He looked about the room. There were her photographs of her sisters, her hairbrushes, a gilt mirror on the dressing table, her clothes laid across the chair. He leant over her bed, and felt his hand sink into the rich pile of covers beneath the quilt. A sweet smell rose up from the bed. He kissed her on the lips and touched her hair before leaving.

Isabelle shuddered as he went, fearing the noise of his footsteps in the echoing corridor. Stephen moved, soundlessly to his own ears at least, to the main junction of the first-floor landing, then went downstairs to rejoin the game he had left.

The following morning Stephen went into town. Azaire told him he should not return to the factory for another day or so, but he found it difficult to stay quietly in the house with Lisette, Marguerite, and various other visitors or members of the household preventing Isabelle from being alone or available to talk. He thought of his life as a wood of confusion with two or three clear tracks on which he could orientate himself. From their directions he could remember and look forward with something like clarity. While they were straight enough and discernible to him, they also felt like scars that had been cut into the undergrowth, and he had no desire to reveal them to other people. For Isabelle he felt great gratitude and admiration; in the pressure of his emotion toward her there was an impulse to disclosure, a natural movement toward trust. He did not fear this nakedness but he did not feel pleasure at the prospect of it.

He was standing at the back of the cold cathedral, looking up to the choir stalls and the window in the east. It was quiet enough to think. There was the sound of a brush on the tiled floor as a cleaner worked her way down the side of the nave, and the occasional bang of the small entrance, set into the main doors, through which visitors arrived from time to time. A handful of people were praying in the body of the church. A medieval bishop was commemorated in Latin on a stone beneath his feet, his name still not erased by the traffic of the years. Stephen felt sorry for whatever anguish had caused the urgent prayers of the scattered worshippers, though also mildly envious of their faith. The chilly, hostile building offered little comfort; it was a memento mori on an institutional scale. Its limited success was in giving dignity through stone and lapidary inscription to the trite occurrence of death. The pretence was made that through memorial the blink of light between two eternities of darkness could be saved and held out of time, though in the bowed heads of the people who prayed there was only submission. So many dead, he thought, only waiting for another eyelid's flicker before this generation joins them. The difference between living and dying was not one of quality, only of time.

He sat down on a chair and held his face in his hands. He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time. He knelt forward on the cushion on the floor and held his head motionless in his hands. He prayed instinctively, without knowing what he did. Save me from that death. Save Isabelle. Save all of us. Save me.

He arrived back too late to have lunch with Isabelle and Lisette, both of whom in their different ways were disappointed. He walked through the cool, quiet house, hoping to hear voices. Eventually he heard the sound of feet and he turned to see Marguerite going into the kitchen.

"Have you seen Madame Azaire?"

"No, Monsieur. Not since lunch. Perhaps she's in the garden."

"And Lisette?"

"I think she's gone into town."

Stephen began to look in all the rooms downstairs. Surely she must have known that he would return. She could not have gone out without leaving a message.

He turned the handle on a door that led to a small study. Isabelle was sitting inside, reading a book. She put it down and stood up as he came in. He went over to her, not sure if he should touch her. She put her hand on his.

"I was in the cathedral. I lost track of time."

She looked up at him. "Is it all right? Is everything all right?" He kissed her and she pressed herself close to him. He found his hands at once searching beneath her clothes.

Her eyes looked up into his. They were wide and enquiring, full of urgency and light. Almost at once they closed as she let out a little sigh of excitement. They were leaning against the wall of the room and he had slipped his hand through the fastening at the back of her skirt. He could feel the satin under his fingers, then a round soft swell beneath. He felt her fingers on the front of his trousers.

"We must stop." He pulled himself back.

"Yes. Lisette has gone." Isabelle was breathless. "But Marguerite."

"The red room?"

"Yes. You go first and go up to your room. Give me ten minutes before you come down."

"All right," he said. "Let me kiss you good-bye." He kissed her deeply and she began to sigh again and rubbed herself against him. "Please," she said, "please."

He did not know if she meant him to stop or to continue. He had lifted her skirts as she stood with her back to the wall and now had his fingers between her legs. "Come to me," she whispered, her breath hot in his ear. "Into me, now." He removed her fumbling fingers from his trousers and freed himself. His shoulder was next to the polished wood of a glass-fronted bookcase. Behind Isabelle's head was a framed picture of flowers in a terra-cotta pot. He had to lift her a little, clasping her behind with his hands, until she slithered on to him and wrapped her legs around his waist so that he could not move but had to bear her weight. The flowers moved a quarter turn on their hook as her shoulder nudged them.

She opened her eyes again and smiled at him. "I love you." She covered his face with kisses, keeping his body captive by her weight. Then she put her feet on the ground again and gently pulled him out of her. His flesh was rigid and swollen with blood. She ran her hand up and down it until he began to pant and give way at the knees, then spurted on to the floor, then against her dress, before she could take the last three or four spasms in her mouth. She appeared to do this from instinct, almost from a sense of tidiness, not because it was something she had known about or done before.

"The red room," she said. "In ten minutes."

Her clothes had fallen back into place. She seemed unaware of any mark on the front of her dress. Stephen watched her as she moved from the room, her walk, as always, a modest sway beneath the skirt. He felt awkward, half-undressed; it was as though she had treated him like a boy and taunted him, though he did not dislike the feeling. He rearranged his trousers and shirt and took his handkerchief to the polished parquet.

He walked briefly in the garden, trying to cool his head; then as instructed, went up to his room. He watched the minute hand crawl round on his pocket watch. If he added three minutes for the garden, that gave him only seven to endure. When it was time, he removed his shoes and went silently to the first floor. Down the main corridor to a narrow passage, down again and through a little arch... He remembered the way.

Isabelle was waiting inside. She wore a robe with some oriental pattern in green and red.

She said, "I was so afraid."

He sat down next to her on the stripped bed. "What do you mean?" She took his hand between both of hers. "When you wouldn't look at me last night I was afraid that you'd changed your mind."

"About you?"

"Yes."

He felt invigorated by Isabelle's concern. It still seemed improbable to him that she could really want him so much.

He took her hair and all its colours in his hands. He felt grateful to her also.

"After all we said and all we did. How could you doubt?"

"You wouldn't look at me. I was frightened."

"What could I have said? I would have given us away."

"You must smile or nod. Something. Promise me that." She had started to kiss his face. "We'll work out a signal. Promise me, won't you?"

"Yes. I promise you."

He let her undress him, passively standing by as she took off his clothes and folded them on the chair. He braved the exposure of his gross excitement and she affected not to notice.

"My turn," he said, but there was only the silk robe to take off and then the beauty of Isabelle's skin. He laid his cheek against the whiteness of her chest and kissed her throat where he had seen the flush of exertion when she had been gardening. The skin was young and new and almost white, with its patterning of little marks and freckles that he tried to taste with the tip of his tongue. Then he laid her gently down on the bed and buried his face in the fragrance of her hair, covering his own head with it. Next, he made her stand up again while he worked slowly over her body with his hands and his tongue. He let his fingers trail only briefly between her legs and felt her stiffen. At last, when he had touched every part of her skin, he turned her round and bent her forward on to the bed, then moved her ankles a little further apart with the pressure from his foot. When they had finished making love they slept, Isabelle beneath a blanket with her arm draped over Stephen, he uncovered, on his front, at an angle across the mattress. She had not yet had time to wash and return When he awoke he at once rested his head on her splayed hair and breathed in the perfume of her skin where his face was against her neck and the soft underline of her jaw. She smiled as she felt his skin and opened her eyes.

He said, "I was convinced when I came down the stairs that I wouldn't be able to find this room again. I thought it wouldn't be here."

"It won't move. It's always here."

"Isabelle. Tell me. Your husband. One night I heard sounds from your room as though he was... hurting you."

Isabelle sat up, pulling a blanket over her. She nodded. "Sometimes he... becomes frustrated."

"What do you mean?"

Her eyes filled with tears. "We wanted to have children. Nothing seemed to happen. I used to dread each month... you know."

He nodded.

"The blood was like a rebuke. He said it was my fault. I tried for him, but I didn't know what to do. He was very brusque, he wasn't cruel to me but he just wanted to do it quickly so I would be pregnant. It was not like with you." Isabelle suddenly looked shy. To mention what they did seemed more shameful than to do it.

She went on, "Eventually he began to doubt himself, I think. To start with he was so sure it was nothing to do with him because he had two children. Then he was not so sure. He seemed to grow jealous of me because I was young. 'You're so healthy, of course,' he would say. 'You're just a child.' And things like that. There was nothing I could do. I always made love to him, though I didn't enjoy it. I never criticized him. He seemed to build up this disgust with himself. It made him talk to me sarcastically. Perhaps you've noticed. He began to criticize me all the time when other people were here. I think that for some reason he felt guilty about marrying me."

"Guilty?"

"Perhaps toward his first wife, or perhaps because he felt he married me under false pretences."

"Because he took you away from someone of your own age?"

Isabelle nodded, but did not speak.

"And then?"

"Eventually it became so bad that he could no longer make love to me. He said I castrated him. Naturally this made him feel worse and worse. So he would try to make himself excited by doing... strange things."

"What?"

"Not, not like the things you and I... " Isabelle stopped in confusion.

"Did he hit you?"

"Yes. To begin with it was to try to make himself excited. I don't know why this was supposed to help. Then I think it was out of frustration and shame. But when I protested he said it was part of making love and I must submit to it if I wanted to be a good wife and to have children."

"Does he hit you very hard?"

"No, not very hard. He slaps me on the face and on the back. He takes a slipper sometimes and pretends I am a child. Once he wanted to hit me with a stick, but I stopped him."

"And he has hurt you badly?"

"No. I have occasionally had a bruise, or a red mark. It isn't the damage I mind. It's the humiliation. He makes me feel like an animal. And I feel sorry for him because he humiliates himself. He is so angry and so ashamed."

"How long has it been since you made love?" Stephen felt the first twinge of jealous self-interest cloud his sympathy.

"Almost a year. It is absurd that he still pretends that's why he comes to my room. We both know he comes only to hit me now, or to hurt me. But we pretend." Stephen was not surprised by what Isabelle had told him, though he was incensed at the thought of Azaire hurting her.

"You must stop him. You must end this. You must tell him not to come to your room."

"But I am frightened of what he would do, or what he would say. He would tell everyone that I was a bad wife, that I wouldn't sleep with him. I think he already tells stories to his friends about me."

Stephen thought of Bérard's secret glances. He took Isabelle's hand and kissed it, then held it against his face. "I will look after you," he said.

"Dear boy," she said. "You are so strange."

"Strange?"

"So serious, so... removed. And the things you make me do."

"Do I make you do things?"

"No, not like that. I mean, I do things of my own accord but it is only because of you. I don't know if these things are right, if they are... allowed."

"Like downstairs?"

"Yes. I know, of course I know, I am unfaithful, but the actual things. I've never done them before. I don't know if they are normal, if other people do them. Tell me."

"I don't know," said Stephen.

"You must know. You're a man, you've known other women. My sister Jeanne told me about the act of love but that's all I knew. You must understand more." Stephen was uneasy. "I've known only two or three other women. It was quite different with them. I think what we do is its own explanation."

"I don't understand."

"Nor do I. But I know you mustn't feel ashamed."

Isabelle nodded, though her face showed dissatisfaction with Stephen's answer.

"And do you?" he said. "Do you feel guilty?"

Isabelle shook her head. "I think perhaps I should feel guilty. But I don't."

"And do you worry about that? Do you worry that you have lost something, lost the power to feel ashamed, lost touch with the values or the upbringing that you would have expected to make you feel a sense of guilt?"

Isabelle said, "No. I feel that what I have done, that what we are doing, is right in some way, though it is surely not the way of the Catholic church."

"You believe there are other ways of being right or wrong?" Isabelle looked puzzled, but she was clear in her mind. "I think there must be. I don't know what they are. I don't know if they can ever be explained. Certainly they are not written down in books. But I have already gone too far now. I can't turn back."

