a loud clatter as he laid it down on his plate. For a moment his face had an expression of panic, like that of the schoolboy who suffers a sudden reverse and can't understand the rules of behaviour by which his rival has won approval. Then he began to smile sardonically, as though to indicate that really he knew best and that his decision not to argue further was a temporary indulgence he was granting his juniors. He turned to his wife with a teasing lightness of manner.

"And have you heard your minstrel again in your wanderings in the town, my dear?"

She looked down at her plate. "I was not wandering, René. I was doing errands."

"Of course, my dear. My wife is a mysterious creature, Monsieur," he said to Stephen. "No one knows--like the little stream in the song--whither she flows or where her end will be."

Stephen held his teeth together in order to prevent himself protesting on Madame Azaire's behalf.

"I don't suppose Monsieur Wraysford is familiar with the song," said Madame Azaire.

"Perhaps Monsieur Bérard would sing it to me." Stephen found that the words had escaped.

Madame Azaire let out a sudden laugh before she could catch herself. She coughed and Stephen saw the skin of her cheeks stain lightly as her husband glared at her.

Although he was annoyed with himself for what his host might take as rudeness, Stephen's face remained expressionless. Azaire had no spontaneous reaction, like his wife, nor, like Stephen, a contrived one. Fortunately for him Lisette began to giggle and he was able to rebuke her.

"Is Monsieur Bérard a good singer, then?" asked Grégoire, looking up from his plate, his napkin tucked into his collar.

"A very distinguished one," said Azaire challengingly.

"Indeed," said Stephen, meeting his gaze with level eyes. Then he looked directly at Madame Azaire. She had recovered her composure and returned his look for a moment, a dying light of humour still in her face.

"So you didn't pass the house again?" he said to her.

"I believe I walked past it on my way to the chemist, but the window was shut and I didn't hear any music."

The Bérards came again after dinner and brought with them Madame Bérard's mother, a woman with a wrinkled face who wore a black lace shawl and was said to have great religious sensitivity. Bérard referred to her, for reasons that were not explained, as Aunt Elise, and she asked the others to do likewise. Stephen wondered whether her married name carried painful reminders of her dead husband or whether it was some social secret of his wife's family that Bérard thought it better to conceal.

On that and later occasions Stephen watched the Bérards and the role they played in the lives of the Azaires. On the terrace, when the evenings grew warm enough, the five of them sat in wickerwork chairs breathing in the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine that lay on the lintels and window frames at the back of the house. Bérard in his stout black boots and formal waistcoat conducted his small orchestra with dogged skill, though he always kept the best parts for himself. He was an authority on the important families of the town and could speak at length on the role played by names such as Sellier, Laurendeau, or de Morville in the making of its wealth and social fabric. He hinted in a long and indirect way that his own family had had connections with the de Morvilles that, through the negligence of some Bonapartist Bérard, they had failed to ratify. His manner of criticizing this errant ancestor was to belittle the ingratiating habits of Paris society, particularly in its hunger for titles, in such a way that the failure of his forebear, who had remained stubbornly provincial, was portrayed as being virtuous in a timeless manner yet possessing in addition a greater finesse than that displayed by the more artful Parisians. This early Bérard therefore seemed both sturdy and refined, while his descendants themselves were consequently presented both as the inheritors of commendable virtue and as the guileless beneficiaries of superior breeding. It passed the time. It was a way of getting to the end of peaceful evenings, Stephen supposed, but it made him burn with frustration. He could not understand how Madame Azaire could bear it.

She was the only one who did not respond to Bérard's promptings. She barely contributed when he invited her to do so, but would speak, unbidden, on a subject of her own choice. This appeared to leave Bérard no choice but to cut her off. He would apologize with a small bow of his head, though not for some minutes, and not until he had taken the conversation safely down the path he wanted. Madame Azaire would shrug lightly or smile at his belated apology as though to suggest that what she had been about to say was unimportant.

Aunt Elise's presence was a particular benefit to Bérard, since she could be relied on to raise the tone of any conversation with her religious conviction. Her reputation as a person of patience and sanctity was based on her long widowhood and the large collection of missals, crucifixes, and mementos of pilgrimage she had collected in her bedroom at the Bérards' house. With her blackened mouth and harsh voice she seemed to embody a minatory spiritual truth, that real faith is not to be found in the pale face of the anchorite but in the ravaged lives of those who have had to struggle to survive. Sometimes her laugh seemed more ribald or fullblooded than holy, but in her frequent appeals to the saints she was able to dumbfound her listeners by invoking names and martyrdoms of the early church and its formative years in Asia Minor.

"I'm proposing an afternoon in the water gardens next Sunday," said Bérard.

"I wonder if I might interest you in joining us?"

Azaire agreed enthusiastically. Aunt Elise said she was too old for boating and managed to imply that such self-indulgence was not appropriate for a Sunday.

"I should think you're pretty handy with a boat, René?" said Bérard.

"I've got a feel for the water, it's true," said Azaire.

"Listen to him, the modest old devil," Bérard laughed. "If it wasn't for all the evidence to contradict him, he wouldn't even admit to being any good at business." Azaire enjoyed being cast in the role of self-effacing joker that Bérard had created for him. He had devised a way of inhaling skeptically when some talent of his was mentioned and following the hissing intake of breath with a sip from his glass. He said nothing, so his reputation for wit remained intact, though not to Stephen, who, each time Azaire modestly rolled his eyes, remembered the sounds of pain he had heard from the bedroom.

Sometimes from the safety of the sitting room he would fix his eyes on the group and on the vital, unspeaking figure of Madame Azaire. He didn't ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant. Perhaps in the harshest judgement of the term she was not. While everything was feminine about her face, her nose was slightly larger than fashion prescribed; her hair had more different shades of brown and gold and red than most women would have wanted. For all the lightness of her face, its obvious strength of character overpowered conventional prettiness. But Stephen made no judgements; he was motivated by compulsion.

Returning one afternoon from work, he found her in the garden, pruning an unchecked group of rose bushes, some of which had grown higher than her head.

"Monsieur." She greeted him with formality, though not coldly. Stephen, with no plan of action, merely took the little pruning shears from her hand and said, "Allow me."

She smiled in a surprised way that forgave his abrupt movement.

He snipped at a few dead flowers before he realized he had no proper sense of what he was trying to do.

"Let me," she said. Her arm brushed across the front of his suit and her hand touched his as she took the little shears from him. "You do it like this. Beneath each bloom that's died you cut at a slight angle to the stem, like this. Look." The brown petals of a formerly white rose fell away. Stephen moved a little closer to catch the smell of Madame Azaire's laundered clothes. Her skirt was the colour of baked earth; there was a dogtoothed edging to her blouse that suggested patterns or frippery of an earlier, more elaborate age of dressing. The little waistcoat she wore above it was open to reveal a rosy flush at the bottom of her throat, brought on by the small exertion of her gardening. Stephen imagined the different eras of fashion and history summoned by her decorative way of dressing: it suggested victory balls from the battles of Wagram and Borodino or nights of the Second Empire. Her still-unlined face seemed to him to hint at intrigue and worldliness beyond her obvious position.

"I haven't seen your daughter for a day or two," he said, bringing his reverie to a halt. "Where is she?"

"Lisette is with her grandmother near Rouen for a few days."

"How old is Lisette?"

"Sixteen."

Stephen said, "How is it possible for you to have a daughter of that age?"

"She and Grégoire are my stepchildren," said Madame Azaire. "My husband's first wife died eight years ago and we were married two years after that."

"I knew it," he said. "I knew you couldn't be old enough to have a child that old."

Madame Azaire smiled again, a little more self-consciously.

He looked at her face, bent over the thorns and dry blooms of the roses, and imagined her flesh beaten by her withered, corrupt husband. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed her hand, folding it in both of his own.

She turned swiftly to him, the blood rushing into her face, her eyes filled with alarm.

Stephen held her hand against the thick serge of his jacket. He said nothing. The satisfaction of acting on impulse had lent him calm. He looked into her eyes as though daring her to respond in a way not dictated by their social positions.

"Monsieur. Please let go of my hand." She tried to laugh it off. Stephen noticed that there was not much pressure of withdrawal from her hand itself to accompany her words. The fact that her other hand held the pruning shears made it difficult for her to extract herself without pulling in some way that risked making her lose her composure.

Stephen said, "The other night I heard sounds from your room. Isabelle--"

"Monsieur, you--"

"Stephen."

"You must stop this now. You must not humiliate me."

"I have no wish to humiliate you. Ever. I merely wanted to reassure you." It was a strange choice of words, and Stephen felt its oddness as he spoke, but he let go of her hand.

She looked into his face with more composure than she had managed before.

"You must respect my position," she said.

"I will," said Stephen. It seemed to him there was some ambiguity in what she had said and that he had capitalized on it by using the future tense in his acquiescence.

