Burger's Daughter

Two

The silk tent of morning sea tilted, pegged to keyhole harbours where boats nosed domestically like animals at a trough; Vauban’s ancient fort squatted out to the water; two S-shaped buildings towered, were foreshortened, leaned this side and that of the wing, rose again. Lavender mountains with a snail-trail spittle of last winter’s snow swung a diagonal horizon across the fish-bowl windows. Down to earth, the plane laid itself on the runway as the seagulls (through convex glass under flak of droplets) breasted the sea beside it.

Passengers who disperse from the last step of a plane’s stairway all hurry but their oncoming seems slowed, their legs don’t carry them, they’re seen through the horizontal waverings-away of a telescopic lens. The long last moment before anybody is recognizable: a woman tipped into her mouth the drop of melted sugar settled in the bottom of an espresso thimble and stood at the glass wall. Her eyes held the moving figures, her expression becoming an offering like a bunch of flowers held ready, but her head hawked forward in tense curiosity.

She left the bar and hurried to the little crowd gathered at the barrier before the passport officers’ booths. Among the elegant homosexuals with bodies of twenty-year-olds and faces like statues of which only the head remains of the ancient original, the blonde with nipples staring through her shirt, the young man with a Siamese cat on a leash, the well-preserved women wearing gold chains and sharkskin pants attended by husbands and poodles, the demanding American children with wet gilt hair, the black-clad grandmothers borne up emotionally by daughters and the frilly infants held by young fathers in leather jackets, she was the one: rounded knuckles of cheekbone, brilliant blue dabs under clotted lashes, wrinkled made-up lids, tabby hair. The one with the neck rising elegantly although the bosom was big and she was low in the welcoming crowd — stocky, and when they could be seen the legs had the ex-dancer’s hard lumpy calves and fleshless ankles.

Her gaze, pushing through the queue bunched behind the immigration booths, setting aside this one from that, passed over once and then returned, singled out. She was watching the approach of a girl sallow and composed with fatigue. The girl had curly hair — dark girl — and a look around the jaw, a set of the mouth (that was it: the woman’s expression deepened strongly) although the eyes were clear and light, not what she was looking for.

They had seen each other. The understanding spun a thread along which they were being drawn together while the girl took her turn; almost at the immigration booth, now; now there, putting the green passport on the counter for an official hand to draw under the glass partition; bending suddenly to dig in the bulging sling-bag (a hitch? a document missing? — the woman craned on her toes.) The eyes-down face of someone under surveillance. A faint, sideways smile to the woman watching. (Nothing wrong; just the usual traveller’s start of anxiety that something has been remembered too late.) The girl was pushing the green passport into a pocket on the outside of the bag. She drew the zip firmly closed. She moved on, she was in: received. Coming across the few yards, through the barrier, the whole of her could be seen clear of other people, small girl with a sexy, ignored body (the mother had always somehow ignored her own beauty, found it of no account) dressed in the inevitable jeans outfit yet never in a thousand years would have passed for one of the young from yachts and hotels and villas wearing the same thing. Pretty. But not young-looking. A face seen on a child who looks like a woman.

The corners of the mouth dented but the lips remained tightly closed, the strangely light eyes were fixed on the woman with an expression of self-amazement, as if the girl doubted her own existence at that moment, in that place.

They had never seen one another before. The woman’s worn lilac-coloured espadrilles splayed sturdily in welcome. She held her arms in a wide tackle and her mouth was parted, smiling, smiling.

The aircraft Rosa Burger boarded was bound for France. The destination on her ticket was Paris but after two nights in a small hotel where she did not unpack she flew back in the direction she had come from, south, to Nice. There she was met on a beautiful May morning by a Madame Bagnelli, who when she was very young had gone to the Sixth Congress in Moscow, had been or tried to be a dancer, was once married to Lionel Burger. She had a son by him living in Tanzania whom she had not seen since he was a student; she took his daughter home to her house in a medieval village, preserved to make money out of tourists, where — the people who had known her in South Africa heard — she had been living for years.

She talked all the way above the noise of the old Citroen into which she settled herself like a sitting hen. There was an impression of speed beyond the car’s capacity, because of her style of driving and the jig of windows that opened like flaps. She had had a terrible feeling it was the wrong day — she should have been at the airport yesterday — she had rummaged everywhere to check with the letter — put away too carefully — that was why she was so excited, relieved when she saw—

— You’d given me the phone number.—

— Oh I was afraid if you arrived and I wasn’t there — you’d just have gone off again — I was so worried—

Changing from lane to lane of traffic along a sea-front, bursts of conversation in another tongue, scenes from unimaginable lives in the space of a car window and the pause at a red light, palm-trees, whiffs of nougat against carbon monoxide, pink oleanders, fish shining in a shop open to the street, pennants fluttering round a car mart, old men in pomponned caps bending over balls, shop-signs silently mouthed — Oh that — fort, château, same thing, all their castles were fortifications. That’s Antibes. We’ll go one day — the Picasso museum’s inside. Good god, what’s he think he’s doing, quel con, my god, ça va pas la tête, êh? These kids on scooters, they attack like wasps. It’s twelve o’clock, that’s why this town is hell, everyone rushing home for lunch…don’t worry, we’ll make it, I just must stop for bread — are you hungry? I hope you’ve got a good appetite, mmh? — Would you rather have lettuce or cress? You must say. Start off the way we’re going to go on, you know — I’m not going to treat you like a visitor.—

She came out of the baker’s and pushed a baton of bread through the window. At the greengrocer next door she turned to smile at her passenger. In the wisp of tissue-paper that belted it, the bread crackled under the pressure of Rosa Burger’s hand; she sniffed the loaf like a flower; the woman’s smile broadened and mimed — go on, take a bite. Children in pinafores were being dragged past by brusque young women or old ones in slippers who blocked the pavement while they gossiped. On balconies, men ate lunch in their vests. The tables outside a bar were tiny islands round which people greeted each other with a kiss on either cheek. Rosa Burger sat in the car like an effigy borne in procession. Out of the town, past plant nurseries and cement works, the light on the new leaves of vines hunched like cripples, grey-headed olives surviving among villas, the sea appearing and disappearing from bend to bend — They told me over the phone, a direct plane tonight so of course I thought my god I‘ve — then I told myself, stop fussing… I’m so glad you’ve come before the pear and apple’s quite over — look — up there, d’you know whose house that is? Renoir lived there—

A frail foam pricked through by green on trees hollowed like wine glasses; where? where? The girl gazed at a day without landmarks. No sooner was something pointed out than it was behind; to the driver all was so familiar she saw what was no longer visible. The car began to buck up a steep gravelly way between the park secrecy of European riverine forest, roadside tapestry flowers ashy with dust. Like the sea, a castle turned this way and that. — Poor things, more tin cans than fish in our river these days, but they keep trying. You actually do see some with a tiddler or two… — A child’s pop-up picture book castle at the pinnacle of grey and yellow-rose houses and walls, rising from the apartment blocks that filled the valley like vast white ocean liners berthed from the distant sea. Awnings bellied; leaning people were dreamily letting the car pass across their eyes an image like that in the convex mirror set up at the blind intersection. Shutters were closed; unknown people hidden undiscoverable behind there. A woman on a vélo with a child dangling legs through the parcel-carrier was drawn level with, greeted, wobbling and puttering, overtaken. — She does for me, you’ll meet her on Tuesday, what hell with that child when it was little, peed on my bed and when it started to crawl! It was into everything, biscuits crumbled on my papers and books — how do you feel? About children? I am a grandmother I suppose, but for me it’s so long since I handled… How old are you, Rosa? I was thinking last night, how old can she be, that girl — twenty-three? No? Nearer twenty-five? Seven — my god.—

A woman with gold tinsel hair in the sun leaned on a cane to let them pass, a middle-aged man spilling belly over jeans gestured with his pipe, the girl with a smile of oriental persistence held out of the car’s way a spaniel dancing about her on its lead: the driver waved to all without looking. — You’re in a room at the top, a lot of stairs to climb, I’m warning you — but there’s a terrace, the roof of the adjoining house actually but they let me fix it up. I thought you’d like to be able to step out when you wake up in the mornings. Sunbathe, do what you like. Get away from me or anyone, quite private. If you’d rather you can have the smaller room on the first floor? — well, you’ll see…a jumble of a house like all the houses, the whole village’s a warren, every one’s built against the next, if my plumbing goes wrong you have to go to the neighbour’s to find the leak…you’ll see, you’ll just say if you’d rather come downstairs. But that room adjoins mine; I don’t mind, but you might… we could close off the door between us, of course. The top room used to be Bagnelli’s room, when he was home…I should tell you, he died four years ago. It was fifteen years. We never actually married, but everyone…—

Suddenly the car braked, the forearm tanned with tea-leaf marks went out to stop Rosa from pitching forward.

— Didn’t I tell you. So there you are! The day, the time, everything. Pure nerves. What a state Madame Bagnelli was in about your arrival. I had to dash after her with the eggs she left in the épicerie this morning. You don’t look too forbidding to me — A man’s voice with the precision of an English stage vicar, and a long, thick beardless face under a captain’s braided peak bent to the window.

— Yes, safe and sound — Rosa Burger, Constance Darby-Littleton. Are you walking up the hill…?—

— Of course I want to walk. It’s my constitutional. I thought everyone was perfectly aware of my habits by now — Night-blue slits between puffy lids had no whites, no eyelashes, and moved from driver to passenger like mechanical eyes set in one of those anthropomorphic clock-faces. The car passed on at the level of matron’s breasts slung under a checked shirt.

In a parking ground scooped out below trees a fat young Bacchus wearing cement-stained cowboy boots leapt from a pick-up loaded with broken tiles and window-frames. — Madame Bagnelli—Loud, indignant and laughing exchange; not necessary to understand the language adequately to be able to follow that this was workman and client taking up some long-standing wrangle. — He came around and couldn’t get in! Now isn’t that just too bad! How many days I’ve waited in for nothing! I won’t see him for another six weeks and after another dozen phone-calls. He’s supposed to put a floor in my cave—rather the junk-pit that’s hopefully going to be a cave. He gets whatever’s there. — The car was held on the clutch at the top of the spiral where the road forked at a broken city wall. The castle waved bright handkerchiefs of unidentified nations. The car announced itself with a gay warning blast, turning right. Greasy locks and a beautiful, lover’s face were approaching. — Madame Bagnelli — the man counted out three letters from his mail-bag and presented them to her; they thanked each other as if for the pleasure of it, using that language. Rosa Burger was presented by a new name with the accent on the final syllable: the friend — all the way from Africa! — who would be getting mail so addressed.

The car swung past the postman into a steep little alley blocked by a studded double gate and she was about to get out to open it for the first time on a house where she was told she would sleep, up flights of stairs, a room with a terrace: for that moment, there was nothing behind that gate with its push-button bell and card under a plastic slot, Bagnelli.

— What do I call you?—

— Call me?—

— Do I call you Madame Bagnelli, or — (Colette was the name, ‘Colette Swan’. ‘Colette Burger’.)

The woman pressed back from arms braced against the steering wheel; she relaxed suddenly, turned her head full on with an expression of sly voluptuous complicity, as if her hand closed on the shy, casual question as on some inert but electrified shape that came to life on contact. — Katya. You call me Katya.—

On the gate there was a note under Scotch tape and a big dried sunflower like a dead burst star. MADAME BAGNELLI URGENT — exclamation mark scored within its outline. The gate dragged screeching across courtyard paving; the smell of stony damp and a perfume never smelled before; and then it brushed Rosa Burger’s face as the door was opened, the suitcase bumped through: lilac, real European lilac.

— Dah-dah-dah-dah; dedah — well that can wait. Why the hell should I phone the moment I come in… — The note flew into a straw basket. — You want to go straight up? No — let’s just dump everything. I’ve got a little (swimming colours, fronds blobbing out of focus and a sea horizon undulating in uneven panes of glass) — just a little something ready — the glass doors shook open, the new arrival was on a leafy shelf of sun, offered to the sea midway between sky and tumbling terraces of little dark trees decorated with oranges. She smelled cats and geranium. The elaborate toy villas of the dead in a steep cemetery took on their façades the light off the sea. She felt it on her cheeks and eyelids. She saw — saw a crack up a white urn that was a line of ants, a tiny boat like a fingernail scored across the sea, saw the varicose vein wriggling up behind the knee of the ex-dancer putting down the tray with the bottle of champagne in a bucket.

They drank leaning together on the balustrade, great open spaces of the sea drawing away the farting stutter of motorcycles and gear-whine of trucks, music and voices wreathing their own, from other terraces and balconies. Now and then something came tinkling-clear to Rosa Burger: once a man’s sudden derisive laugh, the gobbling bark when a dog has a cat treed; a woman’s yell to stop someone driving off. These shattered lightly against her; her palm felt the still cold of the glass and her tongue the live cold of the wine. They sat in tilted chairs with their feet up on the balustrade among falls of geranium and ice-plant drowsy with big European bees in football stripes. The woman toed off the heel of each espadrille and ran the arch of her bare foot over the head and back of a Manx cat. (—Not mine but he likes me better than his owner. — ) Out of her boots Rosa’s feet were released cramped and marked, her jeans were pushed up to the knee. The woman was telling the history of the village with the enjoyment of one who projects herself into the impression it must have for someone who has never seen anything like it before. — A nobility of robber barons, from the crusades to the casinos, a suzerainty — do I mean sovereignty — these weren’t kings — They laughed together in seraglio ease. — Feudal exploitation (these terms slipped in as an old soldier will use the few phrases he remembers from a foreign campaign, when he meets a native of that country) right up to the time of the French revolution. That big garden with the cypress and fig, here behind us, just below the castle, you must have noticed the trees as we drove — it was a monastery. My friend Gaby Grosbois’ house is part of the monks’ pig-sties. But after the revolution the new industrial entrepreneurs and businessmen bought up these church properties for nothing and used them as their country houses, they lived like the aristocrats. During our war the Resistance in this part of the country had its headquarters in the cellars. Oh you’ll hear all the tales, they love to have someone who hasn’t heard them before — everyone a hero of ‘the Resistance, if you want to believe…but a few years ago — Bagnelli was still alive, no; just after — it was going to be made into an hotel, some actor was interested in the investment. It came to nothing. Now it belongs to an arms dealer, not that they ever come here, no one sees them…the old Fenouil couple keep up the garden. The suzerain changes his nationality… Japanese are the ones buying up big properties here now; North Africans are the serfs making roads and living in their bidonville—squatters. And people like me (laughing) — we manage to survive in between. — Again and again, the cat slid under the high-arched foot. — I can imagine how you’ve been brought up (eyes closed and smiling face tilted back into the sun a moment)…here you forget about degrees of social usefulness — good god, nobody would understand what on earth I’m talking about. But on the other hand I suppose you’ll be surprised at the way anybody will do anything; no question that what you do’s infra dig — Back and forth the cat raked by maroon-painted toenails. — I cook for Americans sometimes, in the summer — I know the kind of French food they like. Solvig pays me to vacuum her books and pack away her winter clothes once a year. She’s a friend, but she’s the widow of a big Norwegian publisher, she’s got money, and so… I look after the local hardware shop when the owner goes skiing for her two weeks every January. Cold little hole, selling toilet rolls and plastic dishes…when the French are concentrating on making money they make no attempt to be comfortable. Other friends, a Greek painter and his boy-friend — they take jobs at the race-course when the trotting season starts. But women aren’t hired. Oh I patch up old furniture—‘restore antiques’ —sounds better, eh. Sometimes I get a chance to give English lessons — I taught dancing at the Maison des Jeunes until I got so heavy the floorboards quaked.—

— And your husband? What was he?—

— Bagnelli? — A long-drawn ah-h-h-h, amused, the touching on things that couldn’t be explained even in the easy lucidity of wine and fine weather, in half-an-hour’s understanding. — D’you know what he was when I met him — a captain in the French navy. In Toulon. But here, oh he did a lot of things up and down the coast, a wine agency, once it was motor-racing, a tin mine in Brazil — oh lord. And always yachts, yachts — he had shares in them, or was promised shares in them, he sailed them for other people, he even designed them—

— I shared a cottage with someone who planned to go round the world. But to see a yacht being built in a backyard four hundred miles from the sea—

— You? — The smiling woman allowed herself to look at the girl as she had wanted to since she first settled recognition upon her at the airport.

Dissolving in the wine and pleasure of scents, sights and sounds existing only in themselves, associated with nothing and nobody, Rosa Burger’s sense of herself was lazily objective. The sea, the softly throbbing blood in her hands lolling from the chair-arms, time as only the sundial of the wall’s advancing shadow, all lapped tidelessly without distinction of within or around her. — Like someone in prison. Everything it might do or be — but it couldn’t function. Locked. Landlocked.—

— You never saw it launched? When they slip into the sea — oh yes, it’s true, marvellous, it’s a coming to life — I used to cry — The woman produced liquid brilliance in her eyes, a past seductiveness. The carefully-oiled and tanned flesh between her breasts wrinkled shinily under the pressure of folded arms like a skin forming on cooling fatty liquid. — Tell me — did you know me? Or — (the girl’s down-turned considering smile) — of course you saw I was the one who’d recognized who you were and so — I mean have you ever seen a photograph?—

— When I went through Lionel’s things. There were one or two taken in England and in Russia. Damn it — I should have brought them. The Soviet Union ones — one can recognize them at once, even if the background doesn’t give much indication. The same with those of my mother; you know Ivy Terblanche? And Aletta?—

— Oh I knew them all, all of them. So long ago!—

— My mother with Aletta on a railway station, holding flowers. You can see at once which are the Russian ones — you all look so exalted.—

— Yes, yes. — A wailing laugh. — Like pop-star fans. Come. The last drop between us. Although it’s warm by now. Warm champagne makes you drunk. — She sat with her knees apart and her belly forgetfully rolling forward. — Moscow, Moscow, Moscow! I auditioned with the Maryinsky, you know. What a wonderful time we had. Too late, too old, nineteen or twenty, lazy already — but they took a fancy to us and what a time we had. Their parties went on all night; you breathe vodka like a dragon, after. I had to ask the maid in the hotel to change the pillow-cases — they gave back vodka fumes just from our breathing. We missed whole sessions of their bloody Congress; well, one whole session… Lionel — that father of yours — (a pause, genuine or assumed, of incredulity, looking at the girl lying in the chair) he gave them a most convincing yarn about having to sit up all night preparing papers for a committee, what a reputation for Party diligence but it started with a different kind of party… You look like him. In spite of the eyes. You wouldn’t be able to judge, because you think of him as he is — was. But then in Moscow…I see it while I look at you! You know, when you have lived with different men, lived a long time, like me, you’d be surprised, you forget what they really were like. When I wrote to you when he died, it was a public figure that I… looking at you I see that: because here he is as he really was, in Moscow. Like your father… but I think — I should say, after being with you for exactly — what? — one-and-a-half hours — after this long acquaintance, my dear Rosa, I would say you are more your mother. Yes. I didn’t know her well — although in the Party we all ‘slept in each other’s underwear’ (I’ll never forget: someone once shocked us stiff by telling us that, someone who’d been expelled, naturally—I’ll never forget the blasphemy against the comrades!). How could I know her well — anyway, she was so young. It must have been round about 1941. Your mother was simply — at once — my idea of a revolutionary. —

She was looking at her daughter, the girl smiling, fending off with a languid fascination the play of attention that quickly shifted again.