Stephen folded his arms around her and squeezed her. He lay back on the bed with her head resting on his chest. He felt her body go limp as the muscles decontracted into sleep. There was the sound of doves in the garden. He felt his heart beat against her shoulder. The smell of roses came faintly from her scented neck. He settled his hand in the curve of her ribs. His nerves were stilled in the sensuous repletion of the moment that precluded thought. He closed his eyes. He slept, at peace.

*

René Azaire had no suspicions of what was happening in his house. He had allowed his feelings toward Isabelle to become dominated by anger and frustration at his physical impotence and by what he subsequently experienced as a kind of emotional powerlessness toward her. He did not love her, but he wanted her to be more responsive toward him. He sensed that she felt sorry for him and this infuriated him further; if she could not love him then at least she should be frightened of him. At the root of his feeling, as Isabelle had guessed, was a sense of guilt. He remembered the pleasure he had taken in being the first man to invade that body, much younger than his, and the thrill he could not deny himself when she had cried out in pain. He remembered the puzzled look in her eyes when she gazed up at him. He could feel that she, more than his first wife, had the capacity to respond to the physical act, but when he saw the bewildered expression in her face he was determined to subdue it rather than to win her to him by patience. At that time Isabelle, though too wilful for her father's taste, was still docile and innocent enough to have been won over by a man who showed consideration and love, but with Azaire these things were not forthcoming. Her emotional and physical appetites were awakened but then left suspended as her husband turned his energy toward a long, unnecessary battle with his own shortcomings.

He meanwhile had no reason to mistrust Stephen. The Englishman clearly knew a good deal about the business for a man of his age, and he handled himself well with Meyraux and the men. He did not exactly like Stephen; if he had asked himself why, he would have said there was something cold or withdrawn in him. Although in Stephen they expressed themselves in different ways, these were in fact the qualities Azaire disliked in himself. Stephen seemed too private and too selfcontained to be the sort of man who would chase women, in any event. In Azaire's imagination such men would always declare themselves with flirtatious talk; they would be handsome and much wittier than he was and would charm women in an obvious and seductive manner. Bérard, for instance, would no doubt have been a ladies' man when younger, he thought. Stephen's quiet politeness was not threatening, and although he did seem old for his age he was, nevertheless, still a boy. His English suit sat well on him and he had a full head of hair, but he was not what Azaire would have called handsome. He was a lodger, a paying guest who was a notch above Marguerite in his claims on Azaire's attention, but not quite a full member of his household.

Azaire was in any case preoccupied by his factory. In the clatter of machinery and the irritation of paperwork and decisions, he seldom thought of home or of his children, or of Isabelle.

A week after the disturbance he told Stephen it would be all right for him to return to work, though he should not attend any meetings Meyraux might call. The danger of a strike seemed to have lessened; little Lucien, Azaire was pleased to see, was unable to arouse the passions of his workers. Azaire was surprised when Stephen said he would wait another day or so; he thought he must be bored staying in the house with only Isabelle and Lisette for company, but he agreed to postpone the return until the beginning of the following week.

Stephen's telegram to London had been answered in detail by a letter from his employer. He was to stay until the end of the month, but would then be expected to deliver written reports to Leadenhall Street. Stephen felt he had done well to be granted even three extra weeks and sent a reassuring telegram back. He didn't mention the date of his departure to Isabelle; it seemed sufficiently distant for him not to have to worry, and the days were so full that his life seemed to change from one to the next.

At the weekend came the fishing expedition to the Ancre. The Bérards were unable to accompany them because Aunt Elise had been taken ill, so it was only the Azaires, with Marguerite and Stephen in attendance, who set out to take the train to Albert.

The station had a vast cobbled forecourt and central glass arch crowned by a pointed clock tower. It was said to have prefigured the work of Haussmann in Paris. While the rest of Amiens consciously imitated the capital, the people were proud that their station had shown the way. Horse-drawn cabs waited in a line to the right of the huge glass-topped entrance and a row of small horseless carts were parked beneath two gas lamps set into the cobbles. To the left of the entrance was a formal garden with three oval patches of grass at various angles which unhinged the balanced vista that should have greeted passengers approaching from the street. The ticket hall was busy with families negotiating excursions to the countryside. Trolleys with clanking wheels were pushed up and down the platform by vendors offering wine and loaves of bread filled with cheese or sausage. By the time the Azaires arrived, the windows of the large restaurant were already steamed up with the vapour from the kitchen, where the soup was boiling for lunch. An aroma of cress and sorrel was just discernible when the swing doors pushed open to reveal the waiters in their black waistcoats and long white aprons carrying trays of coffee and cognac to the tables at the front and shouting back orders to the bar. At the end farthest from the kitchen was a tall cash desk at which a grey-haired woman was making careful entries in a ledger with a steel-nibbed pen. Two locomotives were panting on the polished rails, their tenders piled high behind them. The black of the coal, and smudged faces of the driver and fireman, spoke of engineering toil and industrial work that had driven the tracks out west to Paris and north to the coast; this contrasted with the glossy flanks of the painted carriages and the bright display of local cloth among the women and children who thronged the platforms in pastel dresses with coloured parasols. Grégoire had to be dragged from his ecstatic admiration of the Paris express and over to the platform where the small train was waiting to take the branch line to Albert and Bapaume. As they sat on the hot plush of the carriage seats, they watched the centre of the city recede slowly behind them. The spire of the cathedral flickered into view as the train heaved itself east to Longueau, where it juddered over the lines of crossing rails before it found its course northward and began to pick up speed, the wheeze of exhausted steam gradually replaced by the repeated sound of the wheels on the track beneath.

Lisette sat with her hands in her lap next to her stepmother in the middle of one bench seat with Grégoire on her other side and Azaire, flanked by Stephen and Marguerite, opposite.

"So are you going to catch the biggest fish?" she said to Stephen, her head on one side.

"I shouldn't think so. I expect you need special local knowledge. French fish are cleverer than English ones."

Lisette giggled.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter how big the fish is. It's the sport of catching it."

"I'll catch the biggest one," said Grégoire. "You wait."

"I bet you don't catch a bigger one than Stephen," said Lisette.

"Who?" said Azaire.

"You mean Monsieur Wraysford, Lisette," said Isabelle primly, her voice snagging slightly on her own hypocrisy.

Lisette looked at her stepmother with calm, quizzical eyes. "Do I? Oh, yes, I suppose I do."

Isabelle felt her heart whisper and beat. She dared not catch Stephen's eye, though had she looked she would not have found it, since at the first sound of his Christian name he had anticipated embarrassment and fixed his eyes on the landscape of green downland revealed in streaming rectangular frames by the windows of the train.

Neither Azaire nor Grégoire made anything of Lisette's slip, and Isabelle embarked on an urgent and insistent cross-examination of Marguerite about whether she had brought changes of clothes in case the children wanted to swim in the river.

"Anyway," Lisette said to Grégoire, "no one would want to eat anything you caught, would they, Ste--Monsieur?"

"What? Why not? I expect you're a good fisherman, aren't you, Grégoire? That's a fine new rod you've got there."

Lisette looked angrily at her brother, who appeared to have stolen Stephen's attention, and said nothing for the rest of the journey.

A second train took them from Albert out along the small country line beside the Ancre, past the villages of Mesnil and Hamel to the station at Beaumont. The sun appeared from behind clouds banked high above a wooded hill, and lit up the green valley of the river. There were some meadows between the railway line and the water and some large areas of unkempt grass. They picked their way down a dry path and through a gate in the fence that lay twenty yards or so back from the river. They could see other anglers on the opposite bank, solitary men and a few boys perched on stools or sitting with their feet in the water. The Ancre was sometimes no wider than a strong stone's throw and in other places broad and forbidding enough for only a confident swimmer to contemplate crossing. In the wide stretches, there seemed barely any agitation of the surface that licked the margins marked by rushes and rotting logs which had caught in the weeds; in the narrower reaches the water occasionally showed white where a small current split the surface.

Azaire installed himself on a canvas stool and lit his pipe. He was disappointed that the Bérards had not been able to accompany them; conversation was never more enjoyable than when Bérard was there to bring out the best in him. These days there was not much to say to Isabelle, and the children bored him. He baited his line and cast it carefully into the water. With or without Bérard, it was not a bad way to pass a summer's day, beside a river in pleasant countryside, with the sound of rooks in the trees and the peaceful swell of the downs all round him. Stephen helped Grégoire to bait his new rod and then settled himself at the foot of a tree. Lisette stood and watched him, while Isabelle and Marguerite set out a rug in the shade.

By one o'clock no one had caught anything. The river's surface had been undisturbed by fish of any kind, though they could just make out the figure of a small boy some way down the opposite bank whose homemade float seemed barely to touch the water before the line was whisked in again with a flashing, heavy creature on the end. They walked back to the station and took a pony and trap up the hill to the village of Auchonvillers, which had been recommended by Bérard as having a passable restaurant. He had not been to it himself but had been told it was well known in the district.

Azaire straightened his tie outside the door. Isabelle ran her eye quickly over the children to make sure they were respectable. Auchonvillers was a dull village, consisting of one principal road and a few tracks and lesser streets behind it, most of them connected to farms or their outbuildings. The restaurant was more accurately a café, though its dining room was full of local families taking lunch. They had to wait by the entrance until a young woman showed them to a table. They settled down at last and Isabelle smiled encouragingly at Grégoire, whose hunger had made him sulky.

"At least people seem to be properly dressed," said Azaire, looking round the room.

Marguerite was nervous about eating with her employers and could not decide what she wanted to eat when the waitress returned. She asked Isabelle to decide for her. Azaire poured wine for himself and, after she had fractiously insisted, for Lisette.

Stephen looked over the table at Isabelle. Six days earlier she had been Madame Azaire, the distant and respected object of his passion. Now she was grafted to him, in flesh and in feeling. There was the high collar of her dress with the dull red stone at the throat, the formal arrangement of her hair, and the eyes turning this way and that in social concern but keeping always that point of light at the centre that seemed to him to speak so clearly of her hidden life that he sometimes felt amazed that other people could not read her infidelity with a single glance. He watched her talking to Grégoire or reassuring Marguerite, and he wanted to be alone with her, not making love, but talking to a truer version of her. When he judged there was a safe moment, he sought out her eyes with his and inclined his head in a gesture of affirmation so small that only Isabelle could have seen it, and he saw by the fractional softening of her expression that she had.

At this moment Stephen knew he would not return to England. There had been the possibility, he now conceded, that his feeling for Isabelle could have been discharged or relieved by what they did in the red room. But it had become clear to him that it was not a contained appetite that could be exhausted or satisfied. It split and spread and changed its shape and entered areas of his thought and feeling far removed from the physical act itself. It had become more important to him than the maintenance of his livelihood or his career or his duty to his employers. He was now mastered by the feeling; he could not rest until he knew where it would end. Almost as decisive as his tenderness toward Isabelle was an overpowering sense of curiosity.

Although his mind worked clearly and had never had any difficulty in dispatching the tasks set for it by schoolmasters or employers, Stephen had not developed the habit of analysis. His confidence in himself was not checked by judgement; he followed where nothing more than instinct took him, and relied on some reflexive wariness to help. Looking at Isabelle, he knew also that the feeling he had for her was of a kind seldom experienced, and therefore he was obliged to follow it.

A strong, metallic-tasting trout was succeeded by a watery stew that they managed to eat with the help of quantities of bread. Isabelle, engrossed in making Grégoire eat his food, looked serene when she turned periodically to the rest of the table. Stephen guessed that it was the deliberate destruction of the basis of her family role that made her able to resume it with such apparent contentment. No sarcasm of her husband, no suggestive remark of Lisette or pointless tantrum of Grégoire could now disturb her charming equilibrium.

After lunch they returned to the river. Azaire went back to his stool and Grégoire to a small tree trunk he had found at the edge of the water. Stephen walked down the bank in the direction of Beaucourt. The big sky over the rolling farmland had now cleared and was filled with the sound of larks, which made him shudder in distaste. He sat down at the foot of a tree and idly began to bait the hook on the rod Azaire had lent him. He felt a hand lightly touch his shoulder and another cover his eyes. He started, but then relaxed at the gentleness of the touch. He placed his own hand over the fingers on his shoulder and stroked them. They were slender and feminine. He gripped the hand and turned round. It was Lisette. She gave a little cry of triumph.

"You didn't think it would be me, did you!"