Seeing he could not improve on this advance, he dragged himself from her presence.

Madame Azaire watched his tall figure retreat across the grass to the house. She turned back to her roses, shaking her head as though in defiance of some unwanted feeling.

*

Since his flight from the room in the factory where the workers took their meals, Stephen had found a café on the other side of the cathedral to which he went each day for lunch. It was a place frequented by young men, students or apprentices, many of whom sat at the same tables each day. The food was prepared by a sturdy Parisian exile who had once had a café in the Place de l'Odéon. Knowing student appetites, he served only one dish, but in quantity, with bread and wine included in the price. His commonest dish was beef, with custards or fruit tart to follow it. Stephen was halfway through lunch at a seat in the window when he saw a familiar figure bustle past, her head lowered, with a basket on her arm. Her face was concealed by a scarf but he recognized her by her walk and the tartan sash at her waist.

He left some coins spinning on the table as he pushed back his chair and went out into the street. He saw her disappear from the corner of the square and go down a narrow side street. He ran to catch her up. He drew level just as she was pulling the bell handle outside a double door with flaking green paint. Madame Azaire was flustered when he accosted her. "Monsieur... I, I wasn't expecting you. I am delivering something to a friend."

"I saw you go past the café I was in. I thought I would come and see if I could help carry anything for you."

She looked doubtfully at her basket. "No. No, thank you." The door was opened by a young man with brown wavy hair and an alert expression. His face showed recognition and urgency.

"Come in," he said and laid his hand on Madame Azaire's shoulder as he ushered her into a courtyard.

"This is a friend," she said uncertainly, indicating Stephen, who was lingering in the doorway.

"Come in, come in," said the man and closed the door behind them. He led the way across the courtyard and up some stairs to a small apartment. He told them to wait in a cramped sitting room in which the shutters were closed and piles of papers and leaflets lay on the surface of every table and chair. He returned and pulled back a curtain, letting in some light on the cramped and squalid room.

He waved his hand at it and apologized. "There are five of us living in this little place at the moment." He held out his hand to Stephen. "My name is Lucien Lebrun."

They shook hands and Lucien turned to Madame Azaire. "Have you heard the news? They have agreed to take back the ten men they sacked last week. They won't back down on the question of pay, but still, it's a start." Feeling Stephen's quizzical eyes on her, Madame Azaire said, "You must wonder what I'm doing here, Monsieur. I bring food to Monsieur Lebrun from time to time and he gives it to one of the dyers' families. Some of them have five or six children--even more in some cases--and they find it hard to live."

"I see. And your husband doesn't know."

"He doesn't know. I couldn't involve myself with his workers one way or another but the dyers are a separate group of people, as you know."

"Don't be apologetic!" said Lucien. "A gift of food is just an act of Christian charity. And in any case, the injustice done to my people is outrageous. Last week at the local meeting of the syndicate--"

"Don't start on that again." Madame Azaire laughed.

Lucien smiled. "I despair of you, Madame."

Stephen felt an acid worry at the familiar way in which Lucien addressed Madame Azaire. He did not feel particularly concerned with the politics of the strike or the ethical nicety of Madame Azaire's position. He only wanted to know how she had come to be on such easy terms with this forceful young man.

He said, "I think it's time I went back to the factory. Your husband is going to show me the finishing process."

"You work with Azaire?" Lucien was dumbfounded.

"I work for an English company who have sent me here for a short time."

"You speak very good French for an Englishman." I learned it in Paris."

"And what has he told you about the dyers' strike?"

Stephen remembered Azaire's remark about "little Lucien."

"Not very much. I think he will be more worried when it begins to affect his own factory."

Lucien gave a short, animal laugh. "That won't be long, I can assure you. Madame, will you have something to drink?"

"That's very kind. Perhaps a glass of water."

Lucien disappeared and Stephen lingered, unwilling to leave Madame Azaire.

"You mustn't think badly of me, Monsieur," she said.

"Of course not," said Stephen, pleased that she should care what he thought of her.

"I am loyal to my husband."

Stephen said nothing. He heard Lucien's footsteps approaching. He reached forward, laid his hand on Madame Azaire's arm, and kissed her cheek. He left at once, before he could see the blood he had raised, calling, "Good-bye," as though his kiss might have been merely a polite farewell.

*

Isabelle Azaire, born Fourmentier, came from a family that lived near Rouen. She was the youngest of five sisters and had disappointed her father by not being the son he had wanted.

As the youngest child, she lived life unregarded by her parents, who by the time their fifth daughter was born no longer found much to charm them in the noises and changes of childhood. Two of her elder sisters, Béatrice and Delphine, had early in their lives formed an alliance against the remote tyranny of their father and Madame Fourmentier's manipulative indolence. They were both lively, quickwitted girls with various talents that went unnoticed and unencouraged by their parents. They developed a shared selfishness that prevented them from venturing far from their own mutual reassurance.

The eldest sister, Mathilde, was given to outbursts of temper and to sulks that could last for days. She had dark hair and a cold eye that sometimes made even her father think twice before crossing her. When she was eighteen she developed a passion for an architect who worked near the cathedral in Rouen. He was a small, shifty-looking man with a certain weasel quickness in his movements. He had been married for ten years and was himself the father of two girls. Rumours of a growing friendship between them reached the ears of Monsieur Fourmentier, and there was a noisy confrontation. From her attic bedroom the five-year-old Isabelle heard the first sound of adult passion as her father's pleading turned to anger and her sister's well-known temper became something more wailing and elemental. She felt the house tremble as Mathilde slammed the front door behind her.

Isabelle was a child of exceptionally sweet nature. She did not question her parents' indifference. The closest thing she had to a confidante was her sister Jeanne, who was two years older. Jeanne was the most resourceful of the girls. She had not had to make the first moves into the world, like Mathilde, nor was she included in Béatrice and Delphine's alliance. When blood came one day to Isabelle, unexplained and unpredicted, it was Jeanne who explained what their mother, through idleness or prudishness, had failed to do. This blood, Jeanne said, was supposed to be shameful, but she had never thought of it that way. She valued it because it spoke of some greater rhythm of life that would lead them away from the narrow boredom of childhood. Isabelle, who was still shocked by what had happened, was suggestible enough to share Jeanne's private pleasure, though not without a qualm. She could never quite reconcile herself to the fact that this secret thing that promised new life and liberation should manifest itself in the colour of pain.

Isabella's father was a lawyer who had political ambitions but lacked the ability to realize them or the charm that might have made connections where talent had failed. He became bored by his houseful of women and spent mealtimes reading Parisian newspapers with their accounts of political intrigues. He was unaware of the complexity or passion of the lives led by his family. He would rebuke the girls for bad behaviour and occasionally punish them severely, but he had no other interest in their development. Madame Fourmentier was driven by his indifference into an excessive concern with fashion and appearance. She assumed her husband had a mistress in Rouen and that this was the reason he no longer showed any interest in her. To compensate for this presumed slight she devoted her time to making herself look attractive to men.

A year after her failed affair with the married architect, Mathilde was married off to a local doctor, to the relief of her parents and the envy of her sisters. It was assumed that when the other girls had also left home Isabelle would stay and look after her parents.

"Is that what I'm supposed to do, Jeanne?" she asked her sister. "Stay here forever while they grow old?"

"I think they'd like it, but they have no right to expect it. You must find your own life. That's what I'm going to do. If no one marries me I'm going to live in Paris and open a shop."

"I thought you were going to be a missionary in the jungle."

"That's only if the shop fails and my lover rejects me."

Jeanne had a greater sense of humour and detachment than Isabelle's other sisters, and their conversations together gave Isabelle the feeling that the things she had read about in books and newspapers were not just the ingredients of other people's lives, as she had once believed, but were open to some extent to her too. She loved Jeanne as she loved no one else.

At the age of eighteen Isabelle was a self-reliant but gentle girl who had no proper outlet either for her natural instincts or for the exuberant energy that was frustrated by the routine and torpor of her parents' house. At her sister Beatrice's wedding she met a young infantry officer called Jean Destournel. He spoke to her kindly and seemed to value her for some quality of her own. Isabelle, who had only ever been made to feel a shadowy version of a child who should in any case have been a boy was confused to find that someone could think she was unique and worth knowing for herself. Jean was not just anyone, either; he was attentive and handsome in a conventional way. He wrote to her and sent small presents. After a year of courtship, most of it conducted by letter since Jean's various postings seldom allowed him to be in Rouen, Isabelle's father made one of his rare interventions into family life. He summoned Jean to see him when he came to visit Isabelle and told him he was too old, too junior in rank, too undistinguished in family, and too dilatory in his courtship. Destournel, who was essentially a shy man, was taken aback by the force of Fourmentier's objection and began to question his own motives. He was entranced by Isabelle's character and her individual appearance, which was already different from that of most girls of her age. When he had spent an evening in the mess he loved to go to his room and think of this young, vital woman. He allowed his imagination to dwell on the details of her feminine home life, with the trappings of peace and domesticity and the company of her two remaining unmarried sisters, Delphine and Jeanne. He liked to evaluate their comparative worth in his mind and was pleased with his perverse judgement that the youngest one, pretty well unregarded by the others, was the most beautiful and most interesting. But while Isabelle Fourmentier and her pale skin and her fresh clothes and her laughter undoubtedly gave him a wonderful source of relief from the daily details of army life, he was not certain that in his heart he had any definite intention of marrying her. Perhaps if Fourmentier had not interfered it might have come naturally to that; but the sudden advent of self-consciousness prompted a destructive doubt.