— Me in a cloche hat? Down to my eyebrows? Oh my god — The body squatted, spread-kneed, as if on the lavatory; nowhere to be found in this woman the marmoset face showing itself out of fur hat and fur collar, the slim pointed shoes lined up beside Lionel Burger’s outside the hotel bedroom. Laughter and chatter trailing behind or bursting ahead, the solid, over-blown figure came and went, preparing food, between rooms vague and dark with objects not yet seen as more than shapes, and the radiance, the sweet hum of the village, on the terrace. The innocence and security of being open to lives all around was the emotion to which champagne and more wine, drunk with the meal, attached itself. All about Rosa Burger, screened only by traceries of green and the angles of houses, people sat eating or talking, fondling, carrying out tasks — a man planing wood and a couple leaning close in deep discussion, and the susurration of voices was as little threatened by exposure as the swish of shavings curling. People with nothing to hide from, no one to elude, careless of privacy, in their abundance: letting be. The food was delicious and roused a new pleasure, of greed. Rosa Burger had not known she could want to eat so much; but the Manx cat sniffed the fish-bones fragrant with herbs as an everyday offering. An Englishwoman came in the tight little hat, chiffon scarf and gloves of one who keeps up some bygone standard. She forestalled any possibility that she was unwelcome by the air of having her mind on more important matters than her friend’s guest, and being too busy to be expected to stay. — I’ve an appointment at the bank.—

— You know the bank doesn’t open till three. Come on, Alice—

— Not just the bank. There are plenty of things I have to see to.—

— Such as, for instance?—

— Don’t pry into my affairs, Katya.—

Madame Bagnelli laughed, pouring coffee. — Ah, if you had any, Alice, I’d be dying of curiosity. Here, just as you like it, strong, in a thin cup. We saw Darby on the way to her liquid lunch.—

— In the bar tabac?—

— No, on the hill.—

— Oh yes. She must have been down to the aide sociale office about her rent.—

— Not on a Tuesday. Thursday’s for interviews.—

— What’s today? Are you sure? Well perhaps she went to the clinic. She never tells when there’s something wrong. Likes to think she’s not flesh and blood like the rest of us. But I notice how she’s short of breath on the stairs. I can hear her when she goes past my door up to the second flight.—

— And who else did I see, before I went to the airport — Françoise, yes, Françoise without Marthe, trying to makeup her mind whether to buy sardines at five francs a kilo. She didn’t see me.—

— Oh Marthe’s in Marseilles. Didn’t you know? For three days. She came round to ask if she could do anything for us, there. Darby said some of those green peppercorns we had last time.—

— Well she probably phoned. I’ve been in and out — Rosa coming. But you can get them here, why bother?—

— Not the Madagascar kind.—

— Yes, the Madagascar ones. In the shop behind the post office. Yes, yes, right there, Monsieur Harbulot has them. Exactly the same, I assure you.—

— Well I’m not so sure. Have you seen Georges?—

— They’ve gone to Vintimille to buy shoes. And some place where they get their olive oil. Manolis doesn’t like any other.—

— He’s lucky if Georges can afford to indulge his whims, that’s all I can say.—

— Donna and Didier went along.—

— What for?—

Madame Bagnelli appealed to her house-guest against the absurdity of the question. — For the ride. For fun.—

— Spoiling that boy, too. Just as she did the others. You’ll see.—

A French voice flew through the house like a trapped cuckoo. Another woman arrived and the same sort of conversation continued in French. The first woman stopped in the doorway to talk another five minutes. — Well, I hope you enjoy your holiday or whatever it is. Did Darby meet her, this morning?—

— Of course, for a moment. Why?—

With the Englishwoman hardly out of earshot Madame Bagnelli was explaining — Wanted to be the one to tell Darby she’d met the girl at Katya’s — did you see that! — It was repeated in French and she and the Frenchwoman rose to a heightened pitch of laughter, each cutting across the comments of the other. There was an anxious attempt at English now and then. — But you have the beautiful sunshine too, êh…it’s a wonderful country? I know. I like to go there, but — The Frenchwoman pulled the enchanting face of a woman twenty years younger and rubbed first-finger and thumb together. The two women then fell into a discussion about money, serious and with twitches of pain in the expression about their mouths, calculations reeled off in which Rosa distinguished only milles and cents colliding along chains of hyphens as the bees did sottishly round the dregs of wine. A young man had appeared; she turned her chair away from the sun, and found the battlements of the castle up there behind her in the sky, the flags luminous as stained glass, and down in the indoor shadowy hush of the house was aware that one of the objects detached itself and moved into human shape. She saw him eavesdropping before he made himself known. Out in the light of the terrace, he had come upon them all on bare feet, tightly bound in blinding white pants to just below the navel and naked above it. Two sea-pumiced brown hands over Madame Bagnelli’s eyes and she seemed to know the touch instantly. — But you’re in Vintimille — What happened?—

He bent round to her face and kissed her, then ceremoniously, leisurely, went over to bend to the face of the Frenchwoman. When he had kissed her she took his face in her palms and said something whose cadence was adoring and admiring, motherly-lustful.

— What are you doing here? Didier!—

He leaned against the balustrade before his audience. — I didn’t go. — In a dark-tanned face the nostrils had the pink rawness of one who has been diving.

— And Donna?—

— She went.—

— Didier? But why?—

The Frenchwoman said of the lost opportunity, things were so much cheaper over the border in Vintimille; he had seen the leather coat Manolis got there last winter?

— Didier? What’ve you been doing all day alone, then?—

— Fishing. Spear-fishing. You don’t need anyone to do it with. — They were introduced but he didn’t address himself to Rosa Burger. The questions and comments of the women fawned round him inquisitively and appreciatively; he seemed not to address anyone, eyeing himself in an accompanying vision of himself, like a mirror. He went purposefully about the table under the awning finding morsels he ate quickly, licking his fingers. He waved down offers to fetch something more for him to eat; wiped round the salad bowl, soaking bread in the oil, served himself cheese wrapped in straw, with a certain professional deftness. His dark cloudy blue eyes under lashes so long he seemed to trail them on his cheeks, his chewing jaw, followed the return of the women’s talk to the subject of taxes. Now and then he put in an objection or correction; they argued. He belched, hit flat belly-muscles, ran fine hands over smooth pectorals. They laughed;—Like that cat, Didier. Come for titbits and just stalk off. — He was embracing the women again, swinging gracefully from one to the other. He said goodbye to the girl in English used in the casual manner of an habitual tongue but with a marked French and slight American accent.

— When are they coming back?—

The voice was caught before the slam of the door. — How should I know?—

— Naughty boy! What are you sulking about? — Madame Bagnelli yelled, bold and laughing, out of range. She performed a little caper of activity and swooped on the table, scooping up dishes, emptying bees and dregs among the flower-urns. The Frenchwoman left. They tidied away the remains of the meal, lingering in the cool livingroom to talk, Madame Bagnelli’s voice flitting without cease from where she bent into the refrigerator in the kitchen, or sank suddenly, legs crossed at the ankle balletically, to a little sofa. Her guest had opened the suitcase and brought out the offerings that are part of the ritual of arrival. The girl eyed them warily now that they had found their recipient — safe options chosen for someone not known, they might seem only to do for anybody, the interchangeable airport gifts she herself had had her share of, all the years she had stayed at home. Only one suggested a particular being imagined, asserted associations that might not exist, or might be unwelcome: a double necklace of finely-carved hexagonal wooden spools separated by cheap store beads.

The woman looked at it looped in her hands; quickly at Rosa Burger; at the necklace, and parted a bead from a spool. — See what they’re strung on. What’s it called…that palm…Ilala. Ilala palm thread spun by rolling the fibres up and down on your bare thigh. I’ve seen them do it. Look, not cotton! Ilala palm — She broke into pleased pride at the verification, identification in herself. — And the wood — don’t say, wait — His daughter stood there before her. — Tambuti. Yes? That scent! It’s Tambuti.—

— I think so. They’re the things the Herero women wear. There’s a shop…very occasionally you find something—

— It’s from Namibia — even the Afrikaners don’t call it South West anymore, eh? — She wandered round her livingroom considering the disposition of a strange blood-dark head of Christ on leather embossed in flaky gold, staring almond eyes; a picture of a nude girl with an eel or other sea-monster mutilated beside her; a great iron key; jagged with age and an ancient fervour that had hacked it from the whole, a fragment of a rigid wooden saint raising a pleated hand and upright finger over the fireplace. She hung the necklace from a candle-bracket marbled thick with the lava of wax. — When I’m not wearing it, I want to enjoy seeing it.—

— The day before yesterday’s. I thought you might like to— Rosa Burger hesitated before dumping along with crumpled wrappings the South African newspaper that had been standing up from her bag when the woman first singled her out.

— Good god. How many years… — Madame Bagnelli sank down holding the paper at arm’s length. — Same old mast-head… In the kitchen, you’ll see a pair of specs. Probably on the shelf where the coffee-grinder…on the fridge or in the fridge — sometimes I take something out and put them down without… — She dismissed herself with a twirl of fingers. — You were still there. Only the day before yesterday. — She was looking at Rosa Burger as at someone whose existence she, too, could not believe in. His daughter wagged her head slowly; they were together. — Have you ever been out before?—

The head weaved, making its way, setting aside in the soft confusion of wine all that had been emerged from.

— Never.—

— Of course never.—

— And you have never been back.—

The woman drew her elbows against her body, rocked herself cherishingly, fists together under her chin, the newspaper fell. — Ah, they wouldn’t get me. Never.—

She sprang up on her wide-planted feet; balance and agility contradicted bulk. — Can we do the monkey-trick? Up my staircase, swing by tails—

There was scarcely room for her to pass between wall and wall with a thick silky cord, a theatre prop, swagged up one in place of a rail. As she led she was explaining how to manage some eccentricity of the hot-water tap in the bathroom; she panted cheerfully.

At the top was a room clear with different qualities of light. It brimmed against the ceiling; underneath, patterns and forms showed shallowly ribbed. A big jar of lilac, scent of peaches furry in a bowl, dim mirrors, feminine bric-a-brac of bottles and brushes, a little screen of ruched taffeta for sociable intimacies, a long cane chair to read the poetry and elegant magazines in, a large low bed to bring a lover to. It was a room made ready for someone imagined. A girl, a creature whose sense of existence would be in her nose buried in flowers, peach juice running down her chin, face tended at mirrors, mind dreamily diverted, body seeking pleasure. Rosa Burger entered, going forward into possession by that image. Madame Bagnelli, smiling, coaxing, saw that her guest was a little drunk, like herself.

If I’d been black that would at least have given the information I was from Africa. Even at a three-hundred-year remove, a black American. But nobody could see me, there, for what I am back where I come from. Nobody in Paris — except, of course, there’s the cousin. The daughter of Auntie Velma and Uncle Coen, with whom I share our grandmother’s name. She was in Paris, with me, selling South African oranges somewhere in these buildings flaring to a prow from diminishing perspectives where two streets merge V-shaped, in my single evening, walking them. I could have looked up the Citrus Board under its French title in the directory. The boerevrou with her tour group’s pin beside me in the plane remarked as we chatted in our language, it’s a great pity we Afrikaners don’t travel enough. Stick-at-homes, she said. True, for one reason or another. She at forty-three (she confessed) and I at twenty-seven (she asked) going to Europe for the first time.

I knew from books and talk of people like Flora and William I was in the quarter tourists went to because the nineteenth-century painters and writers whose lives and work have been popularized romantically once lived there. Thousands of students seem to occupy their holes of hotels and haunts now, blondes and gypsies in displayed poverty the poor starve to conceal, going in fishermen’s boots or barefoot through the crowds, while back on Uncle Coen’s farm people save shoes for Sundays. Girls and men whose time is mine, talking out their lives the way clocks tick, buying tiny cups of coffee for the price of a bag of mealie-meal, drinking wine in the clothes of guerrillas surviving in the bush on a cup of water a day. Dim stairs, tiny bent balconies, endless dovecotes of dormer windows were nearly all dark; everyone in the streets. I walked where they walked, I turned where they turned, taking up the purpose of these or those for a few yards or a block. They met and kissed, kissed and parted, ate thin pancakes made in a booth glaring as a forge, bought papers, paraded for a pick-up. If students play charades, there were surely others wearing the garb playing at being students, and still others wanting to be taken for their idea of models, actors, painters, writers, film directors. Which were the clerks and waiters off duty? How could I tell. Only the male prostitutes, painted and haughty enough to thrill and intimidate prospective clients, are plainly what they are: men preserving the sexual insignia of the female, creature extinct in the preferences of their kind. One went up and down before the café where I sat with the drink I bought myself. He wore a long jade-green suede coat open on a bare midriff with a silver belt round it and his face of inhumanly stylized beauty was a myth. If I had been a man I would have approached just to see if words would come from it as from any ordinary being.

The Boulevard Saint-Michel was my thread back to the hotel with its cosmetic gilt-and-glass foyer and old-clothes cupboard of a room with the bidet smelling of urine. I kept wandering down side streets to the sight of eddies of people in the soft coloured light from little restaurants and stalls of bright sticky sweetmeats and lurid skewers of meat. Under the sagging, bulging buildings of this Paris along streets that streamed into one another was a kind of Eastern bazaar; more my idea of a souk, where also I have never been. Bouzouki music wound above the heads of people in sociable queues outside small cinemas burrowed into existing buildings. The cobbled streets with beautiful names were closed to traffic; from the steep end of one called Rue de la Harpe, a crowd pressed back to form an open well down which I looked on a man from whose mouth flames leapt and scrolled in a fiery proliferation of tongues. I was moved into the crowd, kneaded slowly along by the shifting of shoulders. There were still heads in front of me but I could see the man with his anxious, circus-performer’s eyes sizing up the audience while he turned himself into a dragon with a swill of petrol and a lighted faggot. He pranced up and down my patch of vision between collars, necks and the swing of hair. I was enclosed in this amiable press of strangers, not a mob because they were not brought together by hostility or enthusiasm, but by mild curiosity and a willingness to be entertained. I couldn’t easily move on until their interest loosened, but closeness was not claustrophobic. Our heads were in the open air of a melon-green night; buoyed by these people murmuring and giggling in their quick, derisive, flirtatious language, I could look up at the roof-tops and chimney-pots and television aerials so black and sharp and one-dimensional they seemed to ring out the note of a metal bar struck and swallowed into the skies of Paris. Close to bodies I was comfortably not aware of individually and that were not individually aware of me, I instantly was alive to the slight swift intimacy of a movement directed only to me. As swiftly, my hand went down to that flutter of a caress; I seized, as it slid out between the flap of my sling-bag and my hip, a hand.

I held very tightly.

The fingers were pressed together extended helpless and the knuckle bones bent inwards across the palm to the curve of my grip, unable to make a fist. The arm above the hand could not jerk it free because the arm was pressed shoulder to shoulder with me, the body to which the arm belonged was jammed against mine.

Still locked to that hand I couldn’t see, I turned to find the face it must belong to. Among this crowd of strangers in this city of Europe, among Frenchmen and Scandinavians and Germans and Japanese and Americans, blue eyes and curly blondness, Latin pallor, the lethargic Lebanese and dashing Greeks, the clear and delicate-skulled old Vietnamese who had passed me unseeingly, the Arabs with caps of dull springy hair, pale brown lips and almost Scottish rosiness on the cheekbones whom I had identified as I heard their oracular gabble on the streets I walked — among all these a black man had been edged, pushed, passed along to my side. The face was young and so black that the eyes, far-apart in taut openings, were all that was to be made out of him. Eyeballs of agate in which flood and volcanic cataclysms are traced; the minute burst blood-vessels were held in the whites like a fossil-pattern of fern. If he hadn’t been black he might have succeeded in looking like everybody else — sceptically or boredly absorbed in the spectacle of the fire-eater. But the face could not deny the hand in anonymous confusion with like faces. He was what he was. I was what I was, and we had found each other. At least that is how it seemed to me — this ordinary matter of pickpocket and victim, that’s all, nothing but a stupid tourist with a bag, deserving to be discovered.

A twinge moved a muscle beside the straight, wide-winged nose. I pretended to be innocent of staring at the face of a stranger. He had round his thin neck with pimples like gravel under the silver-black skin there, a chain with an animal tooth bobbing with his heart-beat, one of the bits of home I’d seen blacks like him selling, all day, bean-necklaces and crude masks and snakeskin wallets, shaking West African rattles in the Tuileries to attract custom. I heard or felt something drop. I said to him — I don’t know what — and it was in English, of course, or maybe in Afrikaans (because that was what I had spoken on the plane and my tongue was still coupled with that speech centre). He wouldn’t have understood, anyway, even if he had not been deaf with fear, because I was not speaking in French or Fulani or whatever it was would have meaning for him. And if I had appealed to the people around us — they wouldn’t have understood either. I didn’t know the French, didn’t have the words to explain the hand in mine.

I let go. I let him go. He couldn’t run.

Somehow I managed to butt down and feel for my purse or wallet of traveller’s cheques or passport. I brought up from among feet a little black book; he had felt for leather, and come up with the address book in which, anyway, I have been trained to record nothing more valuable than the whereabouts of hotels and American Express offices. We were still close. His fear of me melted to a presence of connivance and contempt; because if I wouldn’t denounce him while I held him, no one need believe me now that I had set him free. It was a secret between us, among them; a ridiculous position we were in, until leisurely — he couldn’t hurry like a thief — he made himself appear to be pushed again, to drift on, moving thin shoulders swinging in a tenth-hand aspiration, someone’s once-plum-coloured jacket with the hunched cut I’d seen that day on sharp young Frenchmen dressed as they thought the rich and successful did.

I went by way of Paris not to lead to you: my father’s first wife. Brandt Vermeulen didn’t think of her when he was making sure I’d understood whom I was expected to keep clear of. Yet no one who has ever been associated with my father will ever be off the list of suspects that is never torn up. If it could have occurred to anyone hers was the village, the house, she the one for whom I would make when they let me out — but who remembers her?

I feel an ass, among them: thinking how I came among these people who know such tactics only in their television policiers (the old Lesbians are addicts); for whom running down to the baker is a sociable act by which everyone else knows what time they’ve got up for breakfast, and whose contact with the police is an exchange of badinage about the inside story of the latest bank hold-up in Nice while they stand together with their midday pernods in Jean-Paul’s bar. Out of place: not I, myself — they assume my life is theirs, they’ve taken me in. But the manner of my coming — it doesn’t fit necessity or reality, here. Lionel Burger’s first wife. You are not to be found in Madame Bagnelli, their Katya. I could see that the particular form of baptism by which she got that name came back to her when I asked, the first day at the gate (before I’d seen my lovely room, this cool belfry of a house where their voices fly around) what I should call her. For them you’re Katya because in a small community of different and sometimes confused European origins mixed with the native French, diminutives and adaptations of names are a cosy lingua franca.

I suppose for them the name places you vaguely among the White Russians. Like old Ivan Poliakoff whose love stories you type at four francs a page. When I met him, with you in the village, he kissed my hand, lifting it in one so frail I felt the blood pushing slowly through the veins. I ask what the stories are about? Such a very old man, one can’t imagine he can remember what it was like — love, sex. You tell me you have suggested he write romantic historical stuff about the affairs of counts and countesses, Russian aristocrats, using the setting of the great country estates where he spent his childhood.