Knowing his eyes had already betrayed his surprise, Stephen merely said, "I didn't hear you creep up behind me."

"You expected it to be someone else, didn't you?" Lisette had a coquettish but determined look.

"I wasn't expecting anyone at all."

Lisette walked around him, her hands behind her back. She was wearing a white dress and her hair was tied back with a pink ribbon.

"You see, Monsieur Stephen, I know everything about you and my stepmother."

"What do you mean?"

Lisette laughed. Stephen remembered the wine she had drunk at lunchtime. She lowered her voice and said huskily, " 'My darling Isabelle,' " then sighed and panted as though with longing or desire, before beginning to laugh again. Stephen shook his head and smiled in feigned incomprehension.

"That day after lunch I went out into the garden and I fell asleep on a bench. When I woke up I walked back to the house. I still felt a little dizzy when I got back, so I sat down on the terrace and I heard sounds from an open window upstairs. They were very quiet, but they were such funny sounds." Lisette began to laugh again.

"And that evening after dinner I heard someone creeping oh-so-quietly along the corridor to her room, then tiptoeing back downstairs."

She looked at Stephen with her head on one side. "Well?" she said.

"Well what?"

"What do you say?"

"I think you're a girl with a strong imagination."

"Yes, I'm certainly that. I've been imagining all the things you've been doing and I think I would like to try them."

Stephen laughed in genuine amusement.

"It isn't funny. You don't want my father to know what I've been hearing."

"You're a child," said Stephen, feeling himself begin to sweat.

"No I'm not. I'm almost seventeen. I'm nearer your age than _she _is."

"Do you like Isabelle?"

Lisette looked taken aback. "No. I mean yes, I used to."

"She's been kind to you."

Lisette nodded.

"Think about that," said Stephen.

"I will. But you shouldn't have led me on."

"Shouldn't have what?"

"When you gave me that carving, I thought... You know, you _are _the right age for me. Why shouldn't I have wanted you for myself?"

Stephen began to see that she was not a child who was making trouble for its own sake, but someone whose feelings had been hurt. There was some truth in the things she said.

"I'm sorry about the carving," he said. "You were sitting next to me. If it had been Grégoire I would have given it to him. I meant nothing by it. In fact I did make one for Grégoire later." 'So it meant nothing at all?"

"I'm afraid not."

Lisette put her hands on his arm. "Stephen, I'm not a child, even if they treat me as one. I'm a woman--at least almost a woman. My body is a woman's body, not a child's."

He nodded. He thought by keeping calm he might placate her. "I understand. It's difficult for you, especially without a mother."

"What do you know about my mother?"

"Don't be angry, Lisette. I have no mother, either, and no father. I do know, I do understand."

"All right. Perhaps you do. But I meant what I said. I want you to do those things to me."

"I can't do that, Lisette. You must know that. Be fair to me. Be fair to yourself."

"Is it that I'm not pretty enough? Am I not as pretty as her?" He looked at her. Flushed with wine and confusion, she was attractive. She had deep-set brown eyes with thick lashes, coarse hair, and a slim waist.

"Yes, you're pretty."

"Touch me, then, touch me as you touch her."

She held on to his arm with both hands. He realised how affected she was by the wine; her eyes did not quite focus as she looked up into his.

She took his hand and rubbed it between her breasts. Despite himself, Stephen felt the reflex of desire.

"Lisette," he said, "this is very foolish. Your parents are just down at the bend in the river. I am not going to let you tease me or humiliate yourself. What I will do, if you like, is to kiss you, just very quickly, if you promise that you will go away and never say another word about this."

She said, "No."

"What do you mean, 'no'?"

"I mean you have to touch me."

She took his hand again and rubbed her breasts then guided it to her waist. Something in the perversity of the situation had started to arouse him and he did not at once withdraw his hand when she placed it beneath her lifted skirt, at the top of her thigh. Then she slid it inside her drawers, where he felt fine hair and wet parted flesh.

He pulled it away at once, because his inclination was to leave it there and he knew if he did so it would be the start of something more awful and more hopeless than he had already begun.

Lisette had frozen at his touch; it seemed to have sobered and frightened her. She started to move away but he took her by the wrist.

He looked fiercely into her eyes and said, "Now you understand. You must never begin these things. And you will never, never mention a word of what you were saying earlier, not to your father, not to anyone."

Lisette nodded. "No. I promise. I want to go now. I want to go home." She had forgotten about the English teas at Thiepval.

*

For a further week Isabelle and Stephen lived their strange existence in the boulevard du Gange, going through the daily rituals of normal behaviour even though their minds existed elsewhere. Each noticed, with admiration and some misgiving, how easily the other was able to pretend.

Stephen found that their hurried and clandestine couplings were made more powerful to him by their element of fear. They made love where they could: in the red room, in temporarily deserted sitting rooms, on the grassy bank at the foot of the garden. The urgency of limited time removed all inhibitions.

He did not pause to think. His mind was disarrayed by passion. It had become capable of only one desire or thought: that things should continue. The calm nature of his public behaviour was given to him by this imperative.

Isabelle was bemused by the power of the physical life that had suddenly opened up in her and found equal excitement in their fast and dangerous exchanges. But she missed the intimacy of conversation that they had first had in the red room; this seemed to her as delicate an act of closeness as any physical touch they had yet discovered.

One day, following a whispered consultation in the hall, Stephen contrived to come back from the factory early when Isabelle had dispatched Marguerite and Lisette for the afternoon.

He found her already waiting for him in the red room. Afterward, as he sat back against the pillows, he stared at the picture of a medieval knight above the mantelpiece. In the grate there was a fire laid with neatly chopped kindling and coal. On the far wall was a large country wardrobe in which were stored unused curtains, rugs, winter coats, and various vases, clocks, and boxes with no place in the house. The wood of the window frame was stripped and unpainted. Some white flowers of clematis moved in a light breeze against the glass.

It was the first chance Stephen had had since their excursion to the river to tell Isabelle about Lisette. In the reckless trust of his passion he told her everything, expecting her to value his honesty above any meaner feeling of unease. Isabelle seemed curious.

"I don't understand where she could have learned about these things."

"I suppose she's older than we thought. Didn't you feel such things at that age?"

Isabelle shook her head. "Jeanne had told me what would happen one day, but I had no feelings of desire, not in the way you describe in Lisette."

"I think she feels the loss of her mother. She wants attention."

"Was she excited? Was she... I don't know how to ask."

"You mean would she be ready to make love to a man?"

"Yes."

"Yes, she would be ready as a woman, in her body, but she would almost certainly choose the wrong man."

"You."

"Or worse."

Isabelle shook her head. "Poor Lisette."

She looked over at him. She said, "Did you want to... with her?"

"No. For a moment there was a reflex, like an animal. But no. I only ever want to do it with you."

"I don't believe you." Isabelle laughed.

Stephen smiled at her. "You're teasing me, Isabelle."

"Yes, of course I am." She ran her hand down his abdomen. "You are wicked," she whispered in his ear.

Sometimes Stephen felt his body was no more than a channel for exterior powers; it had no proper sense of fatigue or proportion. He thought of Lisette as he lay on top of Isabelle again. He believed Isabelle had found the story of Lisette's indiscretion in some perverse way arousing.

Later he said, "I am worried that she'll tell your husband." Isabelle, who had recovered her composure, said, "I'm more worried that I have a duty to stay and look after her."

"To stay?"

"Yes. Instead of... "

"Instead of coming with me to England?"

Isabelle, confronted with the thought at last in words, nodded dumbly. Stephen felt a quiet exultation; although he had supplied the words, the idea had been hers.

"But that's what you will do," he said. "You will leave the husband who beats you and go with the man who loves you. Lisette is not your child. You've already done well by her, you've been helpful to her. But you must live your own life eventually. You have one chance only."

He heard the declamatory note in what he said but did not disown it. He wanted Isabelle to remember the words so that they would count with her when she was alone, making her decision.

"And what would we do in England?" she teased him, not yet willing to think about it properly.

Stephen breathed in slowly. "I'm not sure. We'd go and live somewhere remote, not in London. I would find work in a business of some kind. We would have children."

This seemed to take the lightness out of Isabelle's manner. "And Lisette and Grégoire... They would lose another mother."

"And if you stay you will lose your life."

"I don't want to think about it."

"But you must. I'm supposed to return to London next week. You could come with me. Or we could go away together somewhere in France."

"Or you could stay and work here in the town. We could meet."

"Not that, Isabelle. You know that wouldn't work."

"I must dress again. I must go downstairs to be ready for when Lisette comes back."

"Before you go, I want to ask you something. Lucien Lebrun. There was a rumour that you and he... "

"Lucien!" Isabelle laughed. "I like him. I think he's admirable, but really... "

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked. It's just that... I was worried."

"Don't worry. Don't ever worry. There's only you. Now really I must get dressed."

"Let me dress you, then."

He went to fetch her clothes from the chair where she had left them. "Put your foot here and the other one here. Now stand up. And does this come next? How does this fasten? Let me just straighten this. You're breathing so hard, my love. Was it here that I touched you, was it here?"

Isabelle was half-dressed, half-revealed. She stood holding Stephen's head as he sank to his knees in front of her.

As she began to sigh again, he stood up in front of her and said, "You will come with me, won't you?"

Her answer was hissed between closed teeth.

The front door banged as Azaire made his way down the hall with a copy of the evening paper in his hand.

"Isabelle!" he called. "The strike is finished. The dyers return tomorrow." She appeared at the top of the stairs. "That's good news."

"And tomorrow Meyraux will recommend my new terms to the men."

"I'm very pleased."

At least it meant Azaire would be in a good mood, she thought; he would not persecute her with words or come to her room later to air his frustration.

"And when will you be leaving us, Monsieur?" said Azaire at dinner, pouring a small measure of wine into Stephen's glass.

"At the end of the week, as we planned."

"Good. It has been interesting for us at the factory, as I was saying to you this morning. I hope you've enjoyed your time with us."

"It has been a pleasure to stay with your charming family." Azaire looked contented. His eyes for once lost their wounded look. The prospect of a return to normal routine in all aspects of his life evidently pleased him. Isabelle saw his relief at Stephen's imminent departure and the end of the strike, but she could not understand how he could so happily contemplate a resumption of his life as it had been. The way he treated her might, at some stretch of his imagination, be viewed as a painful and provisional transition toward a better feeling, but not as a desirable way of behaviour that he was anxious to begin again. She was not frightened of him, but his attitude depressed her. Winters of loneliness stretched out in front of her; if he was content not to change, then she would find deeper isolation in his presence than in her own.

Meanwhile there was Stephen, an alternative she could not consider with any kind of calmness. There was too much danger in her feeling and in the practical details of what they could do. She felt she might avoid the fallibility of her own judgement by depending on his; though he was younger, he seemed sure of what was right.

Lisette had been subdued since the excursion to the river; she no longer enlivened dinner with sulks or suggestive remarks. She would not catch Stephen's eye, though he tried to meet hers with some reassurance. She sat in silence over her food as the sound of the clock on the small marble-topped serving table became louder in the room.

"I heard the strangest story," said Azaire abruptly.

"What was that?" said Isabelle.

"They told me that at the height of the strike someone was visiting little Lucien and was taking him parcels of food to give to the dyers' families."

"Yes, I heard that," said Stephen. "A number of sympathetic people in the town helped the strikers. There was one man in particular who wanted to be anonymous. So I was told at the factory."

"Oh dear me no," said Azaire. "This wasn't a man, this was a woman, "The strikers had help from many sources, I expect."

"But the strangest thing about this woman was that she was married to the owner of a factory." Azaire paused and looked round the table. Neither of the children were listening. Isabelle was motionless.

"Now isn't that a strange thing?" said Azaire raising his glass to his lips. "I couldn't believe it when I heard it."

"I don't think it's strange," said Isabelle. "It was me." Stephen looked at her uncomprehendingly. Azaire replaced his wine glass heavily on the table.

"But my dear--"

"I took them food because they were hungry. I had no idea of whether they should be on strike or not, but I had seen their children asking for bread, running along behind the carts bringing in vegetables to the market. I had seen them going through the dustbins in Saint Leu and I felt sorry for them."