A few months later, on his next visit, he took Isabelle for a walk in the garden and told her that he was being posted abroad and that he was not in a position to continue their friendship. He skated around the question of marriage with pleas of poverty and unworthiness. Isabelle didn't care whether he married her or not, but when he said he would not see her again she felt the simple agony of bereavement, like a child whose only source of love has gone.

For three years her loss coloured every moment of her day. When at last it became bearable it was still like a wound on which the skin would not thicken, so the least thing could reopen it. The reckless innocence of her unguided childhood was finished, but eventually a sweetness and balance in her nature returned. At the age of twenty-three she no longer seemed the baby of the house; she appeared older than her age, and began to cultivate a style and manner of her own that were not those of her parents or her elder sisters. Her mother was a little frightened by the certainty of her tastes and the assurance of her opinions. Isabelle felt herself grow, and she met no resistance.

At a party her father heard of a local family called Azaire who had gone to live in Amiens, where the wife had died, leaving two young children. He manoeuvred an introduction and distinctly liked the look of René Azaire. Isabelle was not the comfort he had hoped for at home; she had become far too strong-willed to be a housekeeper, and although she was an accomplished helper to her mother she threatened at times to become an embarrassment to him. In the strict and experienced figure of René Azaire, Isabelle's father saw a solution to a number of difficulties.

The match was adroitly sold to Isabelle by both men. Her father played on her sympathy for Azaire while he in turn introduced his children, both then at captivating stages of their lives. Azaire promised her some independence in their marriage, and Isabelle, who longed to be free of her parents' house, agreed. Her interest in Lisette and Grégoire was the most important thing to her; she wanted to help them and to submerge her own disappointments in their successes. It was also agreed that she and Azaire should have children of their own. So she changed from the little Fourmentier girl into Madame Azaire, a woman of dignity beyond her age, of pronounced taste and opinion but with an accumulation of natural impulse and affection that had not been satisfied by any of the circumstances of her life. Azaire was at first proud to have married such a young and attractive woman and liked to display her to his friends. He saw his children prosper under her attention. Lisette was taken tactfully through the awkward changes in her body; Grégoire was encouraged in his enthusiasms and forced to improve his manners. Madame Azaire was well regarded in the town. She was an affectionate and dutiful wife to her husband, and he required no more from her; she did not love him, but he would have been frightened to have aroused such an unnecessary emotion. Madame Azaire grew into her new name. She was content with the role she had accepted and thought that her ambitious desires could be safely and permanently forgotten. It was, by a paradox she did not seem to understand at the time, the cold figure of her husband who kept those desires alive.

He saw the production of further children as an important proof of his standing in society and a confirmation that this was a balanced match in which his age and the difference in tastes were not important. He approached his wife in a businesslike and predatory manner; she reacted with the submissive indifference which was the only response he left open to her. He made love to her each night, though, once embarked on it, he seemed to want it to be over quickly. Afterward he never referred to what they had done together. Madame Azaire, who was initially frightened and ashamed, slowly became frustrated by her husband's attitude; she could not understand why this aspect of their lives, which seemed to mean so much to him, was something he would not talk about, nor why the startling intimacy of the act opened no doors in her mind, made no connections with the deeper feelings and aspirations that had grown in her since childhood.

She did not become pregnant, and each month as the blood returned Azaire became a little more desperate. Some reflexive guilt made him blame himself. He began to believe that there might be something wrong with him, even though he had two children to prove that this was unlikely; he even suspected in some quiet moments of the night that he was being punished for marrying Isabelle, though why this should be so or what he had done wrong he couldn't say. Eventually his feelings of frustration affected the frequency with which he was able to perform. He began also to see that there was an absence of feeling in his wife, though the prospect of examining it and finding a remedy was so appalling that he could not bring himself to face it.

Madame Azaire, meanwhile, became less concerned about her husband. She was frightened of Stephen. From the day he arrived in the boulevard du Gange with his dark face and staring brown eyes and his swift impetuous movements, she was afraid of him. He was not like the other men she had known, not like her father or her husband, not even like Jean Destournel, who, though young and romantic, had proved in the end to be weak.

Because Stephen was nine years younger than she was, she viewed him with a little condescension; she could see in him the youth, or at least a stage of it, that she had left behind. She tried to think of him as the third child, as Lisette's brother; after all, she thought, he is only four years older. To some extent she was successful in making herself look down on him, though she noticed that this only seemed to add an element of motherly tenderness to her alarm.

On Sunday morning Stephen rose early and went downstairs to find something to eat in the kitchen. He walked along the passageways of the ground floor, his footsteps alive in the closed air. There were still rooms in the house he had not visited and others which, having once glanced into, he could not refind. From the doors of a small sitting room he let himself into the cool of the garden and walked down to the end of the lawn. Beneath a chestnut tree there was a bench, where he sat chewing on the bread he had taken from the kitchen, looking back at the house. The night before he had taken his knife and made a small sculpture from a piece of soft wood he had found in the garden. He took it from his jacket pocket and examined it in the fresh, damp air of the morning. It was the figure of a woman in a_

_long skirt and little jacket; close indentations in the wood indicated her hair, though the features could only be represented by marks for the eyes and mouth. He took the knife and trimmed a few shavings from around the feet, to make them look more realistic where they emerged from the skirt. He saw some shutters being opened on a first-floor bedroom. He imagined the sound of voices and running water and door handles being turned. When he judged that the whole family would be dressed and downstairs, he returned to the house.

The children were not excited by the prospect of the trip round the water gardens. Madame Azaire leant across Grégoire to stop him tapping his spoon on the table. She was dressed in cream linen with a blue sash and a panel in the dress with a row of buttons that neither opened nor held anything together.

Lisette eyed Stephen flirtatiously. "So are you coming to the famous water gardens?" she said.

"I don't know if I'm invited."

"Of course you are," said Madame Azaire.

"In that case I will, with pleasure."

Lisette said, "Well, that might make it a bit less boring."

"It's very kind of Monsieur Bérard to invite us," said Madame Azaire. "You must be very polite to both of them. And I don't think that dress is quite right, either, for a girl of your age. It's too small."

"But it's so _hot," _said Lisette.

"I can't help the weather. Now run and put on something else."

"Run, run, run," said Lisette sulkily as she pushed back her chair. Her arm brushed Stephen's shoulder on her way to the door. The dress in question emphasised the plump swell of her breasts, of which she was clearly proud. The five of them set out toward eleven o'clock, with Marguerite, the maid, helping Stephen and Madame Azaire to carry the various baskets of food, parasols, rugs, and extra clothes that had been deemed necessary. It was only a short walk to the edge of the water gardens. They went down a flight of steps to the landing stage, where Bérard was waiting in a straw hat. Madame Bérard was already installed in the stern of a flat-bottomed boat that was shaped, after long local tradition, like a punt with a raised and squared-off end.

"Madame, good morning! What a lovely day." Bérard was at his most expansive. He held out his arm to help Madame Azaire down into the boat. Gripping his proffered arm with one hand, she raised her skirt with the other and stepped lightly into the low craft. Grégoire, no longer bored as he had been, pushed excitedly past the others and jumped in, making the boat rock. Madame Bérard let out a little scream, "Oh, Papa!"

Bérard laughed. "Women and children first."

Lisette embarked with his help and sat next to Madame Azaire.

"I shall be the helmsman in the stern of the craft," said Bérard impressively,

"so you sit facing Lisette and you, Monsieur," he said to Stephen, "if you sit next to Grégoire, and Madame Bérard would like to go here, opposite you, Azaire--that's right--then we shall have perfect balance."

Stephen settled opposite Madame Azaire, as instructed, and found room for his feet on the floor of the boat while trying not to touch hers.

Bérard let out a nautical cry and clambered into the stern, pushing the boat off from the bank with a long wooden pole.

The gardens were formed by the backwaters of the Somme, which had been channelled between numerous small islands whose banks were secured with wooden plank revetting. The land was intensely cultivated for vegetables, either in small plots, where the owner lived in a simple house on the site, or in larger areas whose farmer was likely to live in town. The area was regarded by the people who had nothing to do with its work as a site of natural beauty and an object of civic pride.