— At least the background would be something he knows. But no, his characters are groupies who get picked up by American film actors at the Cannes Festival or teenage heroin addicts who are saved by devoted pop-singers. He thinks he’s learnt the vocabulary from telly — hopeless, the manuscripts come straight back. And then he expects me to lower my rate to three francs!—

People here don’t know I’m as removed from young life around the Cannes Film Festival as the ancient Russian count who won’t tell his age. — What’s a groupie?—

Their Katya’s complaining about Poliakoff becomes a performance she improvises along our laughter. — Look at the handwriting. Need a bloody code expert to unhook his G’s from E‘s — a wire cutter never mind a magnifying glass — can you believe it? B’s like those old-fashioned carpet-beaters-and on top of everything he writes in bed at night after he’s put his face-pack on — d’you see! page all smeared with cucumber milk or yoghurt and egg-yolk or whatever it is he concocts — sometimes I just make up a sentence myself to fill in, Delphine sniffs cocaine from Marcel’s manly armpit, he doesn’t notice the difference…more likely sees I’ve improved the thing and too jealous to admit—

— What’s a groupie, anyway—

— You know. One of those girls who follow singers and actors around. Tear the shirts off their backs. Or they just worship with fixed eyes — Ivan’s do.—

I giggle with their Katya like the adolescent girls at school, who were in that phase while Sipho Mokoena was showing Tony and me the bullet hole in his trouser-leg and I was running back and forth to visit prison, the first prison, where my mother was. The oriental-looking head of Christ that is half-painted, half-stamped on leather is a present from Ivan Poliakoff — the first ikon I have ever seen. You took me to an exhibition of famous ones on loan from the Hermitage in Leningrad; Gregorian chants were being relayed as we spent a whole morning looking at the face of the pale and swarthy outcast. You said, He’s so beautiful I could believe in him. In some examples his crown of thorns was spiked with red jewels, to represent blood, I suppose. A beige-and-white couple whose silk clothes suggested they were worn once and thrown away, examined the rubies and garnets close-up, silent, she with a pair of half-lens gilt glasses, passing the catalogue between their hands soft and clean as new kid gloves, clustered with gold. Coming around behind us was a young American with an arm along his wife’s nape, a baby in a seat on his back and a five- or six-year-old by the hand. He showed the little boy the Christian mask that represents the world’s suffering the way Japanese masks represent various states of being, in the theatre. — See Kimmie, that’s our Lord, he probably looked a whole lot more like that than the man with blue eyes and blond hair they show you in Grade School.—

Then we went to swim at one of the coves between Antibes and Juan les Pins Katya’s friends regard as their own preserve, keeping among yourselves the difficult and unexpected way to get down, trespassing and scrambling past restaurant dustbins. I could lead anyone, by now. We pooled our picnic lunch with Donna and Didier. It was the last time this summer they would come there, she said, the Swedes and Germans arrive after the middle of June; one will have to swim off-shore from the yacht. She’s very orderly-minded; impulse does not rule this woman who can do whatever she likes. I gather from conversations she sails to the Bahamas in November, goes skiing in January, and likes to travel somewhere she hasn’t been before — in the East, or Africa, say, for a month late in the European summer. She’s surprised I don’t know the African countries where she has gone game-watching and sight-seeing. She talks about them and I listen along with the other Europeans like Gaby Grosbois, for whom Africa is a holiday they can’t afford. It’s not possible to say how old this Donna is — again something she has determined with all her resources, the great-granddaughter of a Canadian railway millionaire, you tell me: this woman with long, pale red crinkly hair tied back from a handsome, naked face, a shine of bright down around the mouth and lower cheeks in the sun, has the same kind of frontier background I have. The Burgers were trekking to the Transvaal when the great-grandfather was laying rails across Indian territory. It’s an accident of birth, that’s all, whether one has a grandfather who has chosen a country where his descendants can become rich and not question the right, or whether it turns out to be one where the patrimony consists of discovering for oneself by what way of life the right to belong there must be earned by each succeeding generation, if it can be earned at all. I suppose her hair has faded. There may even be white strands blended into its thickness, one wouldn’t notice. She is probably forty-five or more, once a big pink-faced girl who still has mannish dimples poked reddening into the parentheses enclosing her smile. Sometimes when she is following what someone is saying to her she bares her teeth without smiling, a mannerism like a pleased snarl. I notice this habit because it’s the only sign of the strong sexuality I would expect to find in a woman who feels the need to buy a young lover. You and Gaby — Madame Bagnelli and Madame Grosbois — agree that this one is the best she’s had, not ‘a little bitch’ (you use the derogatory inversions of Lesbian friends) like Vaki the Greek, his predecessor.

What happened to Vaki-the-Greek?

I pipe up from time to time, like a child listening to folk-lore. I am beginning to understand that there is a certain range of possibilities that can occur within the orbit of a particular order of life; they recur in gossip, in close conversations at the tables big enough only for elbows in the back of Jean-Paul’s bar, in noisy discussions on the terrace of this one’s house or that. Vaki-the-Greek went off to South America with the director of a German electronics company he picked up here in the village, on the place, Darby witnessed the whole thing and told Donna after the little bitch had disappeared with the Alfa Romeo that had been registered in his name, for her tax reasons. Didier is straight (I don’t know whether by this is meant not bisexual) and although he rightly expects to be treated generously, he’s not likely to be a thief — never! — When he goes, he’ll just go. — Gaby approves, endorsing Katya.

Didier knows his job. How to please them; all of you. How to please Donna, although that may require some skill, at times he opts out of the company, sets up in the ivory tower of his youth to remind her of his confinement, at other times he is a shrewd and haughty personal aide confronting the garage over the price charged for repairs, going with her to argue with her lawyers — whatever the relationship is between them, I notice it is never so smoothly bonded as when we meet them either before or after one of their sessions with the lawyers, sharing the same preoccupation as other lovers would fondle under a table. And there are the occasions, perfectly timed, when I see him turn and go back to the room he is leaving as with some premonition of the significance of the moment, to kiss her once, on the mouth, holding her gravely by the upper arms. She is never the one to make the move to fondle him in public. That must be one of the unspoken arrangements between them, to save her face before other women? By some sound instinct he knows when to make the move towards her that she cannot allow herself to make towards him.

His professionalism extends to me. He and Donna exchange the left-and-right cheek-greeting with me as everyone else has been doing since my first few days in your house but he doesn’t flirt with me as he does with women older than Donna. Heterosexual or Lesbian, you all belong to a category that cannot challenge her. That’s the code. There was that particularly hot day when Donna’s yacht was being painted and he decided to come with us to swim from one of the beaches too polluted for her. Katya, Madame Grosbois, Solvig — he lies among them safe from demands as they are. If I try to describe him to myself in a word it’s to call him precocious — a boy at home with preoccupations on the other side of test and struggle. To be made rich is ageing, if you are young. On the beach, even the sexuality of his body, the curve of his genitals making a shield of the white trunks, was not aggressive. The Norwegian lady took off her bikini bra, Madame Grosbois displayed a belly puckered and loosened by child-bearing long ago. His body’s presence didn’t shame any of you. I begin to see here that modesty’s really a function of vanity. When the body is no longer an attraction, an expression of desire, to bare your breasts and belly is simple; you lay like old dogs or cats grateful for the sun. No offence was meant.

We swam the waveless peacock-shaded sea, Rosa, Didier, Katya — you talking and calling and flinging away from yourself bits of floating plastic board as if you believe, like an early navigator, somewhere there is an edge of the world over which they’ll be carried and break the global cycle by which what you rid yourself of returns. You tired and floated; Didier and I swam on round a small headland into a stripe of deep blue and came ashore among rocks, where I cut my toe on a sardine-tin. Threadworms of blood came from me in the water; when I took my foot out, from under an eyelid of skin red pain runnelled. I hopped over the pebbles. It hadn’t hurt after the first stab, in the water, but now it was seared by the air. We examined my toe together; blood; the reminder of vulnerability, life always under the threat of being spilled. A little ceremony of blood-brotherhood, every time.

— We need something to tie. — He was very severe.

Well, two people in a bikini and trunks; we didn’t have it. I smiled — it would be all right, the water would wash out the cut well on the swim back.

I must hold the foot high to reverse the flow. I said no, no, it was all right, the chill of the water would staunch it.

— But it hurts you, no? — Water was shaken on him where he crouched with my foot between his knees. The sprinkle on his face already dried stiff in the sun came from my hair, he called — Hey! — flashed me a squinting annoyed look against the light. My toe disappeared from the exposure to pain; I felt it surrounded by gentle warmth and softness. Because his head was ducked I felt before I saw that he had my toe in his mouth. Ridiculous — ridiculous at the same time as sensual, as so many sensual moves are, if you set yourself outside them. But it was done with such confidence I understood it as I was meant to.

As he squatted there before me I saw and felt his head, his tongue as if it were between my legs — he knew it.

— My dirty foot! I walked all round the valley early this morning.—

— How can it be dirty, your foot — out of the sea, Rôse, tell me — He held it between his palms like a rabbit or a bird, and he knew he was holding it to suggest this.

— Come on Didier. We must swim back.—

He mimicked. — Come on Didier, we must go — Rôse, it’s true your feet are a bit broad, peasant feet, but you have a beautiful navel, it’s really like the one on the top of an orange — now why do you pull your face, why shouldn’t we laugh together — Rôse—

— Didier, not with me.—

— With you?—

— You don’t have to.—

— What do you mean, don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything. I do what I feel.—

— I put it badly.—

— Rôse, you are talking — what are you talking.—

— You know. If a new woman turns up — a girl, among the friends, you…it’s like being nice to the older women; appropriate—

— But we’re young, Rôse — He seems sometimes to take up lines of dialogue he has heard in television serials. — Mnh? It’s natural, êh. We are the only young ones! — what’s the matter with you?—

I said to this strange being, as if I knew him — You think it’s wrong then, with Donna, unnatural — making love, living with her?—

He frowned sceptically.

— Because she’s so much older? A sacrifice? She owes you something?—

— What? Donna is a generous woman.—

— Me. Owes me to you.—

He made a mouth like the mouths of cherubs blowing the four winds in the Italian pictures in Solvig’s collection. They tell me this part of France was Italian a hundred years ago; I see faces I thought belonged to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. — She doesn’t expect I should not like girls. She must understand, êh. She likes a young man.—

If I am curious about them, these people, to me it seems they allow me to be so because I am a foreigner. But I see it’s that they are not afraid of being found out, the nature of their motives is shared and discussed; because the premise is accepted by everybody: live where it’s warm, buy, sell or take pleasure honestly — that is, according to your circumstances. They recognize their only imperatives as dependence on a tight-knotted net of friendship, and dedication to avoiding tax wherever possible while using all the state welfare one can contrive to qualify for — the rebates, allocations, grants and pensions they are always discussing, whether rich or poor. — So it’s all right, then?—

He was still playing with my foot, but one of the grey beach pebbles would have been the same, to his hand. — It’s fine. We go along very well together. She’s a good business woman, you know. She looks after her money. — (Doesn’t he know about Vaki the Greek? Of course he does; what went wrong there is regarded by him as a calculated risk in relations of the category of hers with Vaki and himself: I’m learning.) — She knows how to enjoy it. I’ve been around the world. We go wherever we like.—

— And it’s your whole life?—

— Oh, I’ll do other things. I’ve got ideas.—

His sulks are a ploy, then, something to bring Donna to an edge of apprehension about holding him. He feels free, this kept boy: free to be one.

— Things you’d be doing if you weren’t with her.—

— Not necessarily. I have a good friend in America — we want to set up in Paris what they have at the Metropolitan Museum there (I shook my head, I have never been to the Metropolitan Museum) — get a franchise for making reproductions of works of art to sell in the French museums. Egyptian cats and imitations of jewellery and so on. It’s a good thing. Nobody in France thought of it before. You just have to be the first — the same with everything. Donna and I are looking into the possibility of bringing truffles by air from the desert somewhere near where you…I forget. We are meeting a man about it in Milan.—

— But you don’t work, here. You do feel it’s your life, this?—

— Why not? You’ll find somebody. You can’t go back, êh?—

— Katya must have said that.—

— Donna mentioned… I suppose they talk. Botswana—that’s the name. The man in Milan says the natives in the desert sometimes have nothing to eat but truffles…the poor things, êh… 600 francs a kilo…! — He began to link his fingers through my toes again, prepared to give himself a second chance at rousing me. — I know a lot — well, not a lot — about where you come from. I’m from Maurice, you know that? — Mauritius, you call it. Nearly Africa! Oh god… — He was laughing. — It’s nothing for me. Filthy. Poor. Sometimes I like to make Donna sick when I tell her how the dogs, some dogs in Port Louis have ruptures here — he drew a breath to suck in his narrow belly — they hang down right onto the street.—

He laughed again, at my face, but he didn’t see the donkey that still exists somewhere.

— Donna goes crazy.—

— I don’t know why Katya should have said that.—

— Africa is no good for white people any more. Same on the islands. It was okay when I was a kid.—

— I was born there. It’s my home.—

— What does that matter. Where you can live the way you like, that’s what counts. We have to forget about it.—

— My father died in prison there.—

— You know why we went to Maurice? My father was a collaborator with the Germans and he was sent to prison after the war. People only talk about their families who were in the Resistance. Oh yes. Nobody thought maybe the Germans were going to win — oh no. Donna makes me swear not to tell anybody! She’s from Canada, what does she know about it, can you tell me! I know people whose mothers had their hair shaved off for sleeping with Germans. We have to forget about them. It’s not our affair. I’m not my father, êh?—

He helped me back into the water, supported by my arm round his neck. There was nothing sexual about the closeness; it was the huddle of the confidences common among all of you, the friends in the village — the divorced women and women widowed, like Madame Bagnelli, by lovers, the old Lesbians and young homosexuals. When we got back to you on the beach he must have remembered my stupidity, not having taken the easy opportunity of making love, and he was cool to me and sharp with Donna for the next few days when she and he were in my presence. Sometimes he trails a caress as I pass him; but it’s only to see if I will pounce. It’s playful and even derogatory.

A morning can be filled by shopping in the market. Not in the sense of passing time; filled with the peppery-snuff scent of celery, weak sweet perfume of flowers and strawberries, cool salty secretions of sea-slippery fish, odour of cheeses, contracting the nasal membranes; the colours, shapes, shine, density, pattern, texture and feel of fruits and vegetables; the encounters and voices of people handling them. By the time Madame Bagnelli and her guest had moved along the stalls — meeting acquaintances, admiring dogs or children entangled with their legs — comparing prices between this vendor and that, had bought a pot-plant not on Madame Bagnelli’s list and eaten a piece of spinach tart, they needed an espresso at the bar on the corner where the young workmen were coming in and out off their vélos and the old men in casquettes deciding bets for the tiercé were already drinking small glasses of red wine. By the time the women got back up the hill to her house, Madame Bagnelli had tooted at someone who asked them in for an aperitif, or Gaby Grosbois and her husband Pierre dropped by to take theirs on Madame Bagnelli’s terrace — Pierre and the little Rôse drinking pastis, and the two older women following Gaby’s régime, telling them how good vegetable juice was for ridding the body of toxins.

Madame Bagnelli carried whatever she had to do out onto that terrace. Squatting on a stool in her frayed espadrilles she picked over herbs she had gathered with her guest on the Col de Vence and was going to dry. She sand-papered an old table she had bought cheaply when they went to the street market near the old port in Antibes, and hoped to sell to some Germans who had taken a house next door to Poliakoff; her chin settled into the flesh of her neck and flecks of gilt caught on the clotted mascara of her eyelashes. In the same position, uncomfortable-looking for a woman her size, with her sewing machine on a low table between her legs, she made the flowing garments Gaby Grosbois cut out — I tell her, Rôse, she is still a woman, êh, men still look…she must know what to wear. This year nobody is wearing like this — tight, short — for her the style is good, very loose, décolleté—no, no, Katya, you have still a beauty, I’m telling you — The two women laugh, embracing. — If with Pierre everything was still working — (more laughter, her mouth playing at tragedy) — I will be worried—

Reading in the room that had been waiting for her, Rosa Burger was aware in the afternoons of Madame Bagnelli’s activities down there, the scissors snapping at threads like a dog at flies, the slap and slither of a paint-brush; the striking up of the record she had set playing indoors. The Goldberg Variations, the first side of the Christmas Oratorio, some Provençal songs punctuated by clucks as the needle rode a scratch, and now and then accompanied by a second voice — Katya’s, following and anticipating phrases she knew so well the recording had become a kind of conversation. At some point it would become a real one: that was the masculine croak of Darby and the hoarse patter of one of her cronies. Their voices were changed by age like schoolboys’ at adolescence, so that the one who had been as famous in Paris as Baker and Piaf — people in the village told Rosa again and again: You know that Arnys lives here? — could not be distinguished from the Lesbians who had perhaps cultivated the lower register or the old Americans, expatriate for thirty or forty years, who had ‘granulated the vocal chords’ (Madame Bagnelli’s attempt at translating a local expression, ‘la voix enrouee par la vinasse’) with deposits from the alcohol they had consumed. — At 33 per cent flat rate he surely might be better off… but if you have a fluctuating income coming in from a dozen different sources?…it only makes sense if you’re certain you can’t spread your assets in such a way that you can get into a lower tax bracket — The English comes from Donna, and the wriggling, ticklish laughter means the Japanese girl with the dog.

— You will be a nice friend for me. We are same age. — The text of a children’s first reader; the Japanese girl said it at one of those daily meetings at the top of steps or on the place, when people ran into each other and stood about talking. The girl prattled to her beautiful dog in some anthropomorphic game — Rosa looked down from her own private roof-top and saw her, so pretty in tight French trousers and high clogs she wore with the close-elbowed, close-kneed femininity of exotic dress, turning up a smiling, wide-jawed face on its frail stem. She lived with an Englishman Madame Bagnelli’s guest hadn’t yet met. He passed below on a morning walk with a stick, the girl and the dog; a white-haired man with the majesty of a slow-grown tree casually carried in the denim egalitarianism first taken over by students from peasants and labourers, and then from the young by the rich. He was a Lancashire shipyard owner — had been, everyone had been something else before they came to live as they wanted to, here — for whom Ugo Bagnelli, whose name Madame Bagnelli continued although she had never been married to anyone but Lionel Burger, had worked. — If Tatsu invites you, you should go — just to see what Ugo did. Everything in that boat’s his idea. He fitted out…must have been three or four — a whole succession of yachts and cabin cruisers for Henry Torren. Oh Henry happened to like him…not many that one does. He’s a solitary. Apart from whatever young woman he marries or lives with. He’s never mixed here. He likes to think he’s not like us… there’re so many failures, you know? But people who haven’t got money also do what they like, here. I don’t think he approves of that, it spoils things for him, ay? He would like to think he doesn’t enjoy the things the rest of us do! Not a snob, no, no, you have to know him…we get on all right. A puritan. Ugo never charged him — w-e-ll, so little it was nothing. Ugo loved luxurious things — he lived with them — oh-ho in style! — in his imagination, you know? — while we were eating nothing but spaghetti. He could design them and make them but he knew he would never have them for himself. In a way it was the same thing…why do I fall for such men? Rather why did I… And now — The gesture, the face of mock abdication learned from Gaby Grosbois when she talked about Pierre, her husband.