Isabelle's voice was surprisingly calm. She said, "I would do the same again, whether the people made cloth or shoes or anything else."

Azaire was white; his lips were a shade of pale purple as though even this soft membrane had repelled his blood.

"Leave the room," he said to Lisette. "And you." Grégoire pushed his chair noisily back on the wooden floor, pausing to take a piece of chicken from his plate.

Azaire stood up. "I discounted these rumours. I did not believe them, even though it was your name that was attached to them and I suppose I should have learned about you by now. However wilful and selfish you are I could not believe that you would ever, ever behave toward me in such a way. And you, Monsieur, you had better leave the room."

"No. Let him stay."

"Why? He--"

"Let him stay."

A look of panic passed over Azaire's face. He tried to speak, but failed. He drank again from his glass. His imagination seemed to be supplying more appalling possibilities than his previously controlled and teasing anger could admit. He struggled towards the worst question. He began it, "You...?" He looked at Stephen, then down at the table. His courage visibly failed him. He fought with himself, then regained control by resuming his previous manner.

"I did not believe my wife could let me down in such a way. The further reason I would not believe the rumours was that there was another piece of tittletattle that went with them, which said that the lady in question was also... " He waved his hand, as though swatting the thought "Not with Lucien," said Isabelle. Azaire's face seemed to collapse. His voice had so pitifully requested a complete dismissal of the rumour that Isabelle's partial denial appeared worse than a confirmation of what he feared.

She saw this and moved to end his uncertainty even if she could not stop his anguish. "Not with Lucien. With Stephen."

Azaire looked up from his seat. "With... him?"

"Yes." Stephen looked evenly back at him. "With me. I pursued your wife .1 seduced her. You must hate me, not her."

He wanted to protect Isabelle as far as he could, though he was astounded to find himself in this position: Isabelle could easily have prevaricated. His slow heart was beating hard. He looked at Azaire, whose jaw had gone loose, causing his mouth to open. There was a dribble of wine on his chin. Stephen pictured the misery from the way it affected the muscles of his face. He felt pity for him. Then, in the interests of preserving something for Isabelle and himself, he hardened his heart. It was an act of almost physical willpower, as he compelled the compassion to go out of him.

Isabelle was no longer able to be cold toward Azaire. The brief sentences with which she had informed him of her unfaithfulness seemed to have drained her resolve and she began to weep and to apologize to him for what she had done. Stephen listened carefully to what she said. He did not begrudge Azaire his wife's apologies but he did not want her to retreat too far.

Azaire was incapable of saying more than "With him? Here?" Isabelle said, "I'm sorry... so sorry, René. I meant you no harm. It is a passion for Stephen. It was not done to hurt you."

"This... boy, this English boy? In my house? Where? In your bed?"

"It doesn't matter, René. It doesn't matter where."

"It does to me. I want to know. Did you... in which room?"

"For God's sake," said Stephen.

Azaire sat silently at the table, his hand still clutching the base of his glass. His mouth dropped open again and he screwed up his eyes in puzzlement, as though looking into a bright sun.

"And your father, Monsieur Fourmentier, what can he do...? What will they say? My God, my God."

Isabelle looked at Stephen and there was fear in her eyes. Stephen could see that she had not calculated what effect her sudden honesty would have on her husband. The fear was no doubt partly for Azaire's well-being, but also seemed to be for herself: there was a chance that in the crisis she might lose her resolution and follow some older code of conduct which would compel her to put herself once more at Azaire's mercy.

It made Stephen feel uneasy as he looked at the wreckage of this suddenly precipitated storm. He felt he needed to keep Isabelle's determination in place, but this could not be done if Azaire collapsed completely.

He was muttering to himself: "Bitch... Your father told me and I never listened. In my own house. And now my children. What will become of them? Bitch."

"Listen." Stephen moved swiftly round the table and took him by the shoulders. "What can you expect from a woman you have treated as you have treated Isabelle? Did you expect her to humiliate herself for your pleasure, to sit meekly at your table in the knowledge that you would beat her later?" Azaire was rejuvenated. "What did you tell him?"

"It doesn't matter what she told me. This is a house where everything can be heard. How can you sit there and call her names after what you've done to her? This is a woman with her own life and feelings and look what you have done to her. What have you _done?" _He pushed Azaire violently back into his chair. Azaire seemed inspired by Stephen's anger. He stood up and said, "You will leave my house within the hour. If you have any sense you will never let me see you again."

"Certainly I will leave your house," said Stephen. "And I am taking your wife with me. Isabelle?"

"I don't want this." Isabelle shook her head. The words came from her mouth without thought or calculation in their purity of feeling. "I don't know what to do or how to behave now. I could be happy in the simplest way, like any other woman with a family of her own, without this terrible pain I've caused. I won't listen to either of you. Why should I? How do I know that you love me, Stephen? How can I tell?" Her voice fell to the low, soft note Stephen had heard when she spoke on his first evening in the house. It was a beautiful sound to his ears: pleading and vulnerable, but with a sense of strength in its own Tightness. "And you, René, why should I trust you when you have given me so little reason even to like you?" Both men watched her in silence. Stephen believed in the strength of feeling between them, and believed it would persuade her.

Isabelle said, "This is not a situation anyone can be prepared for. Nothing I have learned in religion, or from my family or my own thoughts is any help to me. I won't be painted as some sort of whore by you, René. I'm a frightened woman, no more than that--not an adulterer, or a harlot or anything else. I'm just the same person I ever was, but you never took the trouble to find out what that was."

"Forgive me, I--"

"Yes, I do forgive you. I forgive you any wrong you've done me and I ask you to forgive me the wrong I've certainly done to you. I am going upstairs to pack." She left the room with a rustle of her skirt and a barely discernible trace of roses.

"You go with him," Azaire shouted after her, "and you are going to hell!" Stephen turned and left the room, trying to still the exultation of his heart. Isabelle placed the framed photograph of Jeanne on top of the clothes she had piled in her case. She paused for a moment, then added the family group with her parents in their Sunday best, Mathilde, dark-haired and womanly on her father's right hand, herself, a little fair-haired child on her mother's left, with Delphine, Jeanne, and Béatrice standing behind. The photograph had been taken in a park in Rouen; among the plane trees in the background an oblivious couple were strolling over the gravel. In the foreground at her father's feet was the Fourmentiers' small white dog.

She looked into the staring face of her father, the eyes dark and remote above the thick moustache. How hard he would find it to understand what she was doing, she thought. How little he had ever tried.

She packed two dresses and the blouse with the dogtoothed edging. She would need more practical clothes for travelling: a coat, and shoes she could walk in. Presumably she could send for others when they arrived wherever they were going.

Isabelle did not pause for thought. She wanted to be out of the house, alone with Stephen, before the certainty deserted her and she began to consider the practical details.

She heard footsteps in the corridor leading to her room and turned to see Stephen in the doorway. She ran to him and he held her close against his chest.

"You are a wonderful woman," he said.

"What shall I say to the children?"

"Say good-bye to them. Tell them you'll write."

"No." Isabelle stepped back from him and shook her head. Tears flowed from her eyes. "I have done wrong to them. I can't pretend otherwise. I must just leave them."

"No good-byes?"

"No. Quickly, Stephen. We must go. I'm ready to leave."

"Wait here. I must get my papers."

As Stephen ran up the stairs to his room he heard the sound of a woman's voice shouting and sobbing on the floor below. There came the noise of a door slamming and he heard Grégoire's voice asking what was going on. He threw his passport, his notebooks, work reports, razor, and a change of clothes into a small leather bag. As he descended to the first landing, he saw Lisette standing in her nightgown outside her bedroom. She looked pale and shocked.

"What's happening?" she said. "Why is everyone shouting?" Stephen felt a rush of pity for the girl. He turned speechlessly from her and ran to Isabelle's room. She had put on a coat and a green hat with a feather. She looked touchingly young.

"All right?" said Stephen. "Shall we go?"

She took his hand between hers and looked up into his grave face. She smiled and nodded as she picked up her case.

Each space and unexpected corridor beneath the plunging roof with its conflicting angles was alive with voices and the sound of feet, heavy, hesitant, running or turning back. The door to the kitchen banged and rolled repeatedly on its hinges as Marguerite and the cook shuttled back and forth to the dining room under the pretext of clearing dinner, then lingered, listening, in the hallway. At the top of the stairs Stephen appeared with his arm round Isabelle, guiding her past the stricken looks and questions.

"To hell," Azaire repeated from the doorway of the sitting room. Isabelle felt the pressure of Stephen's hand on the small of her back as they passed. She turned on the threshold of the house and saw the pale figure of Lisette at the bend of the stairs. She shuddered, and led Stephen out into the night. Back inside the house, Azaire ordered the children to wait on the landing while he went to Isabelle's room. He pulled back the cover on the bed and looked at the sheets. He ran his hands over them. They were clean, starched, barely touched by the weight of his wife's body. He went upstairs to his lodger's room and ripped back the blanket. The narrow bed was more disarrayed than Isabelle's, as though Stephen had slept less soundly or the maid had spent less time making it, but it bore no signs of the adultery: the sheets were clean, with the ridge of the crease running neatly up the centre.

Azaire went back to the first floor and began to go through each room in turn. He raged with a desire to see the filth and shame of what they had done to him. He wanted to see the marks of his wife's betrayal, the stains of her degradation. In the midst of his anger and his humiliation, he noted the return of a low urge he had not felt for many months.

Grégoire stood terrified on the landing as his father scrutinized his bed. Lisette clutched her brother's hand as they watched the wretched emotions of adulthood. Azaire held the sheets from Marguerite's bed up to the light, believing he had seen a mark, but it was no more than beeswax or polish from her hand where she had not washed properly. He ran his fingers over the linen in the guest rooms and laid his head on it, inhaling deeply. There was only the smell of camphor. Eventually he stood defeated and flushed beneath the light at the top of the stairs. The doors to all the rooms stood open, their beds uselessly wrecked. Azaire was breathing heavily. In his haste and rage he had not thought of the red room. He had forgotten the narrow corridor with its plain wooden boards that doubled back from the garden side of the house toward the back stairs. Since he had first bought the house he had had no cause to visit it, had never in fact seen its finished shape, such as it was, after it had been cleared of the previous owners' unwanted belongings and modestly redecorated by Isabelle. It was a place he had not refound, but which had stayed, as Stephen had feared it might for him, beyond the reach of memory.

Stephen sat opposite Isabelle in the train going south towards Soissons and Reims. He felt the simple elation of his victory, the fact that it was he who had won, who had persuaded Isabelle against the weight of convention and sound argument to do the difficult and dangerous thing. And there was the deeper happiness of being with this woman, whom he loved, and the undeniable evidence, for the first time, that she was his. Isabelle smiled, then shook her head incredulously from side to side with closed eyes. When she opened them again they had a look of resignation.

"What will they say? What will he say to Bérard and to his friends?" Her voice was intrigued but not anxious.

"It's not the first time a wife has left her husband." Stephen had no idea what Azaire would say, but he did not feel inclined to imagine. He felt it was important that he and Isabelle concentrate on themselves.

The train was the last of the evening, so they had had little choice of destination. At the station Isabelle had wrapped a shawl over her face, fearing recognition as she clambered on to the train. As it made its way south over the flat landscape, she relaxed; there might be years of regret, but the prospect of immediate drama and reverse had gone.

The train stopped at a dimly lit station and they looked out of the window at a porter unloading mail and pushing a trolley full of boxes to a wooden building that gave on to the empty stockyard. The man's face showed pale in the darkness. Behind him was the ordered black swell of a street, leading uphill into a town where the occasional yellow light showed hazily from behind curtains and shutters. The train shrugged and clanked out of the station and made its way south through the tranquil night. The summer was almost at an end and there was an edge of cold to the air. To the east was the forest of Ardennes, and beyond it the Rhine. After a stop at Reims they followed the line of the Marne through Joinville. Occasionally the gloomy river would be caught by moonlight when the railway traveled alongside before retaking its own course through cuttings and embankments whose high sides enclosed it in darkness.