Bérard worked the boat along with some skill, plunging in the pole with a vigorous thrust and moving it to the left or right to steer as he pulled it out again. They slid along beneath the overhanging trees, occasionally coming close to other Sunday pleasure-seekers who called out greetings and comments on the sunny weather from their own boats. Bérard sweated freely at his work, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, but was still able to give an account of the history of the water gardens as he punted them along.

Stephen sat uncomfortably on his wooden seat with his back to the direction of the boat's movement. The stagnant water, unmoved by any breeze, seemed to emphasize the unnatural heat of the day. His polished leather shoes lay on the slatted wooden floor of the craft at the unnatural angle required by his feet if they were not to touch the white shoes of Madame Azaire, which lay together in the position dictated by the slightly sideways attitude of her closed legs. The extreme lowness of the seats, however, which were only a few inches off the floor of the boat, meant that her knees were a little raised and the pale skirt was drawn up to reveal the taut stretch of the stockings over her instep. They were of a fine, silken material that was not, Stephen thought, the product of either of her husband's factories. He noticed the delicate definition of her ankles and the beginning of her calves and found himself wondering what fastening beneath the folds of her linen skirt achieved the tension that made the stocking's fabric look so light and open on the arch of her foot.

... by the Roman soldiers. But the channelling of the water between the parcels of the land was to some extent a natural phenomenon and it was several centuries before the banks of the little islands were secured by planks in the way you see now. So what we have really is man and nature working in harmony and cooperation."

Bérard's discourse was interrupted by his occasional gasps for breath, though not by any of the others, least of all Azaire, whose interjections were ignored. Stephen looked at the water, trailed his hand in it, smiled at Grégoire, and tried to engage Madame Azaire's eye. When he did, she gave a composed smile before turning to ask Lisette a question.

The broad channels of the water gardens were public thoroughfares, though narrower strips of water, marked "Private," led to large houses obscured from general view by thick hedges and tall, abundant flowers. When Bérard was exhausted, Azaire took over and pushed the little craft onward until Grégoire's pleas for lunch were eventually rewarded.

Bérard had been allowed by a friend to moor the boat at the foot of a shady garden and take lunch beneath some apple trees. Azaire made great play of lowering the wine by the boat's painter into the water to cool, while Madame Azaire and Lisette laid out rugs on the grass. Grégoire ran round the garden, returning occasionally to report his discoveries, and Stephen made conversation to Madame Bérard, though her eyes were only for her husband, who settled himself at the foot of a tree with a glass of wine and some chicken, which he ripped from the bone with a sideways shake of his head.

The men took off their jackets, and as he laid his down Stephen felt the little wood carving in his pocket. He took it out and turned it round in his fingers.

"What's that?" said Lisette, who had placed herself near him on the rug.

"Just a little carving. I did it with this." He took out the knife from his pocket.

"It's beautiful."

"You can have it if you like," Stephen said without thinking. Lisette glowed with pleasure, and looked around to make sure the others had seen. Stephen searched for some wood with which to do a carving for Grégoire, who was busily eating his lunch.

No one else seemed to have much appetite. Various cheeses and pies were produced from the hampers by Madame Azaire but were returned with only a slice or two missing. Bérard ate some jellied tongue as well as the chicken; Lisette managed a strawberry tart and some little cakes Madame Azaire had made herself. She and her brother drank orangeade while the others had wine from the Loire valley, wine that immersion in the placid water had not chilled.

After lunch Bérard lay back against his tree and fell asleep; Azaire lit his pipe before retiring to a neighbouring part of the garden for the same purpose. Stephen carved a hard piece of wood, with difficulty, into a passably realistic man for Grégoire.

With lunch over, the afternoon lay heavy and dull on them. They clambered back into the boat and, after Stephen had been allowed a brief spell with the pole, Bérard resumed his position. The temperature had increased and the women fanned themselves vigourously. Madame Bérard, in thick formal clothes, looked disconsolate at the front of the boat, like a brooding figurehead on an ill-fated ship headed for ice and equatorial winds.

Stephen felt hot and thickheaded from the wine. He was repelled by the water gardens: their hectic abundance seemed to him close to the vegetable fertility of death. The brown waters were murky and shot through with the scurrying of rats from the banks where the earth had been dug out of trenches and held back by elaborate wooden boarding. Heavy flies hung over the water, beneath the trees, dipping into the rotting tops of cabbages, asparagus, and artichokes that had been left unpicked in their reckless prodigality. What was held to be a place of natural beauty was a stagnation of living tissue which could not be saved from decay. Madame Azaire, also uncomfortable in the heat and torpor of the afternoon, had lost a fraction of her poise. Her skin was red at the base of her throat, where she had loosened the top of her dress, A strand of strawberry hair was stuck to her neck with moisture. One foot lay unresisting against Stephen's leg, which was outstretched beneath her seat. As Bérard propelled the boat on its slow, straight course, a tiny roll in its motion caused a perceptible pressure to form between them. While Stephen left his leg where it was, Madame Azaire was too hot or too indifferent to shift her position. He caught her eye and she looked into his with no social smile or conversational suggestion, then turned her head slowly away as though to look at the view.

A fish broke the surface of the water unremarked even by the previously excited Grégoire. The flow of the river had been slowed by the construction of a canal, Bérard told them, which was why the boats no longer had rudders; a twitch from the pole was all that was necessary to keep the thing straight. Stephen imagined the great pools and marshes that had occurred in nature before the further channelling of the water and planting of the ground. The river's function had not been significantly changed; still it watered a cycle of superfluous decay, the rotting of matter into the turned and dug earth with its humid, clinging soil.

It had reached a stage in the afternoon when it should have started to grow cooler, but what small breeze there had been had disappeared, and the static air coagulated, thick and choking. Grégoire began to splash water at Lisette, who smacked him on the side of the face and made him cry.

Azaire took over in the stern from Bérard, who sat perspiring next to his wife. For once he was silent.

Stephen tried to drag his mind from the vision of decay the river had induced. The pressure of Madame Azaire's foot against his leg slowly increased until most of her calf rested against him. The simple frisson this touch had earlier given to his charged senses now seemed complicated; the sensation of desire seemed indistinguishable from an impulse toward death.

All of them, he thought, would be taken back by this earth: Bérard's tongue would decompose into the specks of friable soil that gardeners rolled between their fingers; its clacking would be stilled as it was reabsorbed by the thirsting roots of artichokes or cabbages. Little Grégoire and Lisette would be the mud of the banks in which the rats burrowed and mated. And Madame Azaire, Isabelle... The tenderest parts of her that his imagination shamelessly embodied, even these would not outlast or rise above some forlorn, unspiritual end in the clinging earth. As the landing stage came into view, their mood lifted. Azaire began to talk about what a splendid trip they had had and Bérard refound his usual dominance in conversation. Over the last ten or fifteen minutes he managed to rewrite the story of the afternoon by ascribing opinions on its success to all the different members of the party, inviting their agreement, and cutting them off before they had time to spoil his version of harmony with actual thoughts of their own.

Madame Azaire seemed to emerge from a trance. She sat up straight, noting with apparent alarm as she did so the position of her left leg. Grégoire trawled a glass jar in the water in the hope of catching a fish.

When they disembarked and thanked the Bérards for their kindness, Stephen loaded himself with the baskets, rugs, and parasols and led the way back to the boulevard du Gange. He was glad to be able to leave the baggage in the hall for Marguerite to put away while he climbed up to his room. He took off the formal collar he had guessed was expected of him and went to the little bathroom, once a maid's, at the end of the corridor. He filled the bath with cold water and soaked himself in it, sinking his head beneath the surface and letting the icy water penetrate even into the follicles at the roots of his hair.

Back in his room, wrapped in a towel, he took a pack of cards and laid them out on the table as though for a game of Patience. The sequence in which he then moved them, however, was something he had learned from a friend of his grandfather's--a superstitious old man who made a living at fairs by telling fortunes. As a child Stephen had been enraptured by him and his games, and in private moments he still found himself drawn back. If the queen of diamonds could be discovered on the left-hand pile before the jack of clubs was filed in order on the right, then Madame Azaire would... He shuffled and moved the cards through subtle combinations, half smiling to himself, half in earnest.

He took a book and lay down on the bed, knowing that dinner would not be for at least an hour. The church bell was tolling and from the garden there was again the sound of birds. With the noise in his ears he fell asleep and dreamed a dream that was a variation of one he had had all his life. He was trying to help a trapped bird out of a window. Its wings battered frantically on the glass. Suddenly the whole room was filled with starlings, moving with one flock instinct. They beat their wings against the window panes, flapped them in his hair, then brought their beaks toward his face.