Madame Bagnelli and Rosa Burger did not deliberately talk about Lionel Burger but did not avoid doing so: he was a fact between them. It changed them, each for the other, at different times and in different contexts. They had not known each other before they became a middle-aged woman and her young guest fortunate to find themselves in a state that could not have been anticipated, arranged for or explained. Compatible: that was enough, in itself; comfortably, they began to exist only at the moment each turned out to be the one the other was looking for on an airport. That fact — the fact of Lionel — when the passing of daily life thinned or shifted to reveal it, made, like a change of light transforming the aspect of a landscape, the two women into something else for each other.

As Madame Bagnelli was talking, the girl was looking at the woman who had fallen in love with Lionel Burger. The woman felt the way she was suddenly seen, and became Katya. — We were young, all the ideas were so wonderful. You’ve heard it all before, god knows. But they were. ‘We were going to change the world’. When I tell you even now — I could still begin to tremble, my hands…you know? And I thought that was going to happen! No more hunger, no more pain. But that is the biggest luxury, ah? I must have been a stupid little creature — I was. Unattainable. Not to be achieved in our lifetime; in Lionel’s. He understood that. He was prepared for it, don’t ask me how. — But if it should be never? What then? I couldn’t wait, I can’t wait, I don’t want to wait. I’ve always had to live…I couldn’t give it up. When I saw your mother — you remember I told you? — I thought: that’s the end of me.—

The girl corrected her. — No, you said — you could see she was a ‘real revolutionary’—. A precisely-imposed pause. Smiling. They were skinning big sweet peppers that had been grilled.

— Yes, that’s what I mean. So that was the end of me. I wouldn’t stand a chance against her. The end of me with him. — The skin of the peppers was transparent when it lifted in finicky curls and the hot flesh beneath was succulent, scarlet; the tips of their fingers burned. — Like this, about half-an-inch, don’t worry if they’re not regular — Rosa watched while she laid strips of flesh in a bowl. — But I was also free of them. That was something. Those bastards. I was wearing a pair of shoes once, summer shoes, very pretty ones. Everyone wore white shoes in summer in those days. I must have innocently let slip the servant girl had blancoed them for me. The next thing, a complaint at a meeting: Comrade Katya was showing bourgeois tendencies not fitting in a Party member. They wouldn’t be specific. Nobody admitted it — I lost my temper and screamed at the meeting — I knew it was the shoes, nothing but a bloody stupid pair of white shoes — Now a little dribble of oil between each layer— Her stained fingers, followed by those of the girl, dripping juice to the wrists, arranged a lattice of gleaming red. The girl looked at her; she answered, prompted — A sprinkle of salt.—

In the bar tabac young Swedes and Germans, English men and girls crushed in to drink something labelled La Veuve Joyeuse and in the evenings Madame Bagnelli’s friends moved over instead to Josette Arnys’ bar for the summer season. The old singer was surrounded by young homosexuals as by a large family, affectionate, bored and dependent. Some served behind the bar or were served as clients, indiscriminately; Madame Bagnelli had towards them the easy, bossy, cuffing and teasing manner that all the women in the village who for various reasons had denuded themselves of their own children, adopted towards young men. — Oh pardon! Je m‘excuse — je suis désolée, bien sur…Je vous avais pris pour le garçon… Rosa Burger’s French was beginning to piece together whole patches of talk but comprehension tattered when jokes and insults began to fly between Madame Bagnelli and some distant-faced young man taking up his wrist-strap bag, cigarettes and gilt lighter. One of them cooked for Arnys in the cellar-kitchen off the cove of tiny tables beside the bar. Paper place-mats painted by another advised the choice of spécialités antillaises (among the old recordings that played continuously was the voice of Arnys in the Thirties singing of ‘the island where Joséphine Beauharnais and I were born’). In the white toque worn as a transvestite wears a wig, gold chains tangled with the blond hair on his chest, her chef sat most of the time playing cards with Arnys in her corner under photographs of herself with Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, and others whose names were not so well known to a foreigner.

The bar counter was central and majestic as a fine altar in a church. When Rosa Burger lost track of the talk she could follow with her eyes again and again the spiral of magnificent dark oak corkscrew pillars that flanked the mirror where they were all reflected — Darby’s captain’s cap, Madame Bagnelli’s breasts leaning on the mahogany surface, Tatsu’s eyes opaque as molasses, the gaze of one of the homosexuals flirting with himself, the detachment of a French couple dazed by sunburn and love-making, the excited hunch of Pierre Grosbois as he gave his frank opinions, his warnings on this or that subject to Marthe and Françoise, the shrivelled, bright-lipped pair with long cigarette-holders whose flowery courtyard bordering the place was a shop where feather boas, old bathtubs with dragon’s feet, the broken faces of romanesque angels, wore price-tags as trees are named in a botanical garden. The oak pillars — when Pierre explained something to Rosa he considerately used a special, didactically-enunciated French — were screws from old olive presses that had been numerous in the countryside round about, from Roman times (What are you saying! And long before that! — his wife thrust her face over her shoulder) until the end of the nineteenth century (—The ’14-’18 war, Pierre!—).

Madame Bagnelli had not yet shown her guest Alzieri’s olive oil mill, the last of the old ones still in use, but she and Rosa had taken pan-bagnat and wine and spent the midday hours in the olive grove that was Renoir’s garden. The valley of his view to the sea was raised to a new level with cheerfully ugly flat buildings. — People don’t want gardens they have to work in, they want balconies to tan on, to be just as good as the tourists who can afford to come here only to bronzer. That’s democracy in France — The flesh of Madame Bagnelli, dozing on her back on the grass, wobbled a little with laughter. — But look — the way the light falls on us, it’s the light he painted, isn’t it?—

The caretaker came to describe his noises in the head to her; she must have been in the habit of going there often. Rosa fell asleep and woke, under a tree that hung a tarnished silver mesh of foliage over its black trunk and her body. — Were they growing here before the house?—

— Oh probably before the revolution. If you live in Europe… things change (a roll of the untidy head towards the cement glare in the valley) but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away. If I’d stayed…at home, how will they fit in, white people? Their continuity stems from the colonial experience, the white one. When they lose power it’ll be cut. Just like that! They’ve got nothing but their horrible power. Africans will take up their own kind of past the whites never belonged to. Even the Terblanches and Alettas — our rebellion against the whites was also part of being white…it was, it was. But here you never really have to start from scratch… Ah no, it’s too much to take on. That’s what I love — nobody expects you to be more than you are, you know. That kind of tolerance, I didn’t even know it existed — I mean, there: if you’re not equal to facing everything, there…you’re a traitor. To the human cause — justice, humanity, the lot — there’s nothing else.—

— Had you decided that when you went away?—

The older woman sat up slowly, enjoying the leverage of muscles, rubbing upper arms, marked by the grass, like a cat grooming itself after a sand-bath. — Oh I don’t know. I accept it. But there is the whole world… I have forgotten I ever thought of myself like that. — The girl might have been showing curiosity about an old love affair. — To live with a man like Ugo — how can I explain—? He was in his life as a fish in water, with him you just stopped gasping and thrashing around… In Europe they don’t know what conflict is, now, bless them.—

At the bar Grosbois’ voice was always unmistakable; while he talked he kept his right hand slightly in the air ready to intercept interruptions from his wife. — Thirty years? — what is that? Are we all dead? We don’t remember? What have we French to be ashamed of that we don’t celebrate what we fought for, any more? If Giscard was worried about offending the Germans, that’s too bad. I’m not worried. The French people are not worried, êh. They took our food, they moved into our houses. We hid in the cellars and the mountains and came out to kill them at night in the streets. Should we forget all that? — The little house across the street from us, a boy of nineteen was taken hostage, they killed him — his mother is still living there. — I walk through Paris and see the plaques where they shot down people in ’44—

— He’s right, he’s right.—

— Yes, but what does the 8th of May celebration every year mean? Just another demo in the streets…—

— Exactly—no public recognition of the glory of the French nation, all that is thrown away — pouf! The President of the Republic finds it vulgar, êh. Thirty years ago we rid our country of the Nazis and that is nothing to go on marching in the streets about. But the students, êh — the clerks from the Banque de France, the PTT — every little man who wants a few francs more a month — that’s a spectacle for Paris.—

— In Vincennes they’re showing fascist films to the students—

— Ah, no, Françoise. That’s something different. That’s to warn them—

— Oh yes? She’s right — what’s the difference, the kind of film they’ll see and the way they already behave? They smash and destroy their own universities. They — excuse me, êh — they actually piss on the desks of their professors. It can only encourage them—

— What? Nazis kicking Jews and dragging women off to the camps—

— People don’t see anything wrong with violence. Since May ‘68, it’s a general way to get what you want. Am I wrong? You saw on television last night — that gang in Germany. The trial that’s begun… The Baader-Meinhof lunatics — they are the result of what happened in ’68. People only disapprove of each other’s aims, maybe, nowadays. They all use the same methods, hijacking, kidnapping—

— What was the name of the boy, the redhead, you should see, he’s become quite fat and middle-aged! (Gaby’s blown-up jowls in the mirror.) Really. There’s an interview with him in Elle—

— She means Cohn-Bendit.—

— In your women’s magazine? What do they dig him up for?—

— But of course! Ponia’s lifted the interdiction against him, he’s in Paris autographing some book he’s written.—

— Pierre, I’ll show you the article. It’s in the bathroom — I was reading while my tint was taking. Nobody’s noticed my hair…isn’t it a sexy colour?—

A young man came over to look more closely. — What did you use? I want to streak mine.—

— I’ve got half a bottle left, Gérard. Come past tomorrow morning, you’re welcome to it—

— They charge 60 francs in Nice. And I’m going to have to move out of my room, as it is—

— No? But why?—

— She can get double for it in summer. She needs the money, too. Her husband’s on pension and the granddaughter’s got herself pregnant, stupid little nana, I could see her asking for it.—

A man Rosa Burger greeted as she did many people because they passed one another so often in the village, at last came up to her in the bar with the formality with which Frenchmen approach women as a prelude to expectations of intimacy. Would she have a drink or a coffee with him?

— You are English? — Ah? I had a friend who went down there, in the building trade, like me. He’s making a lot of money. 12,000 francs a month — new francs, I’m talking about. But there’s trouble there, êh?…I don’t want trouble… And you like France? The coast is beautiful. Of course. There are some good places to go dancing — you’ve been to Les Palmiers Bleus, it’s just near Cap Ferrat? Don’t your friends take you dancing?—

She had seen a man and girl at a café table, tossing a snapped-off flower back and forth between them; the exchange, in any language, was as simple as that to manage. — I’m staying with Madame Bagnelli.—

— That’s the one in the little house just above the old Maison Commune? But she’s an English lady.—

— Only the name’s Italian.—

— No, no, Niçois, plenty of French people with those names around here. My name: Pistacchi, Michel Pistacchi — you can say that? I’ll take you to Les Palmiers Bleus — you’ll like it. Why do you laugh? You find me funny?—

— We won’t be able to talk — you can hear I don’t speak French—

— I am going to ask Madame’s permission to take you dancing.—

— Ask her? What for?—

Like most gregarious men, he was drawn to girls who appeared to be set apart from the company in which he noticed them. As if to confirm his instinct for such things, the foreign girl’s face broke with vivid amusement, she was generously promising when she laughed.

He brought roses for Madame Bagnelli. Wearing an elegant navy blue blazer he came to fetch Rosa Burger in a sports car — Not mine but it’s nearly the same thing, you understand — when my friend finds a good buy in a newer model, I’ll take over this from him. — He ordered an elaborate dinner and expanded volubly in the busy to-and-fro of tasting each other’s dishes. — This’s what I like, to be with a girl who appreciates good food, an atmosphere — I don’t go out if it’s not somewhere first-class. No discos — He danced expertly and his attempted caresses as they danced were as expertly calculated not to exceed the line at which they could, for the time being, be ignored. She understood most of what he said; when she did not follow the words, could follow the dynamo that moved him, the attitudes and concepts turning always on his private needs, fears and desires. He boasted innocently of familiarity with his patron—I’m at his house for casse-croûte every day — at the same time as he complained of the responsibility he was expected to carry in comparison with what he earned, the taxes he paid.

— But isn’t your union a strong one, in France?—

She hadn’t got it right; he was eager to guess past her mistakes. There was laughter and he squeezed her a moment.

— Ah, but you’re intelligent, you know what’s going on in the world, I can tell… What a pleasure, to be with a girl you can talk to… and you tell me you can’t speak…! Let me explain, the unions — they don’t work, those fellows — we work for them, and they get fat on it—

The subject distracted him from his awareness of her body and his determination to make her aware of his; she could see in his face he didn’t want to get caught up in such talk, yet someone who would listen was not to be resisted, either.

— And if the socialists come to power? — She had to construct sentences experimentally in her mind, before she spoke.

— Mitterrand? He would sell out to the Communists—

— Then the workers will be strong. Not the patrons.—

He stopped dancing, broke the rhythm. He held her away from him. — I want what is mine, êh? My parents worked for it. When my father dies, his house is mine, êh? The Communists won’t allow that. I would be robbed of my own father’s property — you know that?—

Katya called him ‘Rosa’s mason’:—The first time you’ve been out with a brick-layer, I’ll bet. — The two women were amused at this example of sheltered childhood.

— I want to see the house you are going to inherit.—

— Comment?—

Again her sense was not clear; at last he understood, but was still surprised. — Ah it’s nothing to see. Old people without money, it needs a lot of fixing up—

It was a small farmhouse-cum-villa with the burnt umber and rose tiles the people of the region had always used, and an automatic washing-machine in the kitchen. His mother brought out fancy glasses and the father a bottle of his own wine; they exchanged smiles with the strange girl but did not attempt to talk to her, and she could not make out the dialect they spoke with their son, only that the conversation was the kind that takes the opportunity to cover a lot of ground when parents have a chance to consult with an adult son or daughter. The three became a family, briefly, while she walked with them down the hillside garden: the son leaping ditches in his elegant boots, the mother and father padding along in muddy slippers, all talking, explaining, objecting. Father and son were absorbed in disagreement over how to deal with a tree that threatened to fall. Rosa was taken by the mother to see drills of young vegetables she bent to lift, here and there, rumpling the grey soil; through leafy shelters and rickety sheds where seedlings were green and transparent, past baskets of stored walnuts and a bucket — alive as a cheese with worms — of swarming snails gathered for eating. Under olive and cherry trees a long table was covered by flowered plastic below a lamp wired in the branches: there was a pet sheep staked to mow the grass within the radius of its rope, and a swing for grandchildren. Rosa sat eating the cherries the father filled her lap with, and the son ran at her, head lowered to make them all laugh, and sent her up into the air; she got back to her feet at last, laughing, holding her throat as if something were about to fly from her. — I like your inheritance.—

— Ah, when the mistral starts, that tree’s going to smash the power line — that will cost plenty! I’ve told my father. It’s a serious offence in France to obstruct installations—

Madame Bagnelli invited the friends Georges and Manolis to share the home-grown asparagus Rosa was given. One of the intimates ‘smelled them cooking’ as Madame Bagnelli said, and called up, at the gate just as Rosa carried the settings for the table onto the terrace. Bobby was the immensely tall Englishwoman with beautiful legs who at sixty still wore without looking ridiculous bullfighter’s pants that ended at the knee, and toenails shaped and painted like fingernails. If Rosa came upon her sitting on the place on her usual bench she seemed to think they might have had an arrangement to meet; she would jump up, moving her mouth welcomingly, kiss the girl and insist on buying her a coffee, taking up as if the two had been involved in it together some local story of a dispute or crisis in the village. — Well, the great event didn’t come off yesterday, after all. They waited for a phone-call, but it was only when the brother-in-law turned up — you know, the little fat one, from Pegomas, unappetizing if you ask me — In the straw bag she carried rubber gloves and often a newspaper, magazines (that was the source of the Vogues and copies of Plaisirs de France Katya placed in her guest’s room) or a flowering branch from the large, locked house with a majolica virgin on the façade she looked after for absentee owners. As far as Madame Bagnelli knew, she was smuggled into France by a Free French officer who had fallen in love with her when she was in the British women’s navy during the war. The village crones derided the claim that she had been in the Resistance. — She was part of the village when I came. He used to have a house, he used to come every few months — they tell me at one time he actually lived there with her. Since I’ve been here, he would come when he could, just like Ugo… We were waiting for his wife to die. Well she was so ill… We used to ask about that woman’s health, it seemed so hopeful, she had every disease you could wish for. He died first. Oh I don’t think by then…Bobby never expected — she’s lived here so long, she has her ways… Sometimes now if you mention her Colonel she’ll answer as if she knows who you’re talking about but it’s the way you cover up when you haven’t really caught on.—

Manolis’s voice preceded the pair of invited guests, giving directions in his Greek French as if advising how to steer an awkward burden through Madame Bagnelli’s dark little house. The fragile cargo was Georges manoeuvring himself. — He has hurt his leg. Last night. He should not walk up steps, I tell him. — Manolis switched to the English he had learned from Georges, so that it was spoken with both French and Greek accents. His smooth, narrow, yellow face with its dark moles and sorrowful glittering black eyes was dramatic in haughty disapproval and anxiety. Georges made an entrance, leant on a cane. — I had to ask one for him all around — in the end, it was old Seroin, but what a trouble: it’s from his papa, it’s from when he was a gouverneur en Indochine, if it should be damaged ta-ra-ra—

Georges grinned with a free arm held out for the women to come and kiss him. — Manolis had new curtains ready, I was standing on top of the armoire, you know, the treasure Katya found for us in Roquefort-les-Pins — yes — I must have fallen two metres — He smelled of suede (the supple shirt he wore) and lemon cologne and his blue eyes and white hair cut like Napoleon’s were close to Rosa, a presence sure of its androgynous vitality, while he talked past her ear and hugged her. Bobby looked on with head raised from the preoccupations she carried comfortably around like a piece of invisible needlework. — Outside my door it’s been like that for a month. You could break your neck. Not a light, pitch dark. The gang of Arabs just leave their picks and spades at five o’clock — they don’t care.—

— But here we’ve got exactly the person you need. Let Rosa see, Georges. Come quietly into my bedroom — get on the bed — let a qualified physiotherapist examine you… it’s free! — Madame Bagnelli presented her house-guest in another capacity, as much to be taken on trust, for the others, as the wild stories of the country she came from.

— You’re a nurse? — Manolis was strict.

— A doctor is the only one to touch it. — Bobby spoke confidentially to Madame Bagnelli, wrinkling her nose. Her voice was louder when she thought she was whispering.

— Not the bedroom — I won’t move now I’m here — Manoli, put the cushions on the floor—

Madame Bagnelli, curtseying easily up and down, weighty on her thin ankles, arranged it all swiftly.