As they moved south, Isabelle came and sat next to Stephen, resting her head against his body. The rolling motion of the train made her eyes heavy; she slept as it picked out its set course, nosing its way to where the Marne joined the river Meuse, whose course linked Sedan to Verdun--a flat, unargued path through the lowlands of her native country.

She dreamed of pale faces beneath rose-coloured lights; Lisette at the corner of the stairs, the bloodless features in the red glow, a lost girl, and others like her caught in some repeated loop of time, its pattern enforced by the rhythmic motion of the train; many white-skinned faces with dark eyes, staring in disbelief. They stayed in a hotel in the spa town of Plombières. It was a grey building with wrought-iron balconies and thick ivy. Their room was on the first floor; it overlooked a damp garden with a broken summerhouse and a number of outsized cedar trees. Behind the wall at the far end were the baths themselves, whose waters were held to have curative properties for people with rheumatism, chest complaints, and certain diseases of the blood. There were a dozen or so other residents in the hotel, mostly old couples, who ate in the ornate dining room. For the first three days Stephen and Isabelle barely left their room. Isabelle was tired by the journey and the strain of what she had done. She slept in the large wooden bed with its boatshaped ends, and Stephen would sit beside her for hours, reading a book, smoking a cigarette, or standing on the balcony, looking over the peaceful little spa. A shy maid left trays outside their door at dinnertime and hurried back along the passageway. On the third day Stephen went down to the dining room on his own, and sat by the window that overlooked the square. The owner of the hotel brought him a menu.

"Is Madame your wife quite well?" he asked.

"Quite well, thank you. Just a little tired. I expect she'll come down tomorrow." Various residents nodded their greetings to Stephen as they took their places at table. He smiled back and drank from the bottle of wine he had ordered. A waiter brought fish in a heavy cream sauce. Stephen drank again and let himself slip into the tranquil atmosphere of this foreign world: nothing, he imagined, had changed for years in the ordered routine of the hotel, in the thin air or the rich food that was based on recipes from the eighteenth century, or in the probably imaginary qualities of the waters and the genteel, restrictive lives their presumed properties had supported in the town.

On the fourth day Isabelle ventured out with him for a walk. She took his arm like a long-married wife as they explored the streets, sat for a time in an almost grassless park, and drank coffee in a square opposite the boys' school. Stephen was endlessly curious. He asked Isabelle to describe her early life in the smallest detail; he never seemed to tire of stories of her days in Rouen.

"Tell me more about Jeanne."

"I've told you everything I can think of. Now you tell me how you came to be in this place, this institution."

Stephen exhaled slowly. "There's not much to tell. My father worked for the post office in a flat part of England called Lincolnshire. My mother worked in a factory. They were not married, and when she became pregnant he disappeared. I never met him. From what I heard of him later he seemed an ordinary man, someone who took what he could find and preferred not to pay for it."

"Is that what you think is ordinary?"

"It's how people live. My father probably had some charm, though he was not a handsome man, not what you would think of as a seducer. He was just a man who liked women and I should think I have half brothers and sisters in England, though I've never met them. My mother left the factory and went back to live with her parents, who worked in a village. Her father was a farm labourer. My mother eventually got a job in service, as a maid in a big house. Like Marguerite." Isabelle watched Stephen's expression as he spoke. There seemed to be no emotion in his voice, though the line of his jaw had tightened a little.

"But my mother was not a strong character either. When I was a small child I wanted her to prove herself independent of my father, so that he could be dismissed from our minds. In fact she got pregnant again, by someone who worked at the house. She was fond of me but never looked after me much. I was brought up by my grandfather, who taught me to fish and catch rabbits. I was a real farm boy. He also taught me how to steal and how to fight. He was quite young, still in his fifties, and very fit. He regarded it as proper that any labouring man should augment his income in whatever way he could. He would have bare-knuckle fights for money, if enough was offered, and he stole from the larger houses in the district. Mostly food or animals he'd trapped.

"My mother went off with the man she'd met at the house. I heard that they went away to Scotland. Soon after this my grandfather was arrested on some small charge and was sent to prison. Part of his defence was that he needed to stay at home to look after me. The court ordered that I should be taken into a home in the local town, since he was not fit to be my guardian. I'd been quite happy running wild, living with my grandmother, and the next thing I was dressed in a sort of tunic and set to work scrubbing floors and tables in this huge brick building. We had to do lessons as well, something I hadn't done before.

"There are things I remember about the place that will be with me even on the day I die. The smell of the soap that we used to clean the floors and the feel of the uniform against the skin. I remember the big room with a ceiling that was so high it was almost lost to view and the long tables we ate from. I'd been happy enough with my grandmother. I'd never seen so many people in one place before and it seemed to me each one of us was diminished by it. I had feelings of panic when we sat there, as though we were all being reduced to numbers, to ranks of nameless people who were not valued in the eyes of another individual.

"Those of us who had family or people to see were allowed out from time to time. I would spend the day with my grandparents. He was back from prison by now. One day I had a fight with a local boy, and I hurt him much more than I meant to. I can't remember who started the fight or what it was about. It was probably my fault. I remember seeing him sink to the ground and wondering what I had done.

"His parents called the police and there was a fuss. I was sent back to the home because I was too young to stand trial. The incident was reported in the local paper and a man I had never heard of called Vaughan must have read about it. My grandmother was excited because this man was rich and said he wanted to help. He came to see me in the home and talked to me for a long time. He was convinced I was clever and needed to be given a chance to improve myself. He asked if I was willing to let him be appointed my guardian by the court. I'd have done anything to escape from the institution, and my grandparents were happy for someone else to take the responsibility.

"It took a year for all the legal things to be gone through. He was quite well known locally. He'd been a magistrate, but hadn't married or had children himself. He insisted that I go to school during the day and he taught me himself in the evenings. I lived in his house and he somehow procured me a place in the grammar school."

"What's that?"

"A school where they teach you Latin and Greek and history. And how to use a knife and fork."

"Didn't you know how to before?"

"Not with any finesse. But I learned all the lessons they gave me. It was difficult to begin with because I was so far behind. But the teacher was encouraging."

"So he was your great benefactor, like the good genie in a story."

"Yes. Except for one thing. I didn't like him. I thought he would treat me like his son. But he didn't. He just made me work. He was a social reformer of some kind, I suppose, like the priests who went into the slums of London to work with the boys there. I think his interest in my learning was a substitute for other things in life. He never showed me any affection, he just wanted to know how much progress I'd made with my studies."

"But you must have felt grateful to him."

"Yes, I felt grateful. I still do. I write to him from time to time. When I finished at the school he found me an interview for a job with a firm in London who paid for me to go to Paris on their behalf to learn the language and find out more about the textile industry. Then I worked in London, living in lodgings in a place called Holloway. Then I was dispatched to Amiens."

He looked at her with relief. The self-revelation was over. "That's it." Isabelle smiled at him. "That's all? That's all your life? You seem so old to me, I think of you sometimes as being older than I am. It's your eyes, I think. Those big, sad eyes." She stroked his face with the tips of her fingers.

When they returned to the hotel Isabelle went ahead to the bathroom. She noticed with dismay that, despite her elaborate carelessness, the blood had returned at its appointed time.

After a week in Plombières they traveled south. Stephen wrote to his company in London, enclosing his reports and explaining that he would not be returning. In Grenoble they celebrated his twenty-first birthday and he wrote to Vaughan thanking him for his guardianship, which was now ended. They stayed until some money arrived for Isabelle, wired from Rouen by Jeanne, whom she had contacted by letter. Stephen still had two large English bills that had been given to him by his guardian for use in case of emergency.

In October they arrived in St.-Remy-de-Provence, where Isabelle had a cousin on her mother's side. They rented a small house and Isabelle wrote to Marguerite, enclosing some money and asking her to send a trunkful of clothes. She specified exactly which ones she needed; the occasional item purchased en route had been no substitute for the outfits put together so carefully from shops in Amiens, Paris, and Rouen or for the things she had added or sewn herself.

Resplendent again in her oxblood skirt and linen waistcoat, Isabelle read Marguerite's letter to Stephen as they sat over breakfast in the living room overlooking the street.

Dear Madame,

I did not recognize your writing, perhaps you asked Monsieur to write it for you. I have sent the items you requested with this letter. Lisette is very well, thank you, and is being very good to Monsieur and is looking after him very well, she seems happy. Little Grégoire is also well, though he has not been to school every day. I am keeping well though we do miss you terribly, all of us, it's not the same without you. Monsieur and Madame Bérard have been to call on Monsieur most evenings and I sometimes hear the two gentlemen having long conversations. I have done what you asked and not shown your letter to anyone so they won't know that you are in St.-Rémy. I wonder what it is like there and if you are keeping well. Everything is going along fine in the house but we hope you will come back soon. With warm wishes

from Marguerite.

Stephen walked through the streets of the almost-deserted town. The fountain in the square around which people gathered in summer played coldly into its stone basin. The loose shutters on the houses were blown violently back against the buildings by the autumnal wind that was rolling in from the south. Stephen did not mind the feeling of loneliness, nor the tedium that awaited him in his work. He had found a job as an assistant to a furniture maker. He did the preliminary sawing and planing, and was occasionally allowed to do some of the more skilled work in design and carving. At midday he and the other four men employed in the business would go to a bar and smoke and drink pastis. Although he could see they thought him curious and he tried not to outstay his welcome, he was grateful to them for accepting him into their company.

In the evenings Isabelle would prepare dinner from what she could find in the market. She was critical of what was offered. "Rabbit and tomatoes, that's all they seem to eat," she said as she set down a large pot on the table. "At least at home I could have a choice between a dozen different kinds of meat."

"Though Picardy itself is not the gastronomic centre of France," said Stephen.

"Didn't you like the food?"

"Yes, I did. I liked the lunches with you and Lisette especially. But I don't think a gourmet from Paris would have found much to cheer about in the local restaurants."

"Well, he needn't come then," said Isabelle, nettled at what she took to be a criticism of her own cooking.

"Don't be cross," he said, laying his hand across her cheek.

"The chisel. It was different from the ones I've used before."

"You should be more careful. Now sit down and have some rabbit." After dinner they read books, sitting on either side of the fire. They went to bed early in the room at the back of the house. Isabelle had painted it and sewn new curtains. Her photographs stood on top of the cheap chest of drawers and the huge carved wardrobe bulged with her dresses. There were not many flowers to buy in the market, though there was always lavender to put in the numerous blue pots around the house. Compared to the bourgeois opulence of the boulevard du Cange, the room was stark. The presence of Isabelle's things in it, however, gave it in Stephen's eye something of the atmosphere of her old bedroom. The silk stockings that sometimes trailed from an open drawer and the piles of soft undergarments, the finest fabric the trade could provide, mitigated some of the harshness of the bare boards. In that shared bedroom Stephen felt a privileged proximity to these small intimacies that even her husband had never been permitted. In sleep they were also together, though Stephen found the closeness of Isabelle's unconscious body made him feel uneasy, and he often took a blanket to the sofa in the living room.

He would lie alone, looking up at the ceiling and across to the big fireplace, over to the kitchen range and its black, hanging implements. His thoughts and dreams did not fill up with the big skies of Lincolnshire or the memories of refectory tables and inspections for head lice; nor did he give a backward thought to having abruptly left his employment, to import licences, dockets, or bales of cotton unloaded at the East India Docks. He thought about the moment and the next day and the capsule of existence in which he and Isabelle lived, contained within a town and a world of kinds outside. It was an existence he felt had been won by him but in some wider judgement would not be allowed.

He thought about what he would make at work the next day. Sometimes he thought about nothing at all, but merely traced with his eyes the lines of the timber in the beams above his head.

*

Two months passed and winter calmed the worst of the winds with an icy stillness that made the pavements dangerous and stopped the water in the fountain. Isabelle stayed in the house for most of the day when Stephen was at work. She spent the time altering the decorations to suit her taste and cooking soup or stew for him to eat when he came home. She did not miss the comfortable life she had had in Amiens with the attentive delivery boys from the milliner or the grocer. It did not matter to her that much of her day was spent in performing tasks that even Marguerite preferred to leave to Madame Bonnet. Her cousin, whose husband ran the pharmacy, came to visit her frequently, and she was not lonely. At the end of December no blood came. She looked at the small black diary in which she marked the days and saw that it was due. By the end of January there was still none. This seemed appropriate to Isabelle. It had been hard to think of blood as the mark of new life, of hope, as Jeanne had told her when she first ran to her sobbing in alarm; now in the withholding of it there was a sense of being healed. She had stopped hemorrhaging herself away; her power was turned inward where it would silently create. She said nothing to Stephen.