*

The next day Stephen received a telegram from London telling him he was to return as soon as he could conclude his business. He wrote to say it would take him another month: he still had a good deal to learn about the processes that were used in Amiens, and Azaire had promised to introduce him to other manufacturers. He also needed further information about Azaire's own finances before he could report on the feasibility of investment.

He sent his reply that evening, feeling a panic as he did so that he would have to go back to England before he had resolved the conflicting passions that were threatening to overpower him. During dinner he looked at Madame Azaire in the shaded light as she served food to the family and their guests, some cousins of Azaire's, and there was a sense of desperation in the way he registered the features of her face, the loop of her hair, and the certainty of her movements. He could no longer allow himself to be passively beguiled.

At work the next day he learned that there was a threat that the dyers' strike might spread to other textile workers, causing a complete halt to production. A lunchtime meeting of the workers was addressed by Meyraux, who told them they should support their colleagues in other parts of the industry by taking them food and clothes, but that it would serve no purpose for them to go on strike.

"You have your own families and lives to consider," Meyraux told them. "I believe the long-term future of this industry lies in bringing all processes together and in having one body to represent all workers. But for the moment we must deal with things as they are. This is not a time for vain gestures, not when we are under such a threat from foreign competitors."

Meyraux's speech was typically cautious. He distrusted the hotheaded leaders of the strike as much as he did the proprietors. Before he could bring his remarks to a reasoned conclusion, there was a disturbance near the door to the street. It burst open and several young men tumbled in carrying banners and chanting slogans. Meyraux called for calm from the platform as half a dozen police officers, some with dishevelled uniforms that suggested they had already been in a struggle, tried to evict the demonstrators. Many of the female workers nearest the door backed away in alarm as blows began to be exchanged.

Lucien Lebrun, who had been among the first to force his way in, now took the platform next to the reluctant Meyraux. His candid blue eyes and wavy brown hair made him an attractive figure and compensated to some extent for the suspicion many of the workers felt of his youth. He asked Meyraux with tactful appeals to their fraternity whether he could address the workers, and Meyraux finally conceded his place.

Lucien gave a compassionate description of the hardships endured by the strikers' families and of the working conditions that had driven them to their extreme action. He spoke of the poverty and exploitation throughout the plain of Picardy which was causing a large migration of people from the valley of the Somme to the towns of Amiens and Lille in the false hope of finding work.

"I beseech you to support my people," he said. "We must stand together in this matter or we will all fall. We must think of our children and wives. I ask you at least to sign this declaration of support for your fellow-workers." He produced a piece of paper which already carried a hundred or more signatures.

"Talking of wives," called out a deep voice from the middle of the room, "we all know what they say about you, young man!"

There was a roar of ribald agreement. Stephen felt his nerves stiffen as his heartbeat filled his chest.

Lucien shouted, "What was that you said?"

"I'll not repeat it in front of the law, but I think you know what I mean." Lucien jumped down from the platform to try to find his tormentor. He shouldered his way frantically through the press.

"And another thing," the same man called out, "we shouldn't be having a spy from England eating with us and coming to our meetings."

A few voices called out their agreement. The majority had obviously not been aware of Stephen's presence.

Stephen was not listening. "What do they say about Lucien?" he asked the man standing next to him. "What did they mean about wives?"

"They say little Lucien and the boss's wife are very good friends." The man gave a throaty laugh.

Azaire's work force had been good-natured up to this point. They had been lectured at length by Meyraux on the need for patience and they had submitted to his advice; they had seen their meeting disrupted by workers from other factories and they had kept their patience; they had been harangued by a young man who did not even come from the town and they had endured it.

When Lucien lost his self-control and began to fight his way through them, however, a shared sense of grievance overtook them, and they set about ejecting him, the whole group of them reacting spontaneously as though to rid itself of a foreign body.

Stephen found himself jostled by people, some of them responding to the hostility toward him, but most of them anxious to turn Lucien and the other dyers out of their factory.

The worker who had called out the comment about Madame Azaire was surrounded by pushing bodies as some of Lucien's friends came to his assistance. He was a tall, red-faced man whose job was to transport bolts of cloth on one of the rubber-wheeled wagons. His placid expression was turning to one of alarm as the struggle approached him. Lucien was shouting and thrashing wildly with his arms in his attempt to push through the crowd, but a wall of Azaire's men had closed his path in silent complicity.

At the edge of the skirmish the police officers began to swing their batons in a threatening way as they moved into the crowd. Meyraux climbed up on to the platform and shouted for calm. At this point one of Lucien's wilder movements with his arm caught a female worker across the face, causing her to scream. Lucien went down on the floor under a swift blow from the woman's husband. As he lay gasping, various well-aimed boots relieved the frustrations of Azaire's workers. They were not crazed blows, but Lucien cried out as they found his legs and shoulders. Stephen tried to push back some of his assailants to give him time to stand up. He received an open-handed blow on the nose from one of the men who resented being interrupted. Three or four dyers had now reached Lucien and had joined the fight to protect him. Stephen, his eyes smarting, hit out in front of him in fury. He had lost sight of his initial aim, which was to restore peace, and now wanted only to damage the man who had enraged him. He found himself pushed to one side by the tall, redfaced worker whose comment had started the commotion and he responded with a short-armed punch to the man's face. There was no room for him to make a proper swing, but the blow was well enough timed for him to feel some dim sense of retribution. There was blood on his hand.

A combination of determined women workers and police batons ended the skirmish. Lucien was taken out, bruised and breathless, but not badly hurt. The dyers were escorted out by the police, who randomly arrested two of the most disreputable-looking. Stephen's victim dabbed his bleeding mouth with a handkerchief but seemed unaware of who had hit him. Meyraux told the workers to disperse.

Stephen left the factory by the side door, wondering how affairs had moved so quickly that he could find himself on the same side as Lucien Lebrun when, like the others, he wanted never to see his bright-eyed face again.

He walked toward the cathedral and then on into the town. He felt ashamed of the way he had behaved. Years ago he had promised his guardian that he would never again lose control of his feelings but would always pause and be calm. He had abjectly failed this trial, and the memory of the startled expression on the face of the man who had slandered Madame Azaire as Stephen's closed fist found his mouth was only a small compensation for this failure.

The blow must have been harder than he had thought at the time, because his hand became quite swollen in the course of the afternoon. He returned early to the Azaires' house and went up to bathe it. He held it under cold water and wound a handkerchief tightly round the knuckles.

He felt as though his existence in the boulevard du Gange, and perhaps his life in its longer perspective also, were coming to a crisis he could not control. Perhaps it would be better to do as his employer asked. He could conclude his work within a week, then return to London in the knowledge that he had done nothing to shame his company or Mr. Vaughan, the guardian who had worked so hard to help him. First, he thought, he had better write to him.

Miserably, he took a piece of paper from the desk and began.

Dear Mr. Vaughan,

This is not the first time I have been late in writing to you, but I will try to make up for it by telling you in detail what has happened.

He stopped. He wanted to find dignified words for the rage of desire and confusion he felt.

I think I have fallen in love and I believe the woman in question, though she has not said so, returns my feelings. How can I be sure when she has said nothing? Is this youthful vanity? I wish in some ways that it were. But I am so convinced that I barely need question myself. This conviction brings me no joy.

By this time he had already gone too far; he could not, of course, send this letter. He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say. I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive.

He tore the paper into small pieces and dropped them in the basket. He took the handkerchief off his hand and managed to conceal it behind his back when he talked to Monsieur and Madame Azaire in the sitting room before dinner. Azaire was too concerned with events at the factory to be looking at his houseguest's hand, and when Madame Azaire allowed herself a glance at Stephen it was to his face that her eyes turned.

"I understand there was some comment about your presence at the factory," said Azaire.

"Yes. I wasn't sure if I should have been at the meeting. Perhaps I should keep away for a day or two."

Lisette came in through the door to the garden.

"Good idea," said Azaire. "Allow the men time to cool off. I don't think there's going to be a problem, but perhaps you'd better lie low until things are sorted out. I can get one of my staff to bring you some paperwork. There are plenty of ways you can make yourself useful."

"Look!" said Lisette. "What happened to your hand?"

"I caught it in one of the spinning machines when I was being shown how to work it this morning."

"It's all swollen and red."

Madame Azaire let out a little cry as Lisette held up Stephen's damaged hand for her inspection. He thought he saw a flicker of concern in her face before she managed to resume her usual detachment.

"Dinner is served," said Marguerite at the door.

"Thank you," said Madame Azaire. "After dinner, Marguerite, will you please find a dressing for Monsieur Wraysford's hand?" She led the way into the dining room.