— I’ll take off his shoes, no?—

The girl was in charge, smiling, her chin lifted. — Roll up your trouser-leg. That’s no good — right up. No — you wear your pants too tight around the thigh: take them off.—

— She’s not slow, êh? All right, if you say—

They laughed down at him as he pulled in his waist nattily, unfastened belt and flourished zipper. Manolis drew the pants off with the air of preparing a corpse, bringing more laughter. Georges’s chin pressed on his chest in a grimace showed teeth worn laterally to the bone that were more of a private vulnerability revealed than was the body he wore like an outfit he knew would make a good impression. Rosa Burger’s hair had grown enough to fall across her face; they saw only her mouth firm in professional concentration. Her hands moved with the grip and sensitivity they had not put to use for a long time. The doctor says there’s no crack in the patella? You were x-rayed? And there was no dislocation?

Manolis appealed to everyone — Nothing is wrong! But look how Georges is, he cannot even turn in the bed!—

— I might be able to ease it a bit. Give me half-an-hour.—

They deferred to her, Manolis going off to finish setting the table and Madame Bagnelli trailing Bobby into the kitchen where she added final touches to the sauce.

Several glasses of wine released the urbanely concealed concern over himself Georges had been keeping from his lover. The tone meant specifically for him reached Manolis as he swabbed vinaigrette with a piece of bread; at once his attention fixed in his great dark, mournful gaze (when Manolis laughed, those eyes shone as if he were crying) and his lips drew tensely against other chatter.

— It’s better. I said: I think it’s definitely better. It’ll be all right. I can move the knee — well, I won’t but I feel I could.—

— We were supposed to be going to the Algarve next week. A great day, to be able to go to Portugal. We’ve waited a long time for that.—

The two men lifted their glasses with ceremony.

Madame Bagnelli assured — Of course you’re going. Rosa will come and massage Georges every morning won’t you? Of course—

— I shouldn’t have thought it was such a wonderful thing — people I know’ve been having holidays there for years, it was so cheap, even cheaper than Spain.—

— We wouldn’t have gone ever while Salazar lived, even for nothing.—

Bobby was unaware of reproaches as she was of being ignored. — Of course they say it’s finished now — people have been chased out of their houses by the Communists — English people who’ve retired there, put every penny—

Georges took more sauce, miming a kiss to Madame Bagnelli in praise of its excellence. — If we couldn’t afford Chile under Allende, at least we can afford Portugal under Gomes. I wouldn’t miss it. People in this village! Did you hear what Grosbois said? If everything’s so fine in Portugal now, why haven’t all the Portuguese who’re digging the streets here with the Arabs gone home… There has to be prosperity overnight, êh, or that’s proof the Left is making a mess of things — One year, that’s all it is—

It was true that Madame Bagnelli could still take on, like an old challenge to all comers, something like the blazonry of attraction and sexuality; a kind of inward caper to match the boxer-like prance — hefty, light on her feet — she sometimes broke into about her terrace. — It was lovely, last year when we all danced on the place—Georges?—

Georges indicated her to Rosa. — You should have seen her, with a red carnation behind the ear.—

— And you? We all went crazy. Oh some people just thought they were at the battle of the flowers in Nice — never mind… — Manolis and Georges had brought a special white wine; she lifted the third bottle dripping high, from the bucket, and was going round with it. — And what about Arnys? Rosa — Amys didn’t know any Portuguese revolutionary songs so she sang one she remembered about La Pasionara, from the Left Bank in ’36—she cried to me afterwards, she says she once had a great love in the International Brigade. — Madame Bagnelli stood with her glass in her hand as if she were about to make a speech or sing a song herself. — Where this girl comes from, April meant the end of the whites in Moçambique, right next door… you realize what that must have been?—

Manolis regarded Rosa the way he did when she had taken charge of Georges professionally. — What an experience. To be down there in Africa—êh.—

The girl stood up, too, palms on the table. She could see the flood-lit castle behind the black paint-brushes of cypress; music and voices were the single insect-chorus of the summer night. She looked from one face to another at the table in expansive impulses, even affectionate, even appealing. — There were no red carnations. —

But Georges and Manolis prided themselves on being thoroughly informed. They stirred, reflective. Bobby politely, pettishly mouthed that she wanted another piece of bread.

— Black people were ecstatic — Frelimo fought for eleven years… But if you came out in the streets — that’s impossible there… You wouldn’t dare celebrate. There was one mass meeting, people went to prison—

— Not just overnight, waving banners, and headline interviews with the heroes in the papers next day, like it is here when there’s a political rumpus — Madame Bagnelli kept up a counterpoint of emphatic interruption.

Manolis waved her aside to exact acknowledgment; he had the experience of the Greek colonels in his blood although he had not been in his country during their rule. — And the white people? Of course they are afraid the same thing will happen down there, that’s it?—

— The refugees kept coming in, people looking like us, you know, people could look at themselves, and them — bringing their grandmothers and refrigerators, white people — Rosa’s light eyes were indiscreet, trusting. She was her own audience, ranged along with the faces.

— What can they expect! They’ve asked for it. They allowed themselves to be brain-washed into believing they’re a superior race. Running with refrigerators! It will come. Three hundred years, enough! You are outcast… they throw you in prison to die if you try to change them — Madame Bagnelli had the air of one carried away by whatever company she found herself in to profess preoccupations and opinions at one with theirs. With the Grosbois, she was as animated a participant in their decision to eat organically-grown vegetables or Gaby’s interest in the alterations Nice-Matin reported were being made to the villa of the Shah of Iran’s sister.

— This girl could make a good living here. She would do well. I mean it — Georges leant forward to draw everyone to the sudden idea of supporting their own local political refugee. — The yacht people, there are always pains and aches when you take too much exercise… they hurt themselves water-skiing and I don’t know what. Really, it’s amazing, how my leg feels, you know, relaxed — the muscles — The convinced shrewdness of his blue eyes canvassed.

— And even in the village!—

— No one who does that kind of work—

— Aië, aië, what about papers? — Madame Bagnelli looked at Rosa gaily in the enthusiasm of Georges and Manolis. — She has to have permission to work, a permit—

Georges mimed away the maunderings of despised officialdom. — Pah-pah-pah. She doesn’t ask. No one knows. She gets paid in cash, she puts it in her pocket. — Fingers extended fastidiously, with the ring set with a gold seal from the reign of Alexander the Great worn in betrothal to Manolis, the palm of one hand wiped itself off against the other.

Katya took Rosa to hear nightingales. They locked the gate but rooms were open behind them, the candles smoked on the littered table. Up on the terrace, they might still have been there, in the warm still night voices hung.

Down the steep streets with gravity propelling them gently, under street-lamps fluttering pennants of tiny bats, shouldered by the walls of the houses of friends, through lilting staccato-punctuated voices swung about by music coming from the place, whiffs of dog-shit and human urine in Saracen archways, arpeggios of laughter flying in the chatter of knives and dishes from the restaurant where a table of French people sat late under young leaves of a grape-vine translucent to the leaping shadows of their gestures. (—You never understand what makes them so euphoric in the ritual of feasting together — not even when you understand their language perfectly. — Katya was proudly fascinated by the tribal impenetrability of the people she lived among.) Past the little villas of the dead with the urns of their marble gardens sending out perfume of cut carnations as from the vase in any family livingroom; the hoof-clatter of linked couples approaching and trotting away on their platform soles, the stertorous swathe cut by motorcycles, the quiet chirrups of older people wandering the village as at an exhibition of stone, light, doorways fringed with curtains of plastic strips, the faces of carved lions melted by centuries back to the contours of features forming in a foetus. In the remnant of forest ravine all this familiar element was suddenly gone like torn paper drawn up a flue by the draught of flames. It had lifted away above the flood-lit battlements of that castle domestic as a tame dragon. Katya plunged through littered thickets, some quiet vixen or badger of a woman, cunningly coexisting with caravan parks and autoroutes. Rosa strolled this harmless European jungle.

— Wait. Wait—

Katya’s breathing touched her as pine-needles did. All around the two women a kind of piercingly sweet ringing was on the limit of being audible. A new perception was picking up the utmost ring of waves whose centre must be unreachable ecstasy. The thrilling of the darkness intensified without coming closer. She gave a stir, questioning; the shape of Katya’s face turned to stay her. The vibrating glass in which they were held shattered into song. The sensation of receiving the song kept changing; now it was a sky-slope on which they planed, tipped, sailed, twirled to earth; then it was a breath stopped at the point of blackout and passing beyond it to a pitch hit, ravishingly, again, again, again.

Katya hooked the girl’s arm when the path widened. Their feet carried them towards the village. — It goes on all night. Every summer. If I can’t sleep, I just come out at two or three in the morning… Oh I have them always, every year.—

In the middle of winter, seven months pregnant, to teach night-classes in some freezing old warehouse…okay, I was ‘disciplined’—how ashamed I was! — had to be disciplined because of my bourgeois tendencies to put my private life first. I remember I cried…

Murmuring, up there, like schoolgirls under the bed-clothes. Laughter.

Once I was suspended from the Party for ‘inactivity’…when they gave something a name, I can tell you…it meant anything they decided. ‘From each according to his ability’…I was dancing in some bloody terrible revue six nights a week — can you believe it? I had to — Lionel was an intern earning almost nothing, he walked the floor with the baby when he came home. But on Sundays I used to take my little street theatre group I’d got together out to the black townships on the back of a furniture remover’s lorry…oh baby and all. They had it in for me. I wouldn’t go to their old lectures on Marxist-Leninism-I could read it all for myself? — no, you were supposed to sit there listening to them drone on. One poor devil, I forget her name — she was even accused of trying to poison the comrades by boiling water for tea in a suspect-looking can. One of the Trotskyites who was expelled…

What did he say?

I’ve never talked with anyone as I do with you, incontinently, femininely.

Dick was the only one… well, he didn’t exactly defend me, how could anyone — I suppose I really wasn’t good material. But there was some sort of little (an amused pause, mutually culpable in the understanding of our sex)—something — going on at one time. Much later, during the war. I knew he really liked me. He thought I was an extraordinary creature… a few kisses managed in the most unlikely circumstances… oh innocent Dick. We despised the subjection of women to bourgeois morality but he was scared of Ivy and he had schoolboy feelings of honour and whatnot towards his comrade. He worshipped him. He once told me: Lionel will be our Lenin. I think — now yes, don’t let me lie, we actually slept together once. In Ivy’s bed! Good god. Don’t strange things excite men? Funnily enough, I remember the sheets. I’ve never forgotten her sheets. They were embroidered, chainstitch daisies and so on, bright pink and blue — she always wore such awful clothes! She was away at some conference in Durban with Indians. We were supposed to be roneoing pamphlets. Sweet Dick. But compared with somebody like Lionel…the affair didn’t have much of a chance. It wasn’t exactly anything to worry about. I can’t imagine what he’d look like now… his jacket always used to be hitched up on his bum, quite unaware of himself, I used to feel the giggles coming on…

What did he say?

You’ve never asked me why I came and I don’t ask that, either. You tell me anecdotes of your youth that could transform my own. Several times I could almost have exchanged in the same way an anecdote about how I used to dress up and visit my ‘fiancé’ in jail, wearing Aletta’s verloofring. I could imitate the way the warders talk, and you would laugh with the pleasure of the softened reminiscence. That’s exactly it! — the brutishness and guileless sentimentality of grandmother Marie Burger’s taal in their mouths. Of course I know what we’re like when there’s some little thing going on — when Didier gave me my chance, taking a toe for nipple or clitoris. What’d he say, your husband, when his dancing-girl was disciplined? It must have seemed so petty to him — the blancoed shoes, your tears. Or maybe he saw this ideological spit-and-polish as essential training for the unquestioning acceptance of actions unquestioningly performed, the necessity of which was to come later. He may have smiled and consoled you by making love to you; but seen the faithful go ahead and discipline you because you preferred amateur theatricals to Marxist-Leninist education.

The little something going on with comrade Dick — what’d he say then? Perhaps he didn’t notice. You deceived him because you were not of his calibre; it was your revenge for being lesser, poor girl, you were made fully conscious of your shortcomings by his not even noticing the sort of peccadilloes you’d console yourself with.

All these things I see and understand while we’re shelling peas, ripping out a hem with an old blade, walking in the cork woods, watching the fishermen put out to sea, slumping with our bare feet on the day-warmed stone after your friends have gone home to bed. It’s easy, with you. I’m happy with you — I see it all the way he did; smiling and looking on, charmed by you although you’ve grown fat and the liveliness Katya must have had has coarsened into clownishness and the power of attraction sometimes deteriorates into what I don’t want to watch — a desire to please — just to please, without remembering how, any more.

A little something going on. What did he say?

He couldn’t say anything because by then there was the real revolutionary: you recognized my mother the first time you saw her. Nobody has ever told me, but the accepted version, the understanding is that Katya left Lionel Burger — that was in character for someone so unsuitable (even she recognizes this, in later life) for the man he was to become. She left him for another man or another life — same thing, really, what else is there for a woman who won’t live for the Future? You haven’t contradicted this version. But I see that whatever you did, you and he and my mother knew he said nothing because of her. Back there where we come from someone’s writing a definitive life in which this will be left out. Anyway, if you were to ask me — I didn’t come on some pilgrimage, worshipping or iconoclastic, to learn about my father. There must have been some strong reason, though, why I hit with closed eyes upon this house, this French village; reason beyond my reasoning that surveillance wouldn’t think to look for me there.

I wanted to know how to defect from him. The former Katya has managed to be able to write to me that he was a great man, and yet decide ‘there’s a whole world’ outside what he lived for, what life with him would have been.

It was easy for Rosa Burger to turn aside from the calculated pleasures of Didier; she had never been the same age as Tatsu, playing with her dog in the old man’s garden. At one of the summer gatherings she told a man she had never met before and probably would never meet again her version of an incident in Paris when a man tried to steal money from her bag. — He found me out.—

— In what?—

— I thought someone else might be keeping an eye on what I was doing.—

— A pickpocket. Poor devil.—

— Yes.—

— A black man.—

— Yes.—

The Frenchman she had had this conversation with in English was still in the village on Bastille Day — some of these friends-of-friends were about only for a weekend; names and faces introduced with enthusiasm as a brother-in-law, a cousin, a ‘colleague’ from Paris or Lyon, his transience giving the host a dimension of connection with seats of government, commerce and fashionable opinions. He was on the place like everybody else dancing, watching others dance, and applauding and kissing when the fireworks went off from the top of the castle. Katya and Manolis, Manolis and Rosa, Katya and Pierre, Gaby and the local mayor, Rosa and the car-salesman son of the confectioner, hopped and swung past Georges snapping castanet fingers; some beautiful models from Cannes stood about tossing their hair like good children told not to romp and spoil their best clothes; and he was one of the city Frenchmen with neat buttocks, fitted shirts and sweaters knotted by the sleeves round their necks, whose cosmopolitan presence strengthened the family party against the tourist element. He danced with her, rather badly, twitching a cheek at the painful music coming from a festooned platform. He was at the other end of the table when eight or ten of the friends ate at a restaurant together after loud and serious discussion about dishes and cost. Gaby Grosbois had taken charge. — I will arrange a good price with Marcelle. Moules marinières, salad — what do we drink, Blanc de Blancs…? — She strode off to the whistling of the Marseillaise, swinging her backside with a mock military strut.

The tiny restaurant was a single intimate uproar. Marcelle’s barman sang in argot and in the course of one song snatched a curved ficelle from the bread-basket and jigged among the tables holding it thrust up from between his legs with priapic glee. It wagged at shrieking women — Katya, Gaby — Mesdames, just look, don’t touch — With a flourish, like someone putting a flower in a buttonhole, he stuck it in Pierre Grosbois’ groin, from where, to the applause of laughter, Grosbois, by tightening his thigh muscles, managed to rap it against the table.

In the disorder of chairs pulled back and the face-bobbing goodnight embraces the stranger paused vaguely at Rosa. — We’ll go and have a drink.—

They lost the others in the jostle of the place.

— Where? — He stopped and lit a cigarette in a dark archway; for him, she was the local inhabitant.

They went to Arnys, who did not seem to recognize the foreign girl outside the context of her usual company. The old woman went on playing patience in the chiffon dress that rode up on huge legs stemming from little tight pumps like satin hooves. Her blind, matted Maltese dog came over and squirted a few drops at his chair: Chabalier, he was writing for Rosa, on the margin of a newspaper lying on the bar, Bernard Chabalier.

— Where do you stay when you come to Paris?—

— I don’t come to Paris.—

— You thought you were being followed.—

— Ah that. Two nights; I was on my way here. The first and only time.—

His hunch of face against hands accepted that he had not been answered. — Do you want more wine? Or coffee? — For himself he spoke to the barman plainly and severely, as if to forestall any irritating objections. — I know it’s summer. I know it’s Quatorze Juillet. But you have lemons? I want lemon juice — hot.—

— No more wine. I’ll have that too.—

— You’re sure you’ll like it? Not some exotic French drink, you know, just sour lemon juice.—

— I understood.—

— When I was a student in London I used to ask the way on a bus. They would tell me, ten kind people at once… Yes, yes, grinning at them, thank you — but I was lost. It’s a matter of pride, standing up to the chauvinism of the foreign language. At press conferences you hear a visiting statesman so eloquent in his own language — and then suddenly he tries a few words in French…an idiot speaking, an analphabetic from some wretched forgotten hamlet learning to read at the age of seventy.—

The girl did not seem intimidated. — I’m used to it. I’ve been speaking two mother-tongues all my life and I’ve always been surrounded by other languages I don’t understand.—

— I speak English—

She gestured his competence; he was not impressed by his achievement — Well I worked there six years — but I don’t know that we’ll understand each other, eh.—

— Why not? — She took up the formula for a man and woman amusing themselves for half an hour.

— If you talk like that, yes. I say what I think will flatter you and make myself interesting. I like this. Don’t you think that. Each makes an exhibit — I can’t go through that. That’s not what I… That’s right, don’t answer…it’s embarrassing not to flirt, not to spread the tail-feathers and cocorico—

One of Arnys’ young men looking down his cheeks glided two glasses in saucers before them. The man poured the little packet of sugar into the cloudy liquid and stirred medicinally; Rosa did the same. He reached for more sugar.

— What did you do?—

She felt again the grip in which she held a hand in the street named Rue de la Harpe. He waited for her to answer and she tasted the lemon juice and took swallows in sips because it was very hot. — Nothing.—

She turned to him for a verdict, proof of his own words — he would not understand.

— I have done nothing.—

— What could you have done?—

— Ah, I can’t explain that — She looked indulgently round the bar at the young men like chorus girls touching at their hair and clothes in perpetual expectation of making an entrance, the old singer satisfying a sense of control over all she had lived by the resolution of the right card coming down.

— There are many things I could say you could’ve done. Girls in the streets of Paris like tourists with their tired feet and Guide bleu who are hijackers on the run. Little students with art nouveau tresses who have cocaine for sale in their satchels. Deputies dining at the Matignon — silver hair, manicured — Anne-Aymone talks gardening with them — who are selling arms to both sides in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, anywhere.—

— None of those. — He did not have a pullover knotted round his neck (a worn leather jacket had been put down on the bar stool beside him); he separated from the awareness in which a few common characteristics ran into one. A high forehead with distinct left and right lobes was almost a pate; thinning curly hair edged it against the light and straggled out in wings above and behind the ears. A wide thin mouth, with mobilities of muscle that modelled in the firm flesh around it expression more usually conveyed by lips.