One Saturday at noon she went to meet him after he had finished work, and they went for a walk in the town. They stopped briefly at a café so he could eat after his morning's exertion, then carried on past the town hall and out along a narrow street of shops toward the outskirts of the place. Their breath left thinning trails behind them as they climbed a slight gradient leading out of town. They arrived in a square, which was the last before the street became a road and vanished into the grey-and-purple countryside.

Isabelle felt lightheaded and went to sit down on a bench. A slight moisture had come up on her forehead, which was now turning cold against her skin under the winter wind.

"I'll find you some smelling salts," said Stephen, and set off for Madame Bonnet's pharmacy.

Isabelle sat quietly, not sure whether to loosen her coat and allow the cool air to reach her or to wrap it more tightly around her to keep out the chill. She intended to tell Stephen about the child she believed she was expecting, but something made her delay. She wished she could present it to him whole without the long toil of pregnancy. She had no wish to be cared for or treated with special regard. She did not feel that the minute organic changes taking place inside her were the concern of anyone else, even of the man who had caused them. Yet she already loved the child. She imagined it to be a boy and could picture his smiling, open face. She didn't see a swaddled baby but a young man with a guileless manner, rather larger than herself, who would fling his arm protectively around her before returning to some undemanding task in the fields. He was never an infant in her imagination, nor a man of substance or achievement for whom she felt ambitious, but always just this ageless, happy male.

She thought of all the mothers who lived in the villages that lined the narrow road leading from the town. Out there were millions of young men, strong, smiling, as her boy would be, working on the land. They never knew each other, never met, never considered any kinship or allegiance they might have to each other or to the country they lived in, because such things existed only in time of war. Isabelle began to look with regret toward her parents and their continuing lives. The coming child had already begun to still her most restless expectations. The need satisfied in her was so deep that she had not previously been aware of it; it was as though she had become conscious of a starving hunger only after having eaten. It seemed to alter the levels and balances of her needs. She felt closer to the girl she had been at home; a broken circle had been rejoined. Although this was a soothing thought, it brought with it some doubts about what she had done; it made her want to be reunited with her family, or at least with her sister Jeanne. It was to her more than to anyone that she wanted to talk. It was she, Isabelle thought, who must be the first to know about the child.

She had started to feel uneasy about the things she and Stephen had done in Azaire's house. Stephen seemed so sure of everything and she had been so overcome by desire that she had trusted him. She had followed her instincts and where there was doubt she was reassured by his certainty and by the tenderness of her feeling for him. Without the stimulus of fear and prohibition, her desire had slackened.

In the southern winter the excesses of their brazen love affair seemed to belong to a different season. She went into a church in St.-Rémy to confess to the local priest, but found she could not bring herself to describe in detail the extent of what had passed between them. The priest cut her off soon after she confessed to the adultery itself. The penance seemed to bear no relation to the sin; it was a formality plucked from the register where such commonplace transgressions were graded. Isabelle felt unsatisfied, and although she did not regret what had happened she began to feel guilty.

Stephen returned with a bottle of salts and sat beside her on the bench.

"I wonder what it is," he said. "Perhaps you haven't been eating well enough at home. Sometimes that makes people feel faint. I brought you a little cake as well."

"No, I don't think it's that. It's nothing serious." She laid her hand on his arm.

"Don't worry about me."

She was smiling at him in a sweet, indulgent way that made it seem as though it was he who needed to be cared for or protected. She broke the cake in half and offered some to him. A shower of yellow crumbs fell on to the wooden seat between them.

There was a whirring and banging of bird's wings above them as a fat pigeon, attracted by the sight of the crumbling cake, descended from the gutter of the building behind them and landed impudently between them on the bench.

"Jesus Christ!" Stephen leapt up from his seat in horror. Isabelle, who had been amused by the bird's fearlessness, looked up in alarm.

"What is it?"

"That bird, that bird. For God's sake. Get rid of it."

"It's only a pigeon, it's just--"

"Get rid of it. Please."

Isabelle clapped her hands, and the plump bird managed to heave itself back into the air, across the square and into the branches of a tree, where it waited in sight of the crumbs.

"What on earth is the matter, my darling? You're trembling."

"I know, I know. I'm sorry. I'll be all right."

"It's just a fat old pigeon, it wouldn't do you any harm."

"I know it wouldn't. It's not that I think it'll attack, it's just some strange fear."

"Come and sit down now. Come on. Sit next to me and let me put my arm round you. That's right. My poor boy. Is that better? Shall I stroke your hair?"

"No, I'm fine. I'm sorry to have made a fuss."

"The noise you made."

"I know."

Stephen gradually stopped trembling. "I've always hated birds. That time I told you about when I hit that boy and they made me go back into the institution. He had been taunting me about some crows that the gamekeeper had nailed up to a fence. I went up and stroked one to show I was not afraid. It had maggots under its wings and drooling, milky eyes." He shuddered.

Isabelle said, "So birds make you think of having to go back to that place?"

"It's partly that. But I had always hated them, from long before that. There's something cruel, prehistoric about them."

She stood up and took his arm. For a moment she looked into his dark brown eyes, into the symmetrical beauty of his pale face. She nodded a little and smiled.

"So there is something that frightens you," she said.

A week later Isabelle was chopping vegetables on the table when she felt a pain just below the waistband of her skirt. It felt as though she was being penetrated by a knitting needle with large walnuts midway up its shaft. She pressed her hands flat over the pain and sat down heavily at the table. If she kept still and concentrated she would keep the baby; she would not allow it to escape. Her manicured fingers tenderly aligned themselves on the area she imagined the barely visible thing to be. Her pulse was transmitted through the fabric of the dress and the soft skin beneath to the chamber where the life was balanced. She willed it to stay, trying to reassure it through the gentleness of her palms, but she felt further sharp probes going right up into her womb. She went to the bedroom and lay down, only to find there was bleeding she could not stop.

In the afternoon she took her coat and found a doctor whose name had been given to her by her cousin. He was a bald man with a deep voice and a roll of fat that almost obscured his stiff white collar. He seemed unmoved by her anxiety and talked in brief, cheerful sentences as he examined her and gestured her to a door off his surgery where she would find a glass container. He told her the result of the test would be available to him within a week and she was to call back then. In the meantime, he said, she should take things quietly and not exert herself. He pressed a large, folded piece of paper into her hand and told her to pay the receptionist as she left.

On the way back to the house, Isabelle stopped at the church and sat in a pew at the back. She had no further desire to confess to the priest, but she wanted to admit, if only to herself, her feelings of guilt about the way she had abandoned herself to physical pleasure. Lurid images of afternoons in the boulevard du Cange came into her mind inside the wintry cold of the church. She could see Stephen's blood-swollen flesh in front of her face, her mouth; she could feel it probing and entering each unguarded part of her, not against her will but at her hungry and desperate insistence.

She opened her eyes and shook the sacrilegious pictures from her mind, feeling ashamed that she had entertained them in a church, even if it had been only to confess them. She looked to the altar, where a wooden crucifix was lit by candles, the waxy flesh below the ribs pierced and bleeding from the Roman soldier's sword. She thought how prosaically physical this suffering had been: the punctured skin on forehead, feet, hands, the parting of flesh with nails and steel. When even the divine sacrifice had been expressed in such terms, it was sometimes hard to imagine in what manner precisely human life was supposed to exceed the limitations of pulse, skin, and decomposition.

Isabelle wrote: My dearest Jeanne, I have missed you so much, not only in the past few weeks but in the years before when we never seemed to meet. How much I regret that now. I feel like a child who has been absorbed in her own game all day and suddenly stops, only to see that it is growing dark and she is far from home with no idea of how to get back.

I terribly want to see you to talk about what has happened. I am pregnant, though I thought last week that I had lost the child. I have strange pains and bleeding, though the doctor says these are quite common. He says there may be a bruise inside which is bleeding and could dislodge the baby. I am to rest and not exert myself.

I have still not told Stephen about it. I don't know why I can't do this. I truly love him, but he frightens me a little. I'm not sure he would understand my joy at being pregnant or how worried I am at the thought of losing it. He hardly talks about such things. Even when he has mentioned his own childhood he speaks as though it were something that happened to someone else. How could he feel attached to something that does not yet exist?

There is something worse, Jeanne. When we were young and I was the baby, no one ever paid me much attention (except you, of course) and I was allowed to do what I liked as long as my dress was kept clean and I was polite at mealtimes. I wanted to explore. Do you remember how I said I would go to Africa? Now I feel I have explored in some other way. It has damaged René, though I owe him very little after the way he treated me. It has also damaged Lisette and Grégoire, and of course you and Mama and Papa, though whether Papa takes much notice of anything these days I don't know. Although I will love the baby and protect it with all my strength, I will not be the ideal mother, compromised as I am.

At the worst moments I feel we have gone too far. Stephen and I were fearless--or unscrupulous you might say--and we had no doubts that what we were doing was right: it was its own justification, Stephen used to say. I feel we have lost our bearings. I am alone, like the child, on the verge of nightfall. Although I am lost I still think I can find my way home if I go now.

This must sound feeble, I know. She has made her choice, you must be saying to yourself, she can't expect to change her mind now. But I want so desperately to see you, I want so very much that you should hold the baby when it comes, take it in your arms. I want to sit on the bed in your room and feel your hand on my head as you start to comb my tangled hair. What mad thoughts and impulses have pushed me out so far from you? _

Isabelle was crying too much to carry on with the letter. Jeanne had been trusting enough when Isabelle first wrote to ask for money. She had never met Stephen, but out of love for her sister had sent funds of her own. It was not fair, Isabelle thought, to ask more of her.

She laid her head on her arms as she sat at the kitchen table. She felt as though she had been tricked. She had believed herself to be one thing, then turned out to be another. How was she to know whether to trust her latest inclinations, or whether to suspect they too might be superseded by other more compelling ones? In her confusion the only constant emotion was her devotion to the child inside her. For reasons she could not disentangle, its well-being could not be guaranteed in the life she was living, far from home, with Stephen, in this frozen town. Stephen also thought of home. His grandfather's cottage had been at the end of a village with a view of the church, some ugly new houses behind it, and the big road going north. In the other direction were flat fields, very pale green in colour, running out into deciduous woods in which the local farmers shot.

He thought how he would take Isabelle to see them one day. He had no sentimental attachment to the idea of home, he did not weep for his thieving grandfather or his absent mother, but he wanted to see Isabelle against this different background, so that the ages of his life would be united. He had surprised himself by the gentleness he had discovered, all of which was now directed toward Isabelle. When he worked the wood in the mornings he imagined how smooth it would need to be if she were to walk barefoot on it. When the tedium of the work lowered his spirits he thought about her face lighting up at his return in the evening. In his affections she had moved from the object of fearful passion to someone whose well-being was his life's concern, though in that transition he had not lost his sense of her dignity, of her superior age and position. Meanwhile Isabelle privately made plans to visit Jeanne in Rouen. She would tell Stephen that she would be gone only a few days, then when she was there she would decide whether or not to return. The moment would come, she told herself, when she would tell Stephen.

Another week passed and her pregnancy became visible. Stephen noticed that she was heavier, but some new-found modesty meant that he never had a chance to examine her properly without her clothes. He noticed that she talked to him less and he wondered why. She seemed troubled and removed. There had been another episode of pain and bleeding.

One day when he was at work she packed a small suitcase and sat down at the table to write a note of explanation.

"I feel we have gone too far and I must turn back," she began, then tore up the sheet of paper and put the pieces in her pocket. There was nothing she could say to explain herself. She looked around the front room with its open range and the heavy wooden mantelpiece that had so much delighted her at first. She went upstairs to take one final look at the rough floorboards of the bedroom and the curtains she had made. Then she left the house and walked to the station. When Stephen returned in the evening he saw at once that some clothes and personal things, her photographs and jewellery, were gone. He opened the wardrobe. Most of her dresses were still there. He took out one she had worn soon after he had arrived at the boulevard du Cange. It was cream-coloured with a rustling skirt, ivory buttons, and a ribbed bodice. He held it against his face, then crushed it in his arms.