The next day, when Azaire left to go to work, Stephen stayed in the house like a sick child who has been excused school. A messenger arrived from the factory with some papers which Stephen put to one side in the sitting room. He took up a book and settled himself in a corner by the doors to the garden. He could hear the sounds of the house in its morning routine, and he felt like an eavesdropper on this female life. Marguerite came in with a feather duster, which she plied with exemplary lightness over the china ornaments and polished table tops, displacing eddies of dust that rose in tiny spirals in the clear morning sunshine before settling elsewhere on the chairs or the polished wooden floor. Grégoire's footsteps came pounding down the stairs and through the hallway until his progress was checked by an audible tussle with the locks and chains of the front door. A cry of "Shut the front door after you" was not answered by any sound of compliance, and Stephen pictured the rectangular glimpse of the garden, the paved path, and the solid iron railings giving on to the boulevard, that would have become visible in the space left by the unclosed door. There was a sound of crockery as Marguerite carried out a tray full of breakfast cups and plates from the dining room to the kitchen and the soft bump of her hip against the door as she pushed it open. In the moment_

_before it swung shut came the louder, more purposeful clanking of pans being scoured or set on the stove filled with stock that would simmer_ _through the morning.

Madame Azaire's voice was audible from her place in the dining room, where she remained until eleven o'clock, either talking to Lisette or giving instructions to the various people who called on her. Among these was Madame Bonnet, wife of the elderly man in the factory, who came each day to do the cleaning Marguerite considered too menial or too strenuous. Madame Azaire would tell her which rooms were to be done and if there were special preparations to be made for guests. The old woman's heavy, rolling step could be heard as she trundled to her prescribed task. Lisette sat in the sunlight that splashed into the room beneath the spokes of clematis at the window, watching the shadows on the polished table, listening to the way her stepmother ran the household. She enjoyed this shared morning routine; it made her feel trusted and important, and it had the further advantage of excluding Grégoire, with his uncouth behaviour and his childish remarks that, even at their most despicable and banal, sometimes threatened her precarious adult poise. There were further, smaller parts to be played in the gently rolling drama of the morning. There was a second maid, though, unlike Marguerite, she did not live in the house; there was a cook, who had a room somewhere on the first floor; and there was a boy from the butcher's, who came to take an order and one from the grocer's, who delivered two heavy boxes to the back door.

Shortly after midday Madame Azaire asked Stephen if he would be taking lunch with her and Lisette. Grégoire would still be at school, she said. Stephen accepted and spent the next hour working through the papers that had been sent from Azaire's office.

Madame Azaire returned a little after one o'clock to tell him lunch was ready. Three places had been set at the end of the table, by the window. The room looked quite different from the place of formal shadows with stiff-collared guests in the lowered evening lights that Stephen had seen at dinner. Lisette wore the little white dress her stepmother had forbidden on their visit to the water gardens. Her dark brown hair was tied back with a blue ribbon and her legs were bare. She was a good-looking girl, Stephen thought, as she looked up at him from under thick lashes; but he registered her looks quite dispassionately because his thoughts were elsewhere.

Madame Azaire wore a cream skirt with a dark red patterned waistcoat over a white blouse with an open neck.

"You can take off your jacket if you like, Monsieur," she said. "Lisette and I don't consider lunch to be a formal occasion, do we?"

Lisette laughed. Stephen said "Thank you." He could see that Madame Azaire felt protected and emboldened by Lisette's presence.

Marguerite brought in a dish of artichokes. "Perhaps we'll have some wine," said Madame Azaire. "We don't normally drink wine, do we Lisette? But perhaps today. Marguerite, bring a bottle of white wine, will you? Not one my husband is saving."

After the artichokes there was a small dish of mushrooms and then some sole. Stephen poured the wine for Madame Azaire and, at her insistence, for Lisette. For want of something to say, Stephen asked how they came to know Monsieur and Madame Bérard.

Lisette began to giggle at the name and Madame Azaire told her to be quiet, though she herself was smiling. "I'm afraid Lisette is very impolite about Monsieur Bérard," she said.

"It's so unfair," said Lisette. "Did your parents always make you be polite about all their silly friends?"

"I didn't have parents," said Stephen. "At least not ones that I knew. I was brought up by my grandparents, then in an institution until I was taken away from it by a man I'd never met before."

Lisette blushed and swallowed hard; Madame Azaire's face showed a momentary concern as she said, "I'm sorry, Monsieur. Lisette is always asking questions."

"There's nothing to apologize for." He smiled at Lisette. "Nothing at all. I'm not ashamed."

Marguerite brought some fillet of beef on a blue-patterned dish which she set down in front of Madame Azaire. "Should I bring some red wine?" she said. "There's some from last night."

"All right." Madame Azaire put a slice of the bloody meat on each of three plates. Stephen refilled their glasses. In his mind he was remembering the press of Madame Azaire's leg against his own in the water gardens. The skin on her bare arms was a light brown; her mannish waistcoat and open neck made her look even more feminine than usual.

"I shall be returning to England soon," he said. "I had a telegram telling me I was wanted back in London."

Neither of the others spoke. The atmosphere had thickened. He "I shall be sorry to leave," he said.

"You can always come back and visit us another day," said Madame Azaire.

"Yes, I could come back another day."

Marguerite brought in a dish of potatoes. Lisette stretched and smiled. "Oh, I feel sleepy," she said happily.

"That's because of all the wine you've been drinking." Madame Azaire also smiled and the air seemed to lighten again. They finished lunch with some fruit, and Marguerite took coffee to the sitting room. They sat around the card table where Stephen had played on his first night in the house.

"I'm going to go out for a walk in the garden," said Lisette. "Then I might go to my room for a little sleep."

"All right," said Madame Azaire.

Lisette's light step crossed the room and disappeared.

At once the atmosphere changed, and this time it was beyond recall. Madame Azaire could not meet Stephen's eye. She looked down at the card table and played with the silver spoon in the thin china saucer. Stephen could feel his chest contract. He was finding it difficult to breathe.

"Have some more coff--"

"No."

The silence returned.

"Look at me."

She would not raise her head. She stood up and said, "I'm going to do some sewing in my room, so--"

"Isabelle." He had grasped her arm.

"No. Please no."

He pulled her to him and wrapped both arms around her so she could not escape. Her eyes were closed and he kissed her mouth, which opened. He felt her tongue flicker and her hands press his back, then she pulled herself away from his tight grip, tearing the white blouse as she did so, revealing a thin satin strap beneath. Stephen's body convulsed with desire.

"You must. For God's sake, you must." He raged at her.

Madame Azaire was crying, though her eyes were closed. "No, I cannot, I hardly... I hardly think it would be right."

"You were going to say 'I hardly know you.' "

"No. Just that it's not right."

"It is right. You know it's right. It's as right as anything can ever be. Isabelle, I understand you. Believe me. I understand you. I love you."

He kissed her again and her mouth once more responded to his. He tasted the sweetness of her saliva then buried his face against her shoulder. She pulled away from him and ran from the room. Stephen went to the window and held on to the frame as he looked out. The force that drove through him could not be stopped. The part of his mind that remained calm accepted this; if the necessity could not be denied, then the question was only whether it could be achieved with her consent.

In her room Madame Azaire wept as she paced from one side to the other. She was choking with passion for him, but he frightened her. She wanted to comfort him but also to be taken by him, to be used by him. Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self. He was very young. She was unsure. She wanted the touch of his skin.

She went downstairs and her step was so light that it made no sound. She found him clenched in combat with himself, leaning against the window. She said,

"Come to the red room."

By the time Stephen turned round she had gone. The red room. He panicked. He was sure it would be one of those he had once seen but could never refind; it would be like a place in a dream that remains out of reach; it would always be behind him. He ran up the stairs and saw her turn a corner. She went down the main corridor to a narrow passage, down again through a little archway. At the end of the corridor was a locked door that led into the servants' part of the house. Just before it, the last door on the left, was an oval china handle that rattled in the ill-fitting lock. He caught her as she opened the door of a small room with a brass bedstead and a red cover.

"Isabelle." He too was in tears. He took her hair in his hands and saw it flow between his fingers.

She said, "My poor boy."

He kissed her, and this time her tongue did not flee from his.

He said, "Where is Lisette?"

"The garden. I don't know. Oh God. Oh please, please." She was starting to shake and tremble. Her eyes had closed. When she opened them again she could barely breathe. He began to tear at her clothes and she helped him with urgent, clumsy actions. The waistcoat was caught on her elbow. He pushed back her blouse and buried his face in the satin slip between her breasts. There was so much delight in what he saw and touched that he thought he would need years to stop and appreciate it, yet he was driven by a frantic haste.

Isabelle felt his hands on her, felt his lips on her skin and knew what he must be seeing, what shame and impropriety, but the more she imagined the degradation of her false modesty the more she felt excited. She felt his hair between her fingers, ran her hands over the bulge of his shoulders, over the smooth chest inside his shirt.