— W-ell. There are also those who imagine they must have committed something, they feel they’re being followed. It’s all right. — The thick eyebrows that compensate men for losing their hair lifted with tolerance. The eyes had a trance-like steadiness, showing the arch of the eyelid rather low over the eyeball in a hollow of bone.

— I don’t imagine. There’s nothing either neurotic or mysterious — She had a need to be plain; as he had said, to make oneself ‘an exhibit’ was not acceptable. — If you are followed by policemen you get used to it, so do they. You know whether they fall asleep waiting for you and whether they slip away at regular times for a beer. I’ve known them since I was a child. But in a foreign town, it wouldn’t have been so easy to recognize one. I don’t know the sort of person who’d do the work, here — the kind of clothes, the haircut—

She gave up, smiling.

— If you don’t live like that — haven’t… And here — even I — if one isn’t living like that—

He was looking at her with detached respect. — You’ve been in trouble. All right. I told you, it’s impossible… I know about it but I haven’t been in it.—

— First of all, I don’t think of it like that — as ‘trouble’—

— No of course not. You see? It’s less and less possible for me. When I said we wouldn’t understand each other I didn’t think it would be something like this. I was thinking only we wouldn’t admit why I said come and why you came. About the things between men and women. You attract me very much — you know it, and you answer it by leaving the others, with me. Perhaps you haven’t found a man you want among all those who must have shown themselves interested? — Oh yes. But you couldn’t tell me… And how would you understand about me. I am eating the food and drinking the wine of friends I don’t think much of, living on them…and perhaps I also think a new girl is part of my little sabbatical…I don’t know. You know that I’m a teacher. ‘Professor’—we were introduced yes, but names… Every Frenchman who teaches in a lycée is a professor, every German is Herr Doktor. The people I’m staying with will tell you I’m writing a book — in their house, it’s a wonderful process to them. Would I tell you it’s my old Ph. D. thesis I entered myself for at the Sorbonne three years ago and that I hope maybe — maybe — someone will publish it if it is ever finished.—

— You can tell me. — She could laugh, unembarrassed. She put out a hand, tendons spoked widely on the back, and felt down round the spiral of the olive-press pillar she had followed with her eyes when she had been with other people.

A woman’s voice recorded thirty years before was singing about the island where she and Napoleon’s Josephine were born. He had fished the slice of lemon out of the bottom of his glass and was gobbling the skin with a mouth drawn by the zest. — A pig. Excuse me, I love it. — Do you know what that is? That’s Arnys singing — unmistakable. She was the best of the lot. Like some voice coming up from the street when you’re falling asleep or not really awake yet.—

Rosa leaned to whisper and was touched by the springy hair behind his ear, smelled him for the first time. — That’s Arnys there. It’s her bar.—

— Ah no.—

— People keep on telling me. It doesn’t mean much to me. — He was looking at the old woman in some kind of partisan pride and bravado at endurance. — You chose Arnys’ bar. Something like that happens… — He swung down from his stool and was over to the old woman; she looked up, mouth parted girlishly as in the photographs on the walls. He spoke low and fast in French. She growled an uncertain Monsieur? — a bass note with snapped strings. And then one of those extraordinary bursts of French animation broke out. They protested to each other, they talked both at once, lifting faces like birds challenging beaks, Arnys half-closed her eyes, they laid hands upon one another, Professor Bernard Chabalier repeating with reverent formality, chère madame, Josette Arnys, Josette Arnys. Her dog struggled under her arm to get at him or be let down.

He came back laughing privately past amiable glances; he might have been showing himself appreciative of any other local landmark. — Very modest—d‘you know what she says? — she told me there will never be anyone like her. ‘This whole feminist thing’ means women won’t be able to sing about love any more, they’ll be ashamed. So I said but the island song, it’s not about love, at least not that kind of love, it’s about origins, it was even romantically political, êh, in advance of its time (I didn’t say that to her) — the Antilles, the hankering of Europe for a particular humanism it believes to flourish in a creole world? But she says the real source of song remains only one — look at the birds, who can sing only because they must call for a mate.—

— Hadn’t you ever seen her before?—

— Where would I see her? In Paris nightclubs when I was a kid? We have some old records at home — my wife’s family is the kind that never throws anything away — we play them once a year or so, when there is a party, you know, like tonight — everybody drinks too much wine and jumps round… Are you working tomorrow?—

— I’m not working.—

— Oh god, I will have to drive myself. The whole year I say: if I could get away from the flat, children, committees, Sunday lunches, everybody, if I could have three weeks, that’s all. And now I’m alone with my thesis I’m always talking too much about. The whole summer has been arranged around me, my wife and children given up their holiday, even my mother writing me letters saying don’t reply, you are too busy concentrating. — He drew back from himself. — Do people like you have holidays? Can you say, arrête. Set a date for the rentrée.—

— I promised. — She was deeply tempted, since this man had not proved never to be met again, to place something else before him as she had five minutes in the Rue de la Harpe. — I undertook to have a holiday. Like everybody else. — Her manner was teasing.

— We’ll come tomorrow. — He spoke as if they had agreed to shelve some decision. — Does she open in the middle of the day? About twelve. — On the way out he returned to the old singer and kissed her hand. There was another flurry between the two. — She wants to open a bottle of champagne. Her boys would be jealous, êh, she obviously didn’t stand them a Quatorze Juillet celebration. I told her, tomorrow. — As the girl’s head preceded him into the street he was at once pleading and strict. — I’ll be waiting here.—

There were times when she was there before him. He began to make it a rule that he got up early enough to have worked three hours before he appeared for her through Arnys’ tabernacle-shaped doors with the panes of syrupy amber blistered glass at the top. They opened inwards and usually only for him; hardly anyone came in the mornings. Pépé or Toni or Jacques — whichever had happened to take the keys for Arnys when the bar closed at four or five in the morning — prowled listlessly between the hole of a kitchen, the restaurant alcove smelling of corks swollen with wine and corners where the Maltese had leaked into the sawdust, and the espresso machine set gargling and spitting into cup after cup taken up with dirtied, delicate, trembling ringed hands. The self-absorption of the young homosexual was strangely restful. He would drink the coffee as if it were the source of existence, smoke as if what he drew into his lungs and elaborately expelled through mouth and nostrils was a swilling-out with pure oxygen; reviving, his closed face marked by sleep and caresses like a child’s by forgotten tears and a creased pillow would change and flicker with what was passing in his mind. Now and then he would give the bar counter a half-moon swipe. In the presence of a creature so contained, Rosa came to awareness of her own being like the rising tick of a clock in an empty room. She had a newspaper, or a book she and Bernard were exchanging, but she didn’t read. The huge wooden screws of the olive press, the mirror wall behind the bar, the photographs whose signatures were a performance in themselves, the green satin that covered the walls of the alcove, held in place where it was coming loose by the pinned card, Ouvert jusqu’à l’aube; the china fish with pencils in its mouth, the bottles of Suze, Teacher’s, Ricard, Red Heart, ranged upside-down like the pipes of an organ, the TV on the old rattan table facing the kitchen at the whim of whoever currently was cook, so that he could be seen in the evenings, cutting or chopping or beating while he watched; the ribbons saved from chocolates or flowers curled like wood-shavings among the bill-spikes on Arnys’ roll-top desk: in a state exactly the reverse of that of the young homosexual, all these were strongly the objects of Rosa’s present. She inhabited it completely as everything in place around her, there and then. In the bar where she had sat seeing others living in the mirror, there was no threshold between her reflection and herself. The pillars she had noticed only as a curiosity she read over like a score, each nick and groove and knot sustaining the harmony and equilibrium of the time-space before the door pushed inwards.

— You choose something you hope someone else isn’t writing about already. That’s the extent of the originality — The irony was not unforgiving, of himself or others. He held her innocent of the pettiness of Europe. He took her hand a moment, in her lap. — I also wanted to give myself time. — He pulled a comic, culpable face. — If you are too topical, the interest will have passed on to something else before you’ve finished. And if it’s something purely scholarly, well, unless you are a great savant…what will I contribute…? No one will take the slightest notice. But the influence of former French colonists who’ve come back to France since the colonial empire ended — I haven’t got a working title yet — that’s something that will go on for years. I don’t have to worry. At first I thought I would do something about the decline of Ladnity — in fact I’ve given a few little talks on the radio…—

— To do with linguistics?—

— No, no — the decline of the Latin source of the French temperament, ideas and so on — I don’t know, it sounds a lot of shit? You know it’s true the life of the French becomes directed more and more by Anglo-Saxon and American concepts… It’s tied up with the Common Market, OTAN…god knows what else. If you want to be fancy you can compare it with the destruction of the ancient culture that fllourished in southern France and Catalonia in the Middle Ages, the civilisation occitane: instinctive, imaginative, self-renewing qualities losing out to sterile technological and military ones. But I don’t much like it. What d‘you think? Too nationalistic. And it leaves out of reckoning Descartes, Voltaire… Where does that kind of thing end? But of course I make a big fuss like everybody else when I see old bistrots like this disappearing and being replaced by drug-store bars, and markets pulled down for supermarkets… oh on that level… Enfin—when I was playing with the Latinity idea, I spent some time around Montpellier, in the Languedoc (the region’s named after the language of that civilization — the tongue they spoke was called the langue d’oc…‘oc’ simply means ‘yes’, that’s all…). And of course I was also in Provence. Provençal isn’t just a dialect, you know — it’s one of the langues d‘oc. Not much more than a remnant; oh there still are attempts at publishing works in it, but the great Provençal revival took place in the last century — Frédéric Mistral, the poet — you’ve heard of him? — yes. Well then I found I was beginning to think about something different, though in a way…related, because migrations, social change…I began to think about the pied noir concentrated in Provence, here on the coast particularly, and what effect their mentality is having on modern French culture. Part of the consequences of colonialism and all that. Ouf — He had gestures estimating how little all this was worth in the intellectual market. But he was practical. — They’ve come back — some after generations in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco. What gives the idea an interesting nuance, most of them came from this part of the world — their families, originally; southern France, Corsica, Spain. It even relates a bit to the old Latinity business: they have in their blood somewhere the qualities of the ancient cultures, the temperament, but they now bring back to France from her imperialist period the particular values and mores colonizers develop. The locust people. Descend on the land, eat the crop, and be ready to fly when the enslaved population comes after you… Anyway, there are hundreds of thousands back here and they’re very successful. That ancient spontaneousness, capacity for improvisation, alive in their veins? Maybe. A million unemployed in France this summer, but I don’t think you’ll find one among them. Many have their money in Monaco — tax reasons. I’ve been to talk to some people…d’you know that 2 per cent of the population there is pied noir… Not a bad subject, êh. It’s just controversial enough.—

— Why must it be a thesis? It would make a good book.—

— Rosa. Rosa Burger. — He leaned back, elbow on the bar, picked up the china fish and put it down again.

— Oh the style of a thesis — the long-winded footnotes. What you want to say gets buried.—

— I’m a schoolteacher. If I don’t get a Ph. D. I won’t get a job at a university. We have it all worked out — such-and-such a number of francs against such-and-such at the lycée. We can buy a piece of land in Limousin or Bretagne. In so many years build a small country house. To take a chance on a book — you have to be poor, you have to be alone, you can’t have middle-class standards. — He caught her by the wrist, persuasively, smiling, as if to make fall a weapon he imagined in her fist. — You don’t know how careful we are, we French Leftist bourgeoisie. So much set aside every month, no possibility of living dangerously.—

She was considering and curious. — Who need live dangerously, in Europe?—

— Oh there are some. But not the Eurocommunists… Not the Left that votes. Terrorists holding one country to ransom for horrors happening in another. Hijackers. People who push drugs. No one else.—

— One of the people you thought I was.—

— I know who you are. — The third time they met he returned with this discovery. He did not so much mean that someone had told him, as one of Madame Bagnelli’s friends no doubt had: her father was on the side of the blacks, out there — he was imprisoned, killed or something — a terrible story. Bernard Chabalier was among the signatures of academics and journalists that filled sheets headed by Sartre, de Beauvoir and Yves Montand on petitions for the release of political prisoners in Spain, Chile, Iran, and on manifestos protesting the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union and censorship in Argentina. He had once signed an Amnesty International petition for the release of an ageing and ill South African revolutionary leader, Lionel Burger. ‘At a time’ (it was an expression he used often, not quite English, and somehow thereby more tentative than in its correct form) there had been a suggestion he should be on the anti-apartheid committee in Paris. He had spoken a short introduction to a film made clandestinely by blacks showing the bulldozing of their houses in mass removals. The facts came from the black exiles who were hawking the film around Europe; his ability to communicate with them in English was his primary qualification. — And I gave it as a talk on France Culture—I sometimes get asked to do things; usually the sociological consequences of political questions — that sort of programme.—

— I’d like to hear you. If I could understand.—

— I should talk only French to you, really…you’d improve quickly… But you’ll never say anything real to me except in English. I won’t give that up. — Before there was time to settle an interpretation, he became practical and amusing. — If I had a tape recorder here I could do an interview with you for the radio, you know. They’d buy it I’m sure. We’ll split the fee. A grand sum. What could we do with it? Change our brand of champagne? — They drank every day without remarking it the loving-cup of the first meeting, the same citron pressé. Pépé/Toni/Jacques prepared it each time as if he had not known what the order would be: a signal of contempt for heterosexual trysts. — We could buy two cheap tickets to Corsica. On the ferry. Vomit all the way — I am terribly seasick. I know you will not be. — A moment of gloomy jealousy.

— I’ve never been on board a ship.—

— But it would be good — people would hear your voice, and I would translate you (finger-tips pursed together by the drawstring of a gesture, then opening away) — im-pec-cable.—

— I promised. I can’t speak.—

Arnys was at her old roll-top desk as soon as she arrived; she spent the first hour of her day in meditative retreat behind three walls of minute drawers and cubby-holes: her misty spectacles hung on the little pert nose of the celebrity photographs and her hands went about spearing invoices on spikes with the brooding orderly anxiety, over money, of hardened arteries in the brain. Their voices came to her as the voices of so many who were lovers or would be lovers, whose intense abrupt interrogations and monologues of banalities too low to be made out sounded as if secret and irrevocable matters were being discussed.

He put aside what he had said like a trinket he had been playing with. — Who was it you promised?—

Rosa caught the abstracted peer above the old singer’s glasses, tactfully dropped in respect for sexual privacies everyone knows from common experiences and indulges. The protection of Arnys’ unimaginable life, and the life to which the one called Pépé was at that moment connected on the phone — the pillars, the enclosed reality of the mirror — all contained her safely. — That’s how I got here. How they let me out.—

— The police? — The awkward respectful tone of initiative surrendered.

— Not directly. But in effect, yes. Oh don’t worry… — Her eyes moved to smile, a parenthetic putting out of a hand to him. — I didn’t talk. I made sure I had nothing to talk about before I went to them. But I made a deal. With them.—

— Sensible. — He defended her.

She repeated — With them, Bernard.—

— You didn’t betray anybody.—

‘Oppress’. ‘Revolt’. ‘Betray’. He used the big words as people do without knowing what they can stand for.

— I asked. No one I know would do that. I did what none of the others has done.—

— What did they say?—

— I didn’t tell anyone. I kept away.—

He was working well; the regulation of his days had fallen into place round the daily meetings in Arnys’ bar, hardly open for business but tolerant of certain needs. She saw in the rim of shaving-foam still wet on an earlobe that he had broken off concentration at the last minute, jumped up in the virtue of achievement to prepare himself for her. He was superstitious about acknowledging progress, but the calm elation with which he slid onto the stool beside her, or the gaiety of his exchanges with Arnys were admittance.

— I’d like to have you there in the room. I’ve always resented having anyone in the same room while I work. — It was a declaration; a reverie of a new relationship. But he refused himself. — I’ll make love to you, that’s the trouble.—

After the first Sunday of their acquaintance, when each had been committed to excursions with other people, they had gone on Tuesday straight from Arnys to the room where he lived. — I thought of an hotel. I’ve been worrying since Quatorze Juillet, where can we go? — His hosts were out; but it would not often happen that the house would be empty. — Do you know that little one in the street near the big garage? Behind the Crédit Lyonnais. — You mean opposite the parking ground where they play boule? — I like the look of those two little windows above. — There’s a bird-cage outside one. — You saw it too. — That’s the little restaurant where Katya and I eat couscous — they make couscous every Wednesday. Fourteen francs.—

His suitcase lay open on a chair, never unpacked but delved into, socks and shirts that had been worn stuffed among clean shirts carefully folded in imitation of the format of the shirt box and clean socks rolled into neat fists. Someone had packed shoe-trees for him. They were serving to hold down piles of cuttings and papers sorted on the bed.

It was exactly the hour of the day when she had arrived and come out into the village on Madame Bagnelli’s terrace. He moved his papers in their order to the floor, already naked, with the testicles appearing between his thighs as his male rump bent, equine and beautiful. They emerged for each other all at once: they had never seen each other on a beach, the public habituation to all but a genital triangle. He might never have been presented with a woman before, or she a man. Tremendous sweet possibilities of renewal surged between them; to explode in that familiar tender explosion all that has categorized sexuality, from chastity to taboo, illicit licence to sexual freedom. In a drop of saliva there was a whole world. He turned the wet tip of his tongue round the whorl of the navel Didier had said was like that of an orange.

In the heat they had shut out, people were eating in soft clatter, laughter, and odours of foods that had been cooked in the same way for so long their smell was the breath of the stone houses. Behind other shutters other people were also making love.

The little Rôse has a lover.

I spend less time with you; you understand that sort of priority well. You were the one who said, Chabalier, why go home — stay tonight and we can make an early start in the morning. The little expeditions to show me something of the country are arranged by the two of you, now. The big bed in the room you gave me — the room I’ll be able to keep the sense of in the moments before I have to open my eyes in other places, as Dick Terblanche knew the proportions of his grandfather’s dining-table when he couldn’t remember poetry in solitary confinement — the bed in my lovely room is intended for two people. Once dragged shut the heavy old black door doesn’t let through the sounds you have known so well, yourself. If they are audible through the windows they merge with the night traffic of motorbikes and nightingales. When the three of us have breakfast together in the sun before he goes off to his work I notice you make up your eyes and brush your hair out of respect for male presence and as an aesthetic delicacy of differentiation from the stage in life of a young woman in perfect lassitude and carelessness of sensuality — I can’t help yawning till the tears come to my eyes, thirsty and hungry (you buy croissants filled with almond paste to satisfy and indulge me), spilling over in affection towards you a bounty I can afford to be generous with. Bernard says to me: —I am full of semen for you. — It has nothing to do with passion that had to be learned to deceive prison warders; and you’re no real revolutionary waiting to decode my lovey-dovey as I dutifully report it.

With Solvig, with old Bobby (rambling off over her own hopelessly philosophical grievances in a bright English voice — I used to do all Henry Torren’s correspondence at one time. Ten francs an hour! You couldn’t get someone to wash your floors for that. How many millions d’you think he’s worth! Oh but I don’t really mind. I don’t expect anything different. His grandmother wore clogs, a cotton-hand, it’s true, my dear—) — with all the little group of you who once lived with lovers: I imagine in your voices down there on the terrace or in the kitchen a discussion of the prospects, for me, you all know so well.