He felt like the blocks of wood they sometimes split in the back yard at work, when the axe was first embedded, then raised and driven to the ground, so the wood was cloven in half, from top to toe. No shred or fibre escaped the sundering. In the days that followed, he returned to work. He arrived on time in the morning and exchanged pleasantries with the other men. He swore and spat at the snagging teeth of the saw as the blade caught in the grainy timber. He rolled off the long curls beneath his plane. He sanded with three grades of paper, feeling the surface of the finished wood beneath the soft skin of his fingers. He felt the sweet taste of aniseed on his tongue at midday and watched the viscous liquid cloud over in the glass as he poured in water. He talked and told jokes with the men and showed no sign that anything had changed.

In the evening he laboured with the range, conjuring what he could from the food available, from the variations of rabbit and tomatoes. Then he sat in front of the fire and drank bottles of wine as he looked at the embers.

She had returned because she felt she could save her soul. She had gone home because she was frightened of the future and felt sure a_ _natural order could yet be resumed. He had no choice but to continue with what he had begun. When he had drunk the wine he went upstairs and lay on their bed, his boots on the white cover. He could think of nothing.

He lay and stared at the night beyond the window.

He felt himself grow cold.

FRANCE 1916--PART TWO

Jack Firebrace lay forty-five feet underground with several hundred thousand tons of France above his face. He could hear the wooden wheezing of the feed that pumped air through the tunnel. Most of it was exhausted by the time it reached him. His back was supported by a wooden cross, his feet against the clay, facing toward the enemy. With an adapted spade, he loosened quantities of soil into a bag which he passed back to Evans, his mate, who then crawled away in the darkness. Jack could hear the hammering of timbers being used to shore up the tunnel further back, though where he worked, at the face, there was no guarantee that the clay would hold.

The sweat ran down into his eyes and stung them, making him shake his head from side to side. At this point the tunnel was about four feet across and five feet high. Jack kept sticking the spade into the earth ahead of him, hacking it out as though he hated it. He had lost track of how long he had been underground. He found it easier not to think when he might be relieved, but to keep digging. The harder he worked, the easier it seemed. It must have been six hours or more since he had seen daylight, and even then not much of it, but a thin green haze across the lowlands of the French-Belgian border, lit by the spasmodic explosion of shells. His unit had not been able to return to its billet in the local village. So intense was the activity in this part of the line that the surface troops would not stay in their trenches without the protection of the men underground. The miners had to sleep, for the time being, in chambers at the top of their shafts or in the trenches with the infantry.

Jack felt a hand clutch his elbow. "Jack. We need you. Turner's heard something about twenty yards back. Come on."

Evans pulled him off the cross, and Jack turned stiffly, easing the sweatsoaked vest off his shoulders, and following Evans's crawling buttocks until he could stand. Even the murk of the timbered tunnel was bright to him after the clay face. He blinked in the gloom.

"Over here, Firebrace. Turner said it sounded like digging." Captain Weir, a startling figure with disarrayed hair, in plimsolls and civilian sweater, pushed him over to where Turner, a tired, frightened man, shivering with fatigue in the hot tunnel, was resting against his pick.

"It was just here," said Turner. "I'd got my head close up to this timber and I could hear vibrations. It wasn't our lot, I can tell you."

Jack placed his head against the wall of the tunnel. He could hear the rhythmic gasp of the bellows in the overhead hosepipe draped from the ceiling.

"You'll have to turn off the air-feed, sir," he said to Weir.

"Christ," said Turner, "I can't breathe."

Weir dispatched a message to the surface. Two minutes later the noise ceased and Jack knelt down again. His exceptional hearing was frequently in demand. The previous winter, two miles south of Ypres, he had lowered his ear to rat-level in the trench into a water-filled petrol can and held it there until his head lost all feeling. He preferred the airless quiet of the tunnel to the numbing of his skull.

The men stood motionless as Weir held his finger to his lips. Jack breathed in deeply and listened, his body rigid with effort. There were sounds, distant and irregular. He could not be sure what they were. If they evacuated the tunnel as a precaution and the noise turned out only to have been shellfire or surface movement then time would be lost on their own tunnel. On the other hand, if he failed to identify German digging coming back the other way, the loss of life would probably be greater. He had to be sure.

"For God's sake, Firebrace." He heard Weir's hissing voice in his ear. "The men can hardly breathe."

Jack held up his hand. He was listening for the distinctive knocking made by timber when it was hammered into place against the wall. If a tunnel was very close it was also sometimes possible to hear the sound of spades or of bags of earth being dragged back.

There was a thumping noise again, but it did not sound hollow enough for wood; it was more like the rocking of the earth under shellfire. Jack tightened his nerves once more. His concentration was interrupted by a noise like the delivery of a sack of potatoes. Turner had collapsed on to the tunnel floor. Jack had made up his mind.

He said, "Shellfire."

"Are you sure?" said Weir.

"Yes, sir. As sure as I can be."

"All right. Tell them to turn the air-feed on again. Firebrace, you get back on the cross. You two, get Turner on his feet."

Jack crawled back into the darkness, feet first, where Evans helped him regain his position and passed him the spade. He sank it into the earth ahead of him, feeling glad of the resumption of mechanical toil. Evans's grubbing hands worked invisibly beside him. Toward the end of his shift he began to imagine things. He thought for a second that he was standing in the lighted bar of a London pub, holding up his beer glass to the lamp, looking at the big gilt mirror behind the bar. The bright reflection made him blink, and the flickering of his eyes brought back the reality of the clay wall ahead of him. Evans's hand scraped. Jack struck out ahead of him again, his arms grinding in their joints.

Evans swore beneath his breath and Jack reached out and gripped him in rebuke. Evans had tried to light a candle but there was not enough oxygen. The match burned bright red but would not flame. The two men stopped and listened. They could hear the roar of their breathing magnified in the silence. They held their breath and there was nothing. They had dug to the end of the world. Jack could smell the damp earth and the sweat from Evans's body. Normally he could hear the timbers behind them being put into place by hand, pushed quietly against the clay. There was not even this cautious sound. The narrow tunnel closed round them. Jack felt Evans's hand grip his arm. His breath rasped out again. Something must be happening behind them.

"All right," Jack said. "Get me off this thing." Evans pulled the wooden support away and helped roll Jack over. They crawled back until they saw lamplight. Weir was half-standing in the low tunnel. He clutched his ear, then gestured them to lean against the side walls. He began to mouth an explanation but before he could finish there was a roar in the tunnel and a huge ball of earth and rock blew past them. It took four men with it, their heads and limbs blown away and mixed with the rushing soil. Jack, Weir, and Evans were flattened against the side wall by the blast and escaped the path of the debris. Jack saw part of Turner's face and hair still attached to a piece of skull rolling to a halt where the tunnel narrowed into the section he had been digging. There was an arm with a corporal's stripe on it near his feet, but most of the men's bodies had been blown into the moist earth.

Weir said, "Get out before another one goes."

Back toward the trench someone had already got a fresh lamp down into the darkness.

Jack took Evans's shoulder. "Come on, boy. Come on now."

It was dusk on the surface and the rain was falling. Stretcher-bearers pushed past Jack as he stood blinking at the top of the tunnel, breathing the damp air. Weir dismissed the men and went to find a field telephone. Jack walked from the tunnel head to his place in the trench.

Letter for you, Jack," said Bill Tyson. "Mail came this morning." They sat huddled beneath a wooden frame with a groundsheet stretched over it. Arthur Shaw, the third man who shared their shelter, was trying to make tea on a primus stove.

Jack's letter was from his wife in Edmonton. "My Dearest Jack," it started.

"How are you keeping?"

He folded it away inside his pocket. He could not bring his mind to bear on the distant world her handwriting suggested. He was afraid he would not understand her letter, that she would be telling him something important his mind was too tired to register. He drank the tea Shaw had conjured from the gloom.

"Turner's dead," he said. "And at least two others."

"Didn't you hear anything?" said Tyson.

"Yes, but I thought it was shellfire. There must be a tunnel."

"Don't worry," said Tyson. "Anyone can make a mistake." There was a whining sound in the air about a hundred yards to their right as another shell came over.

"Any news about when we're getting out of here?" said Jack.

"Supposed to be tomorrow," said Shaw, "but I can't see us getting down the line while this shelling's going on. Did Weir say anything?"

"No, I don't think he knows."

The three men looked at each other with expressionless, exhausted eyes. Tyson and Shaw had been together for a year, since they had been drawn to enlist by the six shillings pay on offer to men with experience of working underground. Both had been miners in Nottingham, though Tyson had done little work beneath the surface, having been chiefly concerned with the maintenance of machinery. Shaw claimed to be thirty-one, but might have been ten years older. He would work like a packhorse in the tunnel but had little enthusiasm for the military discipline imposed on them by the infantry.

In Jack's life they had replaced two fellow-Londoners with whom he had worked on the construction of the Central Line. Both these men, Allen and Mortimer, had died in an explosion on the Messines Ridge near Ypres the year before. Jack, already immune to death, let their white faces drift from his memory. He had succumbed only with reluctance to the friendship of Tyson and Shaw, but found to his dismay that their company had grown important to him. When they lay down to sleep, he let Shaw rest his head on his knees, which were folded inward to keep out of the line of the trench itself. Sometimes he awoke to find a rat had crawled across his face. At other hours he lay rocked between the fear of being buried by a shell, consumed in the earth they had crawled under, and the overpowering need to lose consciousness of the noise that assailed them. There were wooden planks beneath them that seemed to lie against their bones. Even Shaw's big flanks and shoulders gave him no cushioning of flesh as he rolled and tossed in half-sleep. Captain Weir's face appeared round the corner of the groundsheet. He was wearing a waterproof cape over his white sweater and had changed into knee-high rubber boots.

"Shaw, you're needed in the tunnel," he said. "I know you were in this morning, but they need help to clear the debris. You'd better report for duty, too, Tyson."

"I'm on sentry duty at ten, sir."

"Firebrace will have to do it for you. Come on, move yourselves. Sergeant Adams is in charge of the working party. Go and report to him."

"Finish my tea, Jack," said Shaw. "Don't let the rats have it." With the others gone, Jack tried to sleep. His nerves were too stretched. He closed his eyes but could see only the dark of the tunnel face. He kept hearing the sudden quiet that had made him and Evans stop and hold their breath. He did not berate himself for failing to identify the sound of a German tunnel. He had done his best, and the men might have died anyway, perhaps in a worse way, with gas in their lungs or lying beyond help in no-man's-land. They would find that part of Turner's face and head and they would bury it beneath the earth with any other bits of bone and uniform they could bring back from underground. He thought of Shaw's big hands sifting through the blown soil. For a moment he relaxed into sleep, but then the decontraction of his body made him jump and he awoke again, his body tensed and ready to fight.

Abandoning sleep, he took out the letter from his breast pocket and lit a stub of candle he found in the side compartment of Tyson's pack.

My Dearest Jack,

How are you keeping? All our thoughts and prayers are with you. We read the newspapers each day, we look at the casualty columns first. There doesn't seem to be any news of where you are. We have had Mother staying and she says to tell you she got your letter and she is sending another parcel with some soap and cigarettes and some gooseberries from the garden. I hope they won't be too ripe by the time they get to you.

I am very sorry to have to tell you little John has been taken ill. He has been very poorly indeed and the doctor says it is diphtheria. He was in hospital in Tottenham last week and he is a little better, but his temperature is still very high. As you will imagine it is not easy getting medicine and the doctors to look after him with so much going to the men at the front which is how it should be. He is in good spirits when he is awake and we have seen him in the hospital. He asks me to send you his love. I am sorry to bother you with this news but I think it is for the best. He does miss you very much and I know he loves you. Our prayers are with you and I send my love to you From Margaret With the mail had come rations. There were some tins of stew and bully beef that were held over to midday, but there was bread and jam to go with half a mug of tea. Hungry from his work underground, Jack ate quickly at an improvised station at the head of the communication trench. Sometimes the men who brought the rations had unreliable news of troop movements and plans from behind the lines; today there was no word. Jack ate in silence before returning to his position.