"Corne on, please, please," she heard herself say, though her breathing was so ragged that the words were barely comprehensible. She ran her hand over the front of his trousers, brazenly, as she imagined a whore might do, and felt the stiffness inside. No one upbraided her. No one was appalled. She could do whatever she wanted. His intake of breath caused him to stop undressing her and she had to help him pull down her silk drawers to reveal what she suddenly knew he had long been imagining. She squeezed her eyes tight shut as she showed herself to him, but still no guilt came. She felt him push her backward on to the bed, and she began to arch herself up from it rhythmically as though her body, independent of her, implored his attention. She felt at last some contact, though she realised with a gasp that it was not what she expected; it was his tongue, lambent, hot, flickering over and inside her, turning like a key in the split lock of her flesh. This shocking new sensation made her start to sigh and shudder in long rhythmic movements, borne completely away on her passion, feeling a knot of pressure rising in her chest, a sensation that was impossible to sustain, to bear, though all its momentum seemed to be onward. In this conflict she thrashed her head from side to side on the bed. She heard her voice crying out in denial as from some distant room, but then the sensation broke and flooded her again and again, down through her belly and all her limbs, and her small voice, close to her head this time, said, "Yes." When she opened her eyes she saw Stephen standing naked in front of her. Her eyes fixed on the flesh that stuck out from him. He had still not made love to her; the joy was yet to come. He climbed on top of her and kissed her face, her breasts, pulling the nipples upward with his lips. Then he rolled her over, ran his hands up the inside of her legs, above the silk stockings that her speedy undressing had not had time to remove, and between the cleft where her legs were joined. He kissed her from the small of her back over the pink swell of divided flesh, down to the back of her thighs where he rested his cheek for a moment. Then he began again at her ankles, on the little bones he had seen on the boat in the water gardens, and up the inside of her calves.

Isabelle was beginning to breathe fast again. She said, "Please, my love, please now, please." She could no longer bear his teasing. In her left hand she grasped the part of him she wanted to feel inside her and the shock of her action stopped him in his caressing. She opened her legs a little further for him, to make him welcome, because she wanted him to be there. She felt the sheet beneath her as her legs spread out and she guided him into her.

She heard him sigh and saw him take the rumpled sheet between his teeth and begin to bite on it. He barely moved inside her, as though he were afraid of the situation or of what it might produce.

Isabelle settled herself, luxuriously, on the feeling of impalement. It rolled around the rim, the edges of her; it filled her with desire and happiness. I am at last what I am, she thought; I was born for this. Fragments of childish longings, of afternoon urges suppressed in the routine of her parents' house, flashed across her mind; she felt at last connections forged between the rage of her desire and a particular attentive recognition of herself, the little Fourmentier girl. She heard him cry out and felt a surge inside her; he seemed suddenly to swell in her so that their flesh almost fused. The shock and intimacy of what he had done, leaving this deposit of himself, precipitated a shuddering response in her, like the first time, only shorter, fiercer, in a way that made her lose contact for a moment with the world.

When she had recovered enough to open her eyes, she found that Stephen had rolled off her and was lying face down across the bed, his head tilted awkwardly to one side, almost as though he were dead. Neither of them spoke. Both lay quite still. Outside was the sound of birds.

Tentatively, almost shyly, Isabelle ran her fingers down over the vertebrae that protruded from his back, then over the narrow haunches and the top of his thighs with their soft black hair. She took his damaged hand and kissed the bruised and swollen knuckles.

He rolled over and looked at her. The hair was disarrayed, its different shades milling over her bare shoulders and down to the stiff, round breasts that rose and fell with her still-accelerated breathing. Her face and neck were suffused with a pink glow where the blood was diluted by the colour of the milky young skin with its tracery of brown and golden freckles. He held her gaze for a moment, then laid his head on her shoulder, where she stroked his face and hair.

They lay, amazed and unsure, for a long time in silence. Then Isabelle began also to think of what had happened. She had given way, but not in some passive sense. She had wanted to make this gift; in fact she wanted to go further. This thought for a moment frightened her. She saw them at the start of some descent whose end she could not imagine.

"What have we done?" she said.

Stephen sat up and took her by the arms. "We have done what was right." He looked at her fiercely. "My darling Isabelle, you must understand that." She nodded without speaking. He was a boy, he was the dearest boy, and now she would have him always.

"Stephen," she said.

It was the first time she had used his name. It sounded beautiful to him on her foreign tongue.

"Isabelle." He smiled at her and her face lit up in reply. She held him to her, smiling broadly, though with tears beginning again in the corners of her eyes.

"You are so beautiful," said Stephen. "I won't know how to look at you in the house. I shall give myself away. When I see you at dinner I shall be thinking of what we did, I shall be thinking of you as you are now." He stroked the skin of her shoulders and laid the back of his hand against her cheek.

Isabelle said, "You won't. And nor shall I. You will be strong because you love me."

Stephen's level gaze, she thought, was not afraid. As his hands stroked her breasts she began to lose her concentration. They had talked only for a minute but what they had said, and what it meant, had made her tired of thought. A feeling, more compelling, began to rise through her body as I his hand worked over these soft and privately guarded parts of her. Her breath began to come unevenly again; the low exhalations were broken and she felt herself begin to slide again once more, willingly, but downward where there was no end in sight.

*

Azaire was in a sprightly mood that evening. Meyraux had come close to accepting his new pay offer to the workers, and although the strike had spread among the dyers, there seemed little chance of its infecting other parts of the industry. His friend Bérard, who had not called for more than a week, had promised to look in with his wife and mother-in-law for a game of cards after dinner. Azaire ordered Marguerite to fetch up two bottles of burgundy from the cellar. He congratulated Isabelle on her appearance and asked Lisette what she had been doing.

"I went for a walk in the garden," she said. "I went down to the end where it joins the others, where it grows all wild. I sat down under a tree and I think I fell asleep. I had a very strange dream."

"What was that?" Azaire began to pack some tobacco into his pipe. Lisette giggled. "I'm not going to tell you."

She seemed disappointed when he did not press her but turned instead to his wife. "And how have you whiled away the day? Some more pressing errands in town?"

"No, just the usual things," said Isabelle. "I had to speak to the butcher's boy. They sent the wrong kind of steak again. Madame Bonnet was complaining about all the work she has to do. Then in the afternoon I read a book."

"Something educational, or one of your novels?"

"Just a silly thing I found in a bookshop in town."

Azaire smiled indulgently and shook his head at his wife's frivolous tastes. He himself, it was assumed, read only the great philosophers, often in their original languages, though this arduous study must have taken place in private. When he settled in beneath the glow of the lamp after dinner, his hand invariably reached out for the evening paper.

Isabelle's eyes flickered upward from the sofa, where she sat with her predinner sewing, at the sound of a man's footsteps descending the stairs. Stephen stood in the doorway.

He briefly took Azaire's offered hand and turned to wish Isabelle good evening. She breathed a little less uneasily as she saw the sternness of his dark and steady face. His self-control appeared unshakeable.

She noticed at dinner that he did not address her, nor even look at her if he could avoid it. When he did, his eyes were so blank she feared that she could see indifference, even hostility in them.

Marguerite came backward and forward with the food, and Azaire, in a lighter mood than usual, talked about a plan for a day's fishing that he was going to put to Bérard later. They could take the train to Albert and then it might be enjoyable to rent a little pony and trap and take a picnic up to one of the villages beside the Ancre.

Grégoire became animated at the thought of it. "Will I be allowed my own rod?" he asked. "Hugues and Edouard both have their own. Why can't I?" Isabelle said, "I'm sure we can find you one, Grégoire."

"Do you fish, Monsieur?" said Azaire.

"I did when I was a child. Just with worms and bits of bread. I would sit for hours by a pool in the gardens of a big house near where we lived. I went there with a few other boys from the village and we would sit there and tell stories while we waited. It was rumoured that there was an enormous carp. One of the boys' father had seen it, in fact he had almost caught it, or so he claimed. There were certainly some large fish in the pool because we caught some of them. The trouble was that we were always being ordered off the land because it was private property." Isabelle listened with some astonishment to this speech, which was easily the longest Stephen had addressed to her husband since he had been in the house. Apart from his brief disclosure to herself and Lisette at lunchtime, it was the first time he had admitted to anything so personal as a childhood. The more he spoke, the more he seemed to warm to the subject. He fixed Azaire with his eye so that he had to wait for Stephen to finish before he could resume eating the piece of veal that was speared on the end of his fork.

Stephen continued: "When I went to school there was no time for fishing any more. In any event I'm not sure I would have had the patience. It's probably something that appeals to groups of boys who are bored most of the time anyway but prefer to be together so that they can at least share the new things they are discovering about the world."

Azaire said, "Well, you're welcome to join us," and put the piece of veal into his mouth.

That's very kind, but I think I have imposed enough on your family outings." You _must _come," said Lisette. "They have famous 'English teas' at Thiepval."

"We don't have to decide now," said Isabelle. "Would you like some more veal, Monsieur?"