Manolis was having an exhibition of his paintings on glass; Georges, reversing their roles and taking up housewifely responsibility for the opening, calculated with Madame Bagnelli the number of people for whom he was on his way to order amuse-gueules from Perrin: Donna and Didier, twelve, Tatsu — and Henry; maybe — fourteen, you and Rosa and Chabalier, seventeen… Pierre Grosbois had built himself an ‘American barbecue’ and the Grosbois initiated it with a party — No madonnas and flying donkeys (he looks too much at Chagall, êh), the bouzouki records his boyfriend buys him were the only Greek inspiration, what did you think? But I also can make things with my hands—and the little Rôse will bring her professor, of course.

Gaby suddenly cut out a dress for her; there were fittings with Rosa standing on the terrace table, waving to acquaintances who happened to look up and see her aloft, and the children of neighbours, curious and shy. The equidistant sea and sky were divided for her by the line of gravity like an hour-glass, through which a ship wrapped in pink-mauve haze passed from one element to the other, coming down over the horizon. Gaby and Katya pinned and tacked; while Rosa recognized the car-ferry boat from Corsica or Sardinia Bernard identified when they were walking round the ramparts, Gaby was telling Katya about a book she had ordered from Paris. — La Ménopause effacée, apparently if your doctor isn’t a complete idiot you can avoid the whole thing. It simply doesn’t have to happen to you — Being Gaby, she gurgled with laughter, tipped over into the uncontrolled improvisation and patter that sometimes seemed to become compulsive, she would talk at a street-comer or at the door, unable to free people of herself. — You can go on for ever. In theory. Not that anyone would want to, my god… With Pierre, mon pauvre vieux, it’s not much point…and where would I find someone in this place… Can you imagine, like Pierre’s dentist’s wife — you remember, I told you? — she takes a policeman to the Negresco on his day off every week, she picks him up from the prefecture in Nice, they have a good lunch — She pays for the room… — The laugh rose to a wail — Madame Perrin’s second daughter is at the reception there now — the old Perrin said, it’s comme il faut, mind you — not as if it’s some type picked up on the beach, he’s from the prefecture, a family man. — No — but look, my eyebrows are getting coarse, like an old man’s. Look at these marks on my hands—

— Keep out of the sun, Gaby.—

— Keep out the sun! — it’s not the sun, you know it, Katya. My doctor says there’s nothing to be done. He’s a man, what does he care. But it’s not so sure, not at all. We should have been taking hormones years ago, Katya…they say deterioration can’t be repaired but it can be arrested — Like that! — ah, that’s better, that’s the way the skirt should hang… This girl won’t ever need to get old, who knows?—

The ship was growing from veil to solidity, from pink to white, and as it listed imbedded itself out there in an ocean laid like a Roman mosaic pavement in wavy bands of pollution to the inshore limits. She and Bernard Chabalier might take a ship, one day; they could be standing somewhere on that advancing object, approaching again the chalky-lavender mountains beyond Nice and the white buildings nested up the cliffs, flashing a fish-scale tiled cupola, blue, green or rose with a gilt spike, and the towers on the shore towards Antibes that spouted up over the sea, leaning, turning slowly on their axes under the wing of the plane, built in the spiral — that aspiring, unfinished figure — that was reduced to the scale of her hand in Arnys’ bar. Rosa took in a great lungful of air out there, causing pins to give way, and the women protested indulgently. — I take the pills he gave me, yes — but I wonder if it’s the best thing? according to what I’ve read there’re new discoveries all the time. I’m going to take the book and simply say, tell him — But Katya — you examine your breasts, don’t you? It’s essential. You don’t neglect yourself?—

— You’re the only one who goes to a private doctor. You miss the girls’ gatherings at the clinic; Bobby, Françoise and Marthe, Darby in his oldest cap (afraid they’ll reassess pensions and charge if you look too prosperous). We all have our pap test. You’re crazy to pay.—

— Pierre’s idea, not mine. He doesn’t trust the clinic doctor — for my part ours is a vieux con. But the breasts — you must do that every month. Just in the bath, I lie in my bath and like this — carefully — I close my eyes and feel — you must concentrate—

Katya put out a brisk hand to Rosa. — Come down. You seem to like it up there. — Now and then when the French people became absorbed in discussion of bowel movements or other regulations of their bodies’ functions, she could be distinguished as a foreigner among them still. She spoke English, to redefine herself for the eyes of the girl; a comment on preoccupations deftly quitted, disloyally leaving her friend to them. — If someone would write the book that tells how to get old and ugly and not mind.—

— I don’t understand you too well…? Gaby looked from one to the other.

Katya said it for her in French.

Gaby put on her show of jostling gaiety — Look at that, look at that one! — but Katya, you have still a beauty, êh. — An impressed face pausing at Rosa. — Listen to her — when you have like this (an imitation of the mouth of Françoise or perhaps it was meant to be Marthe) like the anus of a hen…when you are gaga like Poliakoff… then you can complain, êh — She was a dancer, you know that? The muscles are still supple — The Ballet Russe… — A career was built up in the air.

Katya seized and crossed hands with her friend in the position of the corps of cygnets, jerking her head to the burst of ‘Swan Lake’ she sang. Their breasts’ bulk shifted from side to side like pillows being plumped.

Pierre had come up out of the dark of the little stairway and the house, a lonely bald child in search of playmates. He looked at his wife laughing and panting, intimated to Rosa, by drawing up a chair and placing himself carefully, that she and he were the only reasonable beings present.

Gaby was over at once. — How do you like it? Isn’t she beautiful? I’m proud of myself, frankly—

Her husband gazed, not to be influenced. — Wait. Sit down, Rôse. A dress can’t be judged until you see a woman coming and going, standing and sitting — am I right?—

— But it’s good! The colour, with her skin? The tiny design — real satin fermière—I think the fashion’s amusing—

— Wait. Yes. It’s good.—

Rosa walked up and down for them, smiling over her shoulder as she turned the body Chabalier defined for her with his hands, the face he watched with an attention that was only for her.

The girl’s strong awareness of herself brought to Katya the physical presence she had known, and overlaid by many others: Lionel Burger’s young flesh and face that was always under an attention beyond desire, a passion beyond theirs on the bed, the passion-beyond-passion, like the passion of God, although for him there was no such concept: he was on his own; a frightening being, the young man who thrust his heat inside her in the coldest cities of the world.

Pierre carried the glass of pastis that was his avuncular intimacy with the girl and tackled her round the neck in a moment’s hug, murmuring with generosity and sense of celebration that needed no tact — The little Rôse en pleine forme, everything is wonderful with you, êh.—

There’s the desire to create a little store of common experience between lovers, foreigners: while she was living with the Nel family in the dorp hotel on the Springbok Flats, a youth of eighteen was taking his baccalauréat at the Lycée Louis le Grand. The pictures of street cafés, awnings and poodles in the hotel rooms — I told the cleaning girls, that’s Paris, a place in England.

— You were a show-off and ignorant as most show-offs. Whereas of course I could have put my finger just exactly on the map of Africa where your aunt and uncle had their small hotel — He stroked away on her eyelids and in the bend of her elbows the years and places that could not exist, his for her, hers for him. Those of the present and immediate past did not seem to have much importance. Since she had taken down the plate and sold that house, she had lived with friends; in a flat; in a cottage with some young man who had paused in his wanderings about the world; and then a flat again, the same city. — It’s a condominium in the quinzième, not bad, Christine found it when they were replanning the interior so it’s more or less according to her idea. At least I have a small room to work in — before I used to have my table in the bedroom, and if I wanted to work late…the other person gets fed up, wants to go to bed. There’s a big terrace where the kids can keep their bicycles — but she’s cluttered it with a lot of plants, I’m not so keen—

Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier were easily matched to these contingent circumstances; wearing the same clothes covering the same newly-discovered minutely-known bodies they could be set walking along streets that had scuffed the shoes they wore now in each other’s presence, could be seen standing in grey European raincoat on a metro platform, turning home into one of the new rectangles pushed between florid nineteenth-century mansards and frail yellowed walls of earlier buildings, or followed — a small, strong girl whose shoulder-muscles of an open-air country’s physique moved in a bare-backed dress, like the one she was wearing — through traffic of black men on bicycles and women with bundles on their heads that was familiar footage from television news.

When their delight in each other brimmed and its energies turned outwards, they liked to go fishing. The old car borrowed from Katya tackled tracks tunnelled beside the Loup; they shared the modest opportunities of a catch with young husbands in caps given away at petrol stations, old fellows with wives who knitted and minded paper bags holding bait, bread and wine; and all were startled together by the descent of wandering bands of hoarse teenagers who pushed one another about, splashed and went away, leaving the shuddering markings of light and shade to settle again on figures and water, working them over in a way that broke up limits and made one single state of being for a whole summer afternoon.

They looked at paintings. — In Africa, one goes to see the people. In Europe, it’s pictures.—

But she was seeing in Bonnard canvases past which they were being moved as if processed by the crowd, a confirmation of the experience running within her. The people she was living among, the way of apprehending, of being alive, at the river, were coexistent with the life fixed by the painter’s vision. And how could that be? — When you look at a painting, it’s something that’s over, isn’t it? — it’s a record of what’s already passed through the painter’s mind, both the event of seeing and the concept that arises from it — the imagining — are fixed in paint. So a picture is always abstract, to me — the style of painting hasn’t much to do with it. But when Katya and I go and lie under the olive trees…even my room, you know, the room she gave me — the flowers in a jar on the floor, and his flowers, this bouquet of mimosa… These pictures are proof of something. It is the people I’m living among I’m seeing, not the pictures.—

— And do you know why, my darling? This woman here stepping through the leaves, and this mimosa — the woman he painted in eighteen-ninety-four (look in the catalogue, it’s written), the mimosa in ‘45 during the war, during the Occupation, yes? All right. In the fifty years between the two paintings, there was the growth of fascism, two wars — the Occupation — And for Bonnard it is as if nothing’s happened. Nothing. Look at them… He could have painted them the same summer, the same day. And that’s how they are, those ones up there round the château — that’s how they live. It’s as if nothing has ever happened — to them, or anybody. Or is happening. Anywhere. No prisoners in Soviet asylums, no South Africa…no migrant workers living without women just down the road…no ‘place of protection’ at Arène — right under our noses, over there in Marseilles — already this year seven thousand poor devils have been locked up there like stray animals before they’re deported… To be alive day by day: the same as in Bonnard — tout voir pour la premiere fois, à la fois. Until the age of eighty. Oh that’s charming…of course, if you can manage it. Look here — and there — the woman’s flesh and the leaves round her are so beautiful and they are equal manifestations. Because she hasn’t any existence any more than the leaves have, outside this lovely forest where they are. No past, no future. The mimosa: fifty years later, it’s alive in the same summer as she is. There hasn’t been any Hitler, concentration camps — The slow-moving surge of people in holiday clothes pushed them away out of the galleries to the shallow steps and down to a courtyard of sculptured figures elongated as late shadows. His muscular legs with their shining straight black hair, and his pale European hands with the thin gold ring of his family status shone softly in the shade. — no bombings, no German occupation. Your forest girl and the vase of mimosa — c’est un paradis inventé.—

They were both wearing shorts and as they strolled his leg brushed hers like the weaving of an affectionate cat.

— If I did come to Paris—

— You will come, you will come — He went ahead along a narrow path under pinkish-blue-trunked pine trees, putting out a hand to lead her behind him.

— I can’t imagine how it would be — work out. How I would see you.—

— As you are seeing me now. Every day.—

— I’d be — where?—

— Some nice little hotel. Near the lycée. So that I can come quickly to you. I want first to show you la dame à la licorne in the Cluny.—

— You will arrange treats for me.—

— What is that?—

— When you take children out to amuse them.—

— Ah no. I love her, I can’t let you go any longer without knowing you have seen her too.—

Rosa leant beside him on a stone wall, looking on slopes with vineyards spread out to ripen in the sun and olive trees stooped along abandoned terracing broken by old farmhouses and new villas. A shirtless man was tiptoeing across a tiled roof he was repairing; a woman’s arms and stance were those of someone yelling up at him, although she was too far away to be heard. Farther still, on the strip of sea threaded behind the sandcastle towers, flags and belfries of hill-top villages, a ship like a spouting whale sent up white smoke. She followed the woman stepping back and back to see the man on the roof as if completing a figure that was leading to a tapestry on a museum wall from a room in an hotel that would be particular among streets of such hotels. Her chin was lifted and she was smiling, grimacing with lips pressed together in some shy and awkward mastery. Bernard saw the man on the roof;—The belly he’s got on him. Il va se casser la gueule, vieux con… Maybe even a little apartment. It’s not easy, but I have a few ideas. I know just what you’d like — a little studio in an old building…but usually they are stinking…the passages…you can’t imagine. No, we’ll find something better. — He no longer saw the man on the roof, the woman, the valley; eyes were drawn as if against glare, against thoughts in the language where she could not follow him. — Mind you, an hotel — then there’s always the concierge, if you need anything and I’m not — The long mouth with the thin upper line reacted with sadness and shrewd obstinacy to objections she did not know about; the steady eyes came to a warm, assuring focus, denying them. — I’m absolutely sure something can be done through the right people. The anti-apartheid committee can get you temporary residence and even a work permit. If not for you, then who the hell? But discreetly… Though of course they’d love to have you on a platform, Rosa, you can believe it… And we could get that film of your father, it would be — but no, of course not, not until you have French papers. They’d jump at the idea of you — probably they’ll make a job for you right away. And there are my contacts. Not bad. Quite a few black academics who have influence in French-speaking African countries they come from — There are so many projects and never enough people to go. It’s possible you could get a job doing wonderful work, medical training in Cameroun or Brazzaville, somewhere like that — I’ve many times been offered a lectureship at one of those black universities there, a year’s contract, there wouldn’t be any question of moving the family.—

They had taken on without thinking one of the ancient groupings of the couple; found a place in the grass where she folded her legs beneath her and he laid his head against her belly, feeling it shake when she laughed and hearing the muffled questioning sounds of her gut as a child of his in her would. — I’ll come alone. We’d have a whole year.—

— I was talking with the dear boys before you came to Arnys’ yesterday. They were consulting their horoscopes in Marie-Claire. Very serious. You know, I just found I had the words, I could put them together without thinking — The face turned up to hers was the face he must have had ten years earlier, a face to be curious about, smoothed like a piece of paper under the heel of a hand, unmarked by lines of ambitious anxiety, and as it was before the chin-crevice was deepened by sensual intelligence. — Oh your French will be fine. You’ll manage perfectly all right. Maybe in Africa I’ll even finish my bloody book. Ah, that’s very good: one of the reasons for my taking the job after all will be that it’s necessary to go back to colonial sources and so on.—

All practical matters were open between them; a wife and two children, a responsibility assumed long ago by a responsible man. The attitude on which Bernard and Rosa’s acceptance of this circumstance rested was based on one of the simple statements of a complex man — I live among my wife and children — not with them.—

The statement, in turn, seemed to seek an explanation from Rosa she could not give; but in the saying, the burden of it was shifted a little, her shoulder went under it beside his. They had no home but he was living very much with her. The security was almost palpable for him in the vigour and repose of her small body. Resting there, he gained what she had once and many times at the touch-line of her father’s chest, warm and sounding with the beat of his heart, in chlorinated water. Her eyes (the colour of light, creating unease; Boer eyes, pied-noir eyes?) — moved above his head among trees, passers-by and — quick glance down — in a private motivation of inner vision as alert and dissimulating as the gaze her mother had been equally unaware of, looking up to see the daughter coming slowly over the gravel from the visit to her ‘fiancé’ in prison.

The young smooth face spoke out beneath hers; from what he had been and what he was — You are the dearest thing in the world to me.—

At gatherings they lost each other in the generality and then would become aware, near by, of the back of a head or a voice: she heard a slightly different version of Bernard Chabalier giving a slightly different version of what he had said about the painter. — fifty years, fauvism, futurism, cubism, abstract art — for him everything passes as nothing. 1945 is 1895. Maybe what is complete is timeless…but events change the consciousness of the world, it shakes and the shocks register seismographically in movements in art—

Donna was obliged to entertain an English friend who was the property of her family — the sort of single example, culled by them from the politico-intellectual circles whose existence they ignore, that is the pride of a rich family. He would take himself at their valuation of his distinction. He would expect to have a party given for him; Donna had had to round up, among the usual people she knew, a few that he would feel were on a level to appreciate him. Her explanation of what he was or rather did was unsure; had been a member of parliament, something to do with the fuss over Britain’s entry into the Common Market, something to do with editing a journal. She couldn’t remember how good his French was; the Grosbois, the Lesbians from the brocanterie and other people of her local French contingent collected in one part of her terrace, happy to make their own familiar party, anyway; Didier in an exquisite white Italian suit (only Manolis recognized pure raw silk) asserted his own kind of distinction while moving about swiftly serving drinks in the preoccupied detachment of someone hired for the occasion. His contribution to proper appreciation of the guest of honour was instinctively to take on a role in keeping with the position of Donna as the host of James Chelmsford. Chelmsford himself was got up in shirt-sleeves, blue linen trousers, espadrilles showing thick, pallid blue-veined ankles, yellow Liberty scarf under a shinily-shaven red face, drinking pastis; making it clear he was no newcomer to this part of the world. Donna shepherded round him a little group that included Rosa. It attracted one or two others who had opinions to solicit as an opening to giving their own — a journalist from Paris who was someone else’s house-guest, a constructional engineer from the Société des Grands Travaux de Marseille.

— Why has it taken Solzhenitsyn to disillusion people with Marx? Others’ve come out of the Soviet Union with the same kind of testimony. His Gulag isn’t something we didn’t all know about—

Chelmsford was listening to the journalist with an air of professional attention. — Well, for that matter of course, one might ask how since the Moscow trials—

— No, no — because they belong to the Stalinist period and the Left makes a strong distinction between what died with Stalin, that’s the bad old days… But dating from the new era — post-Khrushchev — the thaw, the freeze again — everyone’s been aware the same old horrors were going on, hospitals the latest kind of prison camp, new names for the old terror, that’s all. Why should Solzhenitsyn rouse people?—

— But has he?—

The journalist gave the architect the smile for someone of no opinion. He addressed his reaction to the others. — Oh without question — after that creature so tortured, so damaged — who could meet his eyes on television, sitting there at home on a Roche-Bobois chair with a whisky in your hand. I know that I…that face that looks as if it has been hit — slapped, êh? — so that the cheeks have no feeling any more and the mouth that makes itself (he drew up his own shoulders, shook his clenched hands, and bunched his mouth until the lips whitened) — that mouth that makes itself so small from the habitude of not being allowed to speak freely. The Western Leftists don’t know how to go on believing. They don’t know what to defend in Marx, after him.—

— It’s not easy to answer. — The engineer spoke up friendlily to Rosa as if for them both; he had the scrupulously tolerant manner of some new kind of missionary, his feet in sensible sandals, his blond head almost completely shaven for coolness in the river-mouth swamps of Brazil and Africa where (he chatted to her) he prepared surveys of prospective harbour sites. — Perhaps it’s the approach, something in his style? The writing, I mean. Something Victor Hugoish that appeals to a wide public, much wider…—

— The public. The public in general were always ready to believe the Communists are nothing but beasts and monsters anyway — it’s the intellectual Left that’s rejecting Marx now—

— Well I doubt whether the same kind of thing can be said of England — but then I doubt whether we can be said to have an intellectual Left in the same sense. One could hardly put up Tony Crosland as a candidate among café philosophers… — The French didn’t understand the joke.