His son John had been born eight years before, when Margaret was nearly forty and they had almost despaired of having children. He was a bright-eyed boy, thin and fair, with a vacant expression that often gave way to shrill laughter. His physical frailty was compounded by the simplicity of his mind. He was tolerated by the other boys in the street when they needed someone to make up numbers. He was the goalkeeper in their unrefereed games of football and was allowed to bat at cricket only in an emergency.

Jack looked closely at his wife's careful handwriting and tried to bring the boy's face to mind. In the murk of the rainy evening, with only Tyson's piece of candle for light, it was difficult to see. He closed his eyes and pictured his son's knees beneath the ragged grey shorts, the big teeth he revealed when he smiled, the untidy hair through which he would sometimes run a fatherly hand. At the front he hardly ever thought of home. In his wallet was a picture of Margaret, but none of John. There was always too much to think of to allow his mind to dwell on inessentials. He had not been home for almost a year. He found it unbelievable when Shaw told him that if the atmospheric conditions were right the guns could be heard in London. The place in which he found himself, often underground, with no clear idea of where the nearest village was, seemed as distant from those streets and houses as if he now inhabited another world. That night he stood on the firestep at the end of the trench on sentry duty for Tyson, who had still not returned from underground. The miners were not supposed to do sentry duty, but their officer had struck a deal with his opposite number in the infantry. In view of enemy activity and the consequent danger underground, the infantry would provide fighting cover in the tunnels in return for the miners' doing some of their fatigues. For Jack the days and nights had ceased to be distinct. There was the darkness of the tunnel, the twilight of late afternoon under the intermittent light of shellfire, and the blackness of the trench at night beneath the curtain of a groundsheet.

He listened for noises from the no-man's-land in front of him. German night patrols had been out, with the aim of checking on enemy movements and spreading anxiety. Jack imagined that his side, too, had men in listening posts who would hear anything before he did, but in his trench the sentries were never told in case it made them complacent. The infantry battalion came from London; they referred to the tunnellers as "sewer rats" and were anxious to prove how ineffective they were as soldiers.

Jack was so tired that he had passed the stage when sleep was possible. His body had found some automatic course, powered by what source of wakefulness he couldn't say, that kept him awake if not alert while other men nodded and dozed on the ground, some slumped as though dead on the floor of the trench, some leaning with their backs to the wooden boards. From further down the line he could hear trench repair parties at work.

John's face was now in his mind quite brightly: the wan, solitary boy at the tail of the street gang, the stumbling baby with his troublesome steps. He could hear his piping London voice with its parrot greetings and unfounded optimism. He pictured his boy in the high-ceilinged hospital ward with the yellow smudge of gas lamps, the starched headdresses of the nurses, and the smell of soap and disinfectant. Sleep came to him like an unseen assailant. It was not the sinister light of the ward but the lamps of a huge bar in a pub on Lea Bridge Road: the men in suits and flat caps, smoke rising, ale glasses held aloft. There were other pictures, end to end: the kitchen of his parents' house in Stepney; a park, a dog; the lit pub again, thronged with people; John's face, the dear boy. He was aware of a great temptation being offered, some ease of mind, some sleep for which he would sell the lives of his comrades, and he embraced the offer, not aware that he was already slumbering, head slumped forward, cradled between the aching shoulders that had dug out French earth for hours without respite.

He did not know he was asleep until he was awake again, feeling himself slump forward as a boot cracked into his ankle.

"What's your name?" It was an officer's voice.

"Firebrace, sir."

"Oh, it's you, Firebrace." He recognized Captain Weir's surprised tone.

"Were you asleep?" The first officer's voice was cold.

"I don't know, sir. I just wasn't listening and--"

"You were asleep on duty. It's a court-martial offence. See me tomorrow at six. Your sergeant will bring you. You know the punishment."

"Yes, sir."

Jack watched the two men walk on and swing left at the end of the fire-bay, the red ends of their cigarettes glowing.

He was relieved by Bob Wheeler, another tunneller. He went back to find Tyson and Shaw asleep beneath their wooden frame. There was no room for him with them, so he took a handful of cigarettes from his pack and went back down the communication trench, past the halfhearted challenge of a sentry. He climbed over the back of the support trench and found himself in an area where piles of ammunition and supplies lay strapped under tarpaulin in the drizzle. There was a group of men, including a sergeant, on guard nearby and he went to make himself known to them. He told them he was going to the latrines, and they let him pass. He found a tree that had not been damaged by shellfire and sat down beneath it, lighting a cigarette and sucking in the smoke. Before the war he had never touched tobacco; now it was his greatest comfort.

If he was found guilty by court-martial he could be shot. The tunnellers had become more and more part of the army; although they had not undergone the humiliating drills and punishments handed out to the infantry before they were deemed ready to fight, they had lost the separate status they had had at first. When Jack had arrived at Ypres with his fellow-Londoners Allen and Mortimer, he was told they would spend the war there while different divisions of infantry came and went, but to begin with they found themselves in a constant and bewildering state of movement, the very trouble the organization had been designed to prevent. They had become soldiers and were expected to kill the enemy not only by mining but with bayonet or bare hands if necessary.

This was not the life Jack had envisaged when he volunteered. At the age of thirty-eight he could reasonably have avoided service, but he had no work in London. Margaret was ten years older than he was and had enough to do looking after John. She managed cleaning jobs from time to time, but the money was not enough for them. Jack didn't think the war would last long; he told Margaret he would be home within the year, having saved half his pay.

She was a practical woman of Irish descent who was drawn to Jack by his humour and his kindliness. They had met at the wedding of one of her eight sisters, who was marrying a workmate of Jack's. At the party after the service Jack was drinking beer and doing conjuring tricks for a group of children. He had a big, square face with hair parted in the middle. She liked the way he talked to the children before he began joking with the other men who had come along to see their friend married.

"I'm an old maid," she told Jack when he went round to visit her a week later.

"You don't want to be walking out with me." But he seemed to know exactly what he wanted and they were married three months later.

Lighting another cigarette beneath his tree, listening to the screech of a shell going over the British line about half a mile south, Jack Firebrace began to tremble. He had thought himself immune to death; he thought he had hardened himself against it, but it was not so. If they found him guilty they would take him alone at daybreak to some secluded place behind the lines--a glade in the forest, a yard behind the farm wall--and shoot him dead. They would ask members of his own unit, miners and diggers, men who had not even been trained to fire on the enemy, to do the job. Some would have blanks and some would not; no one would know whether the fatal shot had been fired by Tyson or Shaw or Wheeler or Jones. He would fall like the millions of the dead who had gone down into the mud: baker's boys from Saxony, farm labourers from France, and factory workers from Lancashire, so much muscle and blood in the earth.

He could not look on this possibility without shaking. When there was a battle or a raid, they expected to die; it was the losses through sniper fire, through shells and mortars, the blowing of the tunnel, the continuous awareness that any moment could bring death in a number of different ways that had been harder to understand. Slowly Jack had become accustomed even to this. It took him a day of sleep each time they went into rest before he could adjust to not being in constant fear; then he would begin to laugh and tell stories in the surging relief that overcame them. The indifference he had cultivated, however, was to the extermination of the enemy, his colleagues, and his friends; he was not, he now admitted to himself, indifferent to the prospect of his own death.

He held his face in his hands and prayed to God to save him. There was no task he wanted to complete, no destiny by which he felt impelled: he merely wanted to see Margaret again. He wanted to touch John's hair. My son, he thought, as he sat in the rain, my darling boy. It would make no difference to the outcome of the war whether he himself lived or died; it made no difference whether today it was Turner whose head was blown from his body, or whether tomorrow it was his or Shaw's or Tyson's. Let them die, he prayed, shamefully; let them die, but please God let me live.

Through the night he sat unchallenged and alone, forcing his exhausted mind to bring out memories of his life, pictures of what he had done that might go with him and comfort him if he had to face the line of rifles pointed at his head. There were games of football on Hackney Marshes, the comradeship of workers on the construction of the London Underground; odd faces and voices from childhood; his son. There was nothing to make it seem a life worth saving. In the end his memory offered him only fragments of early childhood: sitting in front of the kitchen range, the smell of his mother as she kissed him in his bed. With them came a desire to sleep, to surrender.

He stood up and stretched his stiff arms and legs, then slunk back to his position in the trench and crept in beside Tyson and Shaw. Shortly before dawn he went to look for Sergeant Adams.

"Come along, then," said Adams. "Smarten yourself. Get your belt on straight." He was not the kind of sergeant most men feared. He had a mocking sense of humour and seldom shouted. The men privately admired him.

"I've heard all about you, sleeping on the job," he said. Jack said nothing. He was ready to die.

"You may be lucky. Some of these young officers blow hot and cold. Mr. Wraysford is the strangest one I've seen. Law unto himself. This way." Adams walked him down a narrow trench in the rear of which were several dugouts. He pointed to an entrance at the end of the line and told him to go down on his own.

Jack looked up at the rim of the world that was appearing through the grey light: the burned and blasted trees, the once-green fields now uniformly brown where all the earth had been turned by shells. He was reconciled to leaving it. He went down the wooden ladder and found a gas curtain across a homemade door. He knocked and waited.

A voice told him to come in and he wrenched the door open. There was a strong smell of kerosene inside. Pipe smoke obscured the contents of the room. Jack was able to make out a wooden bunk in the lower half of which a figure lay hunched in sleep, and a makeshift table and chairs. It was better made than most of the squalid arrangements he had seen, though the primitive boarding that made the walls and the tinker's use of odd cups, candles, wicks, and nails to do duty for missing essentials gave it a primitive appearance.

"Who are you?" He was addressed by a lieutenant, who was one of two officers sitting at the table. The other was Jack's own company commander, Captain Weir, on a visit to the infantry.

"Firebrace, sir. You told me to report to you at six this morning."

"Why?"

"I was asleep on sentry duty."

The officer stood up and walked over to where Jack was standing. He brought his face up close. Jack saw a man with dark hair that was going grey at the sides; he had a thick moustache that obscured his upper lip and big brown eyes that stared thoughtfully at him. He might have been any age from twenty-five to forty.

"I have no recollection at all."

"I think you were going to put me on a charge, sir."

"I don't think I could do that. You're not in my unit. You're a tunneller, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"One of yours, Weir."

Jack looked toward Weir and noticed the almost-empty bottle of whisky that stood on the table. There were only two glasses.

"Sit down, Firebrace. Have a drink," said Weir.

"No thank you, sir. If I--"

"Sit down anyway."

Jack looked round. He didn't want to sit on a chair that might belong to the officer commanding the infantry, an irascible man called Gray whom he had heard giving orders. He wondered where he was: bullying the sentries, perhaps. Jack took the chair that Weir kicked toward him. Weir was back in his soft shoes and white sweater. He looked unshaven and his eyes were bloodshot. Jack looked down, afraid to meet his gaze. Also on the table were five playing cards laid out in the shape of a star, face down, with thin trails of sand between them. In the centre of the formation was a carved wooden figure and a stump of candle.

"This is Lieutenant Wraysford," said Weir. "His platoon is next to your section in the line. His are the men we are protecting against mines. Last night he had two men out in a listening post. Perhaps he was worried about them. Is that right, Wraysford?"

"No. Brennan and Douglas would be all right. They know what they're doing."

"Don't you want to talk to this man?" said Weir.

"I would if I could remember who he was." He turned to Jack. "There'll be some tea in a minute if you don't want whisky. I'll tell Riley to make an extra cup." As Jack's eyes grew accustomed to the smoky dugout he saw that parts of the walls were covered with fabric. It looked like expensive foreign silk or cotton. On top of a small locker were more wooden carvings of human figures. There were no photographs on the bookshelves in the corner, though there were some amateurish sketches of heads and bodies. He became aware that the lieutenant had been following his gaze.

"Do you draw?" he said.

"A bit," said Jack. "I don't get enough time now. Or the quiet." A tray with three mugs of tea was brought in by Riley, a small grey-haired man in neat batman's uniform. He reached up to a bag suspended from the ceiling, out of range of rats, and produced some sugar.