She felt proud of him. He spoke the language beautifully, he was elegantly polite, and now he had even told them something of himself. She wanted to take the credit for him, to show him off and sun herself in the approval he would win. She felt a pang of loss when she reflected how very far she was from being able to do this. It was Azaire who was her choice, her pride, the man in whose glory she was bound to live. She wondered how long she could maintain the falsity of her position. Perhaps what she and Stephen were attempting, the denial of truth on such a scale, was not possible. Although she was frightened by the drama of pretence, she was also excited by the exhilaration of it, and by the knowledge that it was a shared venture. They had left the red room at five in the afternoon and she had not spoken to him since. She had no way of telling what had passed through his mind. Perhaps he was already regretting what had happened; perhaps he had done what he wanted to do and now the matter was finished for him.

For her, in the delirium of joy and fear, there were still practical matters to attend to. She had to dress and conceal the torn front of her blouse when she left the red room. She had to take the sheets and the cover from the bed and deliver them unseen to the laundry room. She had to check and recheck the room for signs of adultery.

In her own bathroom, she took off her clothes. She was known to have baths twice a day and often at this time, but the blouse was beyond repair and would have to be thrown away secretly. Her thighs were sticky where the seed she had felt so deeply planted in her had later leaked. It had stained the ivory silk drawers that had been bought for her by her mother from the rue de Rivoli in Paris as part of her wedding trousseau. When she washed in the bath there were more traces of him between her legs and she scoured the enamel afterward. The major problem was still the bed covers. Marguerite was particular about the linen and knew which rooms needed to be changed and when, even if it was Madame Bonnet who usually did the work. Perhaps she would have to take one of them into her confidence. She decided to give Marguerite the next afternoon off and to wash and iron the sheets herself, replacing them before anyone had been into the red room. She would throw the red cover away and say she had suddenly grown tired of it. This was the sort of impulsive behavior that annoyed her husband, but which he thought characteristic. She felt no revulsion for the stains and physical reminders of their afternoon, not even for the flecks of her own blood that she had seen. She had learned from Jeanne not to be ashamed, and in this shared mark she saw the witness of an intimacy that pressed her heart.

Marguerite went to answer the front door to the Bérards. Azaire thought it proper to continue the evening in the sitting room, or even in one of the small rooms on the ground floor, where he sometimes instructed Marguerite to lay out coffee and ices and little cakes. However, Bérard was ponderously considerate.

"No need for us to disturb this delightful family scene, Azaire. Let me rest my bulk on this chair here. If little Grégoire would be so kind... That's it, then Madame Bérard can sit on my left."

"Surely you would be more comfortable if--"

"And then we shall not feel that we have inconvenienced you. Aunt Elise would only accompany us on the condition that we were just neighbours dropping in on you, not guests who were to be specially treated in any way at all." Bérard settled himself in the chair vacated by Lisette, who was given permission by her stepmother to take Grégoire up to bed. Lisette kissed her father briefly on the cheek and skipped out of the room. Although she had been pleased with her grown-up role that morning, there were times when it still paid to be a child.

Stephen envied her. It would have been easy enough for him to leave the families together; in fact they might have preferred it. While he could look at Isabelle, however, he wanted to stay. He felt no particular impatience with the falsity of their position; he was confident that what had occurred between them had changed things irrevocably and that the social circumstances would adjust in their own time to reflect this new reality.

"And you, Madame, have you heard any more of your phantom pianist with his unforgettable tune?" Bérard's heavy head, with its thick grey hair and red face, was supported by his right hand as he rested his elbow on the table and looked toward Isabelle. It was not a serious enquiry; he was merely tuning up the orchestra.

"No, I haven't been past that house since we last saw you."

"Ah-ha, you wish to keep the melody as a_ _treasured little memory. I understand. So you have chosen a different walk for your afternoon exercise."

"No. I was reading a book this afternoon."

Bérard smiled. "A romance, I'll bet. How charming. I read only history myself. But tell us about the story."

"It was about a young man from a modest family in the provinces who goes to Paris to become a writer and falls in with the wrong kind of people." Stephen was taken aback by Isabelle's unembarrassed fluency. He watched as she spoke and wondered if he could have told that she was lying. Nothing in her manner was different. One day she might lie to him and he would never know. Perhaps all women had this ability to survive, from the subject of Isabelle's book the conversation moved on to the question of whether the families who lived in the provinces could be as important in their way as those who lived in Paris.

"Do you know the Laurendeau family?" asked Azaire.

"Oh yes," said Madame Bérard brightly, "we've met them on several occasions."

"I," said Bérard weightily, "don't consider them to be friends. I have not invited them to our house and I shall not be calling on them." Something mysterious but noble lay behind Bérard's rejection of the Laurendeau family, or so his manner implied. No amount of interrogation from his friends would extract from him the delicate reasons for his stance.

"I don't think they ever lived in Paris," said Azaire.

"Paris!" said Aunt Elise, suddenly looking up. "It's just a big fashion house, that city. That's the only difference between Paris and the provinces--the people there buy new clothes every week. What a lot of peacocks!"

Azaire picked up his own thoughts on the importance of family. "I have never met Monsieur Laurendeau, but I've heard that he's a very distinguished man. I am surprised that you haven't built up your acquaintance, Bérard." Bérard pursed his lips and wagged his index finger backward and forward in front of them to show how sealed they were.

"Papa is not a snob," said Madame Bérard.

Isabelle had grown increasingly quiet. She wished Stephen would catch her eye or give some indication in his manner toward her that everything was all right. Jeanne had once said that men were not like women, that once they had possessed a woman it was as though nothing had happened and they just wanted to move on to another. Isabelle could not believe this of Stephen, not after what he had said and done with her in the red room. Yet how was she to know, when he gave her no sign, no smile of warmth? At first his self-control had been reassuring; now it worried her. Under Azaire's instruction they left their coffee cups and made to transfer to another room for the advertised game of cards.

Isabelle searched for reassurance in Stephen's eyes in the safe melee of movement. He was looking at her, but not at her face. In the act of rising from her chair, in her characteristically modest movement, she felt his eyes on her waist and hips. For a moment she was naked again. She recalled how she had shown herself to him in her hot afternoon abandonment and how perversely right it had then seemed. Suddenly the shame and guilt belatedly overpowered her as she felt his eyes pierce her clothes, and she began to blush all over her body. Her stomach and breasts turned red beneath her dress as the blood beat the skin in protest at her immodesty. It rose up her neck and into her face and ears, as though publicly rebuking her for her most private actions. It cried out in the burning red of her skin; it begged for attention. Isabelle, her eyes watering from the heat of the risen blood, sat down heavily on her chair.

"Are you all right?" said Azaire, impatiently. "You look very warm." Isabelle leaned forward on to the table and covered her face with her hands.

"I don't feel well. It's so hot in here."

Madame Bérard put an arm round her shoulders.

"It's a circulation problem, without a doubt," said Bérard. "It's nothing to make a fuss about, it's quite a common ailment."

As the blood retreated beneath her dress, Isabelle felt stronger. The colour remained in her face, though the beating of the pulse was less.

"I think I shall go to bed, if you don't mind," she said.

"I'll send Marguerite up," said Azaire.

Stephen could see no chance of speaking to her privately so merely wished her a polite good night as Madame Bérard took her by the elbow at the foot of the stairs and helped her up a step or two before rejoining the others.

"A circulation problem," said Bérard, as he shuffled the cards in his plump fingers. "A circulation problem. There it is. There it is." He looked at Azaire, and his left eyelid slid down over the eyeball, remaining in place long enough for the broken blood vessels beneath the skin and the small wart to be visible before it was rotated smoothly back to its home beneath the skull.

Azaire gave a thin smile in response as he picked up his cards. Madame Bérard, who was searching in her handbag for her spectacles, saw nothing of the confidential male exchange. Aunt Elise had retired to the corner of the room with a book.

Upstairs Isabelle undressed quickly and slipped beneath the covers of her bed. She pulled up her knees to her stomach as she had done when she was a small girl in her parents' house and she had heard the whistling of the wind from the surrounding fields of Normandy as it worked the wooden shutters loose and sighed in the space beneath the roof. She prepared herself for sleep by filling her mind with the reassuring picture of peace and certainty she had always relied on; it contained an idealized version of her parents' home in a slightly fanciful pastoral setting, in which the sensuous effects of sun and flowers helped make analysis or decision seem unnecessary.

When she was almost in the arms of this vision there came a small knocking that at first seemed like something in the dream, then switched from one world to another to be identifiable as a soft but urgent tapping on the door of her room.

"Come in," she said, her voice uncertainly sliding back into wakeful-ness. The door opened slowly and Stephen appeared in the dim light from the landing.

"What are you doing?"

"I couldn't bear it downstairs." He raised his finger to his lips and whispered,

"I had to see how you were."

She smiled anxiously. "You must leave."