— And even rejecting Mao — you can’t ‘institutionalize happiness’ —from the same people who were the students in the streets in ’68!—

The journalist and the engineer singled each other out, constantly interrupted, above the heads of others. — No, it’s not quite true, Glucksmann attacks Solzhenitsyn for saying Stalin was already contained in Marx—

— We-ell, they put up some kind of half-hearted show… I mean, of course you don’t come out and say, I was wrong, we brilliant young somebodies, the new Sartres and Foucaults, our theories, our basic premises — blood and shit, that’s all that’s left of them in the Gulag, êh?

— Of course one shouldn’t overlook that Solzhenitsyn’s basic pessimism has always made him a plebeian rather than a socialist writer—

— But how will we change the world without Marx? — (The engineer admitted as if smilingly confessing to have been a football first-leaguer, although his build wouldn’t credit it — I was out in the streets in ’68.—) — They do still agree it must be changed.—

— I wonder. Hardly. Even that. What have they between their legs, never mind in their heads. Political philosophers… They’ll capitulate entirely to individualism. Or get religion. Either way, they’ll end up with the Right.—

— Well, for a start, we must disown Marx’s eldest child. La fille aînée. We must declare the Soviet Union heretic to socialism. — Bernard Chabalier joined the group; she heard the interjection among others. He had the elliptical gestures of one who has slipped back into the shoal.

— No, no, let’s be clear: there’s a distinction between the anti-sovietism of the right and the new anti-sovietism of the Leftist intellectuals. The Left now may seem to define the evils of Soviet socialism just as reactionary thought always did: pitiless dictatorship over forced labour. But what they condemn isn’t the difference between Soviet socialism and Western liberalism — which is roughly speaking the thesis of Western liberalism and even of the enlightened Right — that’s true in England?

— M — y-es, I suppose one could say we believe we know what human rights we stand for but we don’t want nationalization and unrestricted immigration of blacks. That’s why the Labour Party’s going to come to grief. — The French laughed with the guest of honour this time and he tailed off into vague assenting, dissimulating, scornful umphs and murmurs that dissociated him from that particular political folly.

— Neither is it the orthodox apologist thesis that what’s happened to socialism in the Soviet Union has something to do with a legacy of Russian backwardness — that old stuff: her state of underdevelopment when her revolution came, the economic set-back of the war, the autocratic tradition of the Russian people and so on. The Left’s theory is that if Stalin was contained in Marx, it’s because the cult of the state and la rationalité sociale already were contained in Western thought — it’s this that has infected socialism. The phenomenon of Gulag arose in the Soviet Union; but its doctrine comes from Machiavelli and Descartes—

The distinctively-modelled forehead with the fuzz of hair behind each ear tipped back, the lids dropped, intensifying the gaze. — So all that’s wrong with socialism is what’s wrong with the West. The fault of capitalism again—

— Let me finish — therefore the anti-sovietism of the Western Leftists is an anti-sovietism of the Left, quite different.—

— and let me tell you — Bernard burst through the hoop of his own irony — it’s the tragedy of the Left that it can still believe all that’s wrong with socialism is the West. Our tragedy as Leftists, the tragedy of our age. Socialism is the horizon of the world, Sartre has said it once and for all — but it’s a blackout…close your eyes, hold your nose rather than admit where the stink is coming from.—

— The important thing surely is—

The architect’s voice ran up and down themes that pleased him: —I wish I could arrange my convictions with the genius of a new philosophe…and they talk about Manichean…they accuse Giscard…—

— Surely the important factor is — the Englishman had drawn up his belly and lifted his chest, holding his opinions above argument—…at least these fellows may have the sense to have done with total ideas and the total repression indivisible from such ideas. When you get someone saying the twentieth century’s great invention may turn out to be the concentration camp…when you start coming out with thoughts like that, we may be getting away at last from the lure of the evil utopia. If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.—

Bernard saw her, Rosa, looking at them all, at himself as one of them. Her cheekbones were taut with amazement; her presence went among them like an arm backing them away from something lost and trampled underfoot. — ‘You can’t institutionalize happiness’? —In all seriousness? As a discovery…? It’s something from a Christmas cracker motto…—

The architect was charmingly quick-witted. — Perhaps they meant freedom, somehow they‘re — I don’t know — a bit too shaken these days to use the word. In the Leftist view of life, anyway, the two are as one, more or less, aren’t they, they’re always insisting their ‘freedom’ is the condition of happiness.—

She weighed empty hands a moment — Bernard saw what was underfoot taken up and shown there — then hid fists behind her thighs. — Don’t you know? There isn’t the possibility of happiness without institutions to protect it.—

The Englishman smiled on a grille of tiny teeth holding a cigar. — God in heaven help us! And up goes the barbed wire, and who knows when you first discover which is the wrong side—

— I’m not offering a theory. I’m talking about people who need to have rights—there—in a statute book, so that they can move about in their own country, decide what work they’ll do and what their children will learn at school. So that they can get onto a bus or walk in somewhere and order a cup of coffee.—

— Oh well, ordinary civil rights. That’s hardly utopia. You don’t need a revolution for that.—

— In some countries you do. People die for such things. — Bernard spoke aloud to himself.

Rosa gave no sign of having heard him. — But the struggle for change is based on the idea that freedom exists, isn’t it? That wild idea. People must be able to create institutions — institutions must evolve that will make it possible in practice. That utopia, it’s inside…without it, how can you…act? — The last word echoed among them as ‘live’, the one she had subconsciously substituted it for; there were sympathetic, embarrassed, appreciative changes in the faces, taking, amiably or as a reproach, a naive truth nevertheless granted.

The Englishman set his profile as if for a resolute portrait. — The lies. The cruelty. Too much pain has come from it.—

— But there’s no indemnity. You can’t be afraid to do good in case evil results. — As Rosa spoke, Katya paused in passing and put an arm round her; looked at them all a moment, basking in the reflection of a past defiance, an old veteran showing he can still snap to attention, and went on her way to sponge a stain of spilt wine off the bosom of her dress. — This terrible balcony of mine, it catches every drip.—

The Englishman’s authority reared and wheeled. He took another pastis from Didier’s tray without being aware of the exchange of his empty glass for a full one. — Not a question of moral justification, we must get away from all that. The evil utopia — the monolithic state that’s all the utopian dream is capable of producing has taken over moral justification and made it the biggest lie of the lot.—

— Yes, yes, exactly what they are saying — whether it’s the Communist Party or some giant multinational company, people are turning against huge, confining structures—

— Our only hope lies in a dispassionate morality of technology, our creed must be, broadly speaking, ecological — always allowing the premise that man’s place is central—

Bernard met Rosa in the thicket of the others’ self-absorption. — For them, it livens up a party.—

She shrugged and imitated his gesture of puffing out the lower lip: for all of us. She gave a quick smile to him.

They moved away as if they had no common destination, would separate and go to Didier’s bar or join the Grosbois faction where Darby was being egged on to growl out some story which brought down upon her such bombardments of laughter that Donna watched, annoyed. They moved measuredly, like a pair meeting by appointment to exchange a message under cover of the crowd. He suddenly began to speak. — There’s plenty you can do, Rosa. In Paris, in London, for that matter. Enough for a lifetime. If you must. But I begin to think — He stopped; the two moved slowly on. — Ah, my reasons are not theirs—

He couldn’t have said what he did, anywhere else; not alone with her; the presence of the crowd made it possible, safe from any show of emotions let loose. — I want to say to you — you can’t enter someone else’s cause or salvation. Look at those idiots singing in the streets with shaved heads a few years ago… They won’t attain the Indian nirvana. — Her head was down, bent towards his low voice. They might have been murmuring some gossip about the group they had just quitted. — Oh I know, how can I compare… — He paused for her quick glance but it did not come. — The same with your father and the blacks — their freedom. You’ll excuse me for saying…the same with you and the blacks. It’s not open to you.—

— Go on. — She held him to it in the knowledge that he might not be able to find the time and place where he would dare to speak again: a meeting away from the lovers Bernard and Rosa.

— Not even you.—

But he was afraid. He disappeared into thoughts in his own language and the surf of human company broke high all around them. The view of the sea from Donna’s terrace was paraded by red and blue and yellow sails of the local people’s tiny pleasure craft on a Saturday afternoon all tacking in and turning at the buoys that marked the limit of sheltered waters. He could see Corsica wavering through the distortion of distance. — I really feel like pushing off to Ajaccio. You know? We ought to get the feeling of what’s going on there. The cellar the autonomists occupied when they killed those two gendarmes belongs to one of my pieds noirs. The French Algerians are making a fortune in Corsica. I’d like to talk to them.—

— Was the rioting actually against them, or was it also against French rule — to put it the other way about, I mean was the choice of that particular man’s cellar deliberate?—

He took pleasure in explaining what interested her; in her practised understanding of the way things happen in events of that category. — Oh the two are closely connected, the moving in of settlers from Algeria is seen by the independence movement as part of France’s colonialist exploitation — when they got kicked out of Algeria, they came nearer home to another one of France’s poor ‘colonies’, though Corsica’s supposed to be part of metropolitan France… So it’s the same thing. The French Algerians represent Paris, to the Corsicans. They even reject Napoleon as some sort of sell-out: the great hero of the French, the assimilator. The Simeoni brothers who lead the independence movement have taken up Paoli as hero. Ever heard of Pascal Paoli? In the eighteenth century he fought the French for an independent Corsica… It might be fascinating, for us now…and for my book. A popular revolt that’s actually within its scope — the riots are the most serious trouble there’s been in Corsica. Make a good chapter.—

— It’ll be enough to take your mind off your stomach. — When lovers cannot touch, they tease each other instead.

— We’ll fly. To hell with the ferry.—

— I wanted to go on that lovely white ship.—

— Good god, I don’t want you to see me vomiting…it’s not a lovely ship, my Rosa, it’s just a floating belly full of cars.—

— When? There’s no problem about visas, I suppose? They’ll let me in?—

— You are in. I told you, it’s colonized, it’s France—

He gripped her wrist where she leaned on her elbow, wrestling with their joy.

Georges and Manolis joined them. Didier had put on an old Marlene Dietrich record and pulled up Tatsu from the cushions piled on the floor as in a stage harem. She did not grin and giggle when she danced; hers was another face. Manolis was letting Didier’s tango lead his eyes — I was saying to Georges — beau, mais très ordinaire—

Dancing, the Japanese girl’s face was as it has never been before, grave, dreamy, fully expectant, and I felt what she had wanted — one age, with her. Something is owed us. Young women, girls still. The capacity I feel, running down the sluiced alleys under flower-boxes to meet the man who tells me his flesh rises when his ears recognize the slither of my sandals, the flashes of bright feeling that buffet me at this point where I see the sea, the abundance for myself I sense in whiffs from behind the plastic ribbons of open kitchen doors and greetings from the street-cleaners paused for a glass of wine at the bar tabac. School comes out for lunch and a swirl and clatter of tiny children giddy round my legs, they clasp me anywhere that offers a hold, I dodge from this side to that like a goal-keeper, arms out…

I see everything, everything, have to stop to stroke each cat taking up the pose of a Grimaldi lion on a doorstep. Or I go blindfold in the darkness of sensations I have just experienced, deaf to everything but a long dialectic of body and mind that continues within Bernard Chabalier and me even when we are not together. Suddenly a woman stood before me; the other day, a woman in a nightgown stopped me in one of these close streets that are the warren of my loving. — One of the old girls, the Lesbians or beauties from the nineteen thirties. — I thought for a moment it was Bobby there.

She clutched me by the arm; the nerves in her fingers twitched like fleas. I saw that there were tears runnelling the creases of her neck. Help me, help me. I broke surface into her need with the cringe and bewilderment at the light of a time of day or night one doesn’t recognize. And that was what she herself inhabited: What time is it? She wanted to know if she had just got up or was ready to go to bed; she had slipped the moorings of nights and days. When I asked what was wrong she searched my face, gaping tense, the lipstick staining up into the vertical folds breaking the lips’ outline: that was what was wrong — that she didn’t know, couldn’t remember what it was that was wrong.

I took her away from the street that exposed through folds of blue nylon the dangle of dark nipples at the end of two flaps of skin. The door to a little house—Lou Souliou in wrought-iron script — stood open behind her. I offered to help her dress or get back to bed (supposing she had been in bed; she couldn’t say). But as soon as we were inside she began to chatter with matter-of-fact, everyday animation. We did not mention what had happened in the street. She put on something that looked more like an old velvet evening coat than a dressing-gown. She offered me coffee — or vodka? There should be a bottle of vodka in the fridge, and some tomato juice? When she heard my French pidgin she answered in English with a formal American turn of phrase like a character out of Henry James. Photographs and mementoes in a dim, cosy room — like all the houses where women live around here. A free-range life; some of the things looked Peruvian, Mexican — American Indian. The Provençal panetière with books and small treasures behind its wooden bars, the curlicued spindly desk — it was stacked with rolls of unopened newspapers. — You’re Arnys’ little friend, aren’t you? That’s where we’ve met. Arnys loves young people — Bernard is Arnys’ little friend, but I suppose this must have been one of the women who have seen me in the bar so often this summer. When I come back another year they may even remember, your — Madame Bagnelli’s — girl, the great love of the Parisian professor who was writing a book.

I wanted to go and she wanted to keep me with her in case the woman I had met in the street took possession of her again. I came flying up the hill to look for you singing while you upholster an old chair or paint a brave coat of red on your toenails. I wanted to ask who she was and tell you what happened. But when I saw you, Katya, I said nothing. It might happen to you. When I am gone. Someday. When I am in Paris, or in Cameroun picking up things that take my fancy, the mementoes I shall acquire.

The prospects: what are the prospects? For Burger’s first wife, Ugo Bagnelli’s mistress, for Rosa Burger.

You have your nightingales every May and the breasts that gave such sweet pleasure are palpated clinically every three months in the routine of prolonging life. The bed Ugo Bagnelli came to when he could get away from his family in Toulon — I sleep in it with Bernard, now — will not be filled with another man of yours. As Gaby Grosbois says, there could only be an arrangement, one pays for the hotel room oneself, like Pierre’s dentist’s wife and the policeman. And dear old Pierre in his blue Levis — it does not worry his wife that he might still find you desirable; there’s nothing for it but to make a joke between you of his impotence. You laugh at her when she says ‘You have still a beauty, Katya’; today I saw you in the good light that’s only to be found in the bathroom, of the dim rooms in this house I wish I could stay in for the rest of my life — I’ve seen you plucking bristles from your chin.

It’s possible to live within the ambit of a person not a country. Paris, Cameroun, Brazzaville; home. There’s the possibility with Chabalier, my Chabalier. He tells me that once installed in Paris, I’ll have my Chabalier who is the only one who counts. He’s not disloyal. He doesn’t say he doesn’t love his wife and children; ‘I live among them, not with them’. We don’t say ritual words between us; I don’t want to use the ones I had to use to establish bona fides for a prison. How is it he knew that — he was somehow recognizing that, in his distaste for going through the motions of flirtation the first night in the bar.

‘I have to satisfy her sometimes.’

I have asked him outright: you will have to make love to her when you go home. We knew I meant not only when he goes home from here, but when I am living ‘near by’ the lycée and he has been with me. He never lies; and mine was a question only a foreign woman would ask, surely. I realize that. I feel no jealousy although I have seen her photograph — she was on one he showed me when I asked to see his children. She is a pretty woman with a pert, determined head whom I can imagine saying, as you told me Ugo’s wife did: You can have as many women as you like so long as you don’t bring them into my home and I don’t know about them. — An indestructible bourgeoise — you said of Ugo’s wife, and you laughed generously, Katya. — That was good. I didn’t want to destroy anyone; I didn’t want anything of hers. — And you had your Bagnelli for more than fifteen years. Bobby had her Colonel. It’s possible.

We could even have a child. — You’re the kind of woman who can do that — He’s said it to me. — I wouldn’t be afraid to let us have a child. I don’t agree in general with the idea that a girl should go ahead and have a child just because she wants to show she doesn’t need a husband — like showing one can get a degree. It’s no easier than it ever was. A child without a family, brothers and sisters… But ours. A boy for your father.—

When I’m middle-aged I’ll have with me a young son at the Lycée Louis le Grand named after Lionel Burger; he would have no need to claim the name of the Chabalier children. We have kin in Paris, my child and I: I think sometimes of looking her up one day when I’m living there, cousin Marie who promotes oranges. In Paris there will be no reason to avoid anyone once I have new papers. Free to talk. Free. If I should meet Madame Chabalier accompanying her husband at one of the left-wing gatherings? — It doesn’t matter. You will probably like each other. You’ll chat like you do with anyone else who has political ideas more or less in common…that’s all. She tries to keep up. — He scoops the soggy slice of lemon out of my glass when he’s eaten his own, and sucks that. — You haven’t done her any harm.—

I don’t want to know more about her; don’t want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it’s not her fault. — One is married and there is nothing to be done. — Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It’s other things he’s said that are the text I’m living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There’s nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other. Bernard Chabalier’s mistress isn’t Lionel Burger’s daughter; she’s certainly not accountable to the Future, she can go off and do good works in Cameroun or contemplate the unicorn in the tapestry forest. ‘This is the creature that has never been’—he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé.

When I saw you plucking the cruel beard from your soft chin, I should have come to you and kissed you and put my arms around you against the prospect of decay and death.

After a short trip to Corsica in pursuit of research for his thesis, Bernard Chabalier put his mind to discovering some sound reason why he should need to go to London, as well. He was good at this; extremely skilful and practised, beginning by convincing himself. Once this test was made — his face that habitually flickered with ironic scepticism and amusement at doubtful propositions accepted this one as passable — he was confident he could convince whoever was necessary. — I ought to spend a few days in London to talk to a British colleague — yes, of course the LSE — he’s doing the same sort of research. The influence of the counter-emigration in Britain. Not bad, ‘Counter-emigration’. I think I’ve invented it. The settlers who returned from Kenya, the Rhodesians who have been slipping back since UDI, Pakistanis, that goes without saying, West Indians. As a comparison: a short chapter for purposes of comparison. The mutation of post-colonial Anglo-Saxon values as against… Such things are good for a thesis. Erudite touches. Impress the monitors. — These points would scarcely need to be led before his wife (Christine is her name) and his mother for whom the demands of the thesis come before everything. — If sitting on top of a pillar in the middle of the desert was the best way to get my doctorate, they would send me, no mercy, a bottle of Evian to make sure if I was dying of thirst I wouldn’t drink water with germs. Ambitious for me, oh, I can tell you! They make sacrifices themselves, it’s true…—

Four days and three nights together in Corsica had given Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier a taste of the experience of being alone, a couple in the pure state, the incomparable experience they were in no danger of losing in the attempt at indefinite prolongation that is marriage. But the joy without demands — because the night-and-day presence of the other, sensation and rhythm of breathing, smell, touch, voice, sight of, interpenetration with was total provision — becomes in itself one single unifying demand. Of the couple; upon the world, upon time: to experience again that perfect equilibrium. A wild, strong, brazen, narrow-eyed resoluteness, cast in desire, treading on the fingers of restraint, knocking aside whatever makes the passage of the will improbable and even impossible. Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier would not have many opportunities to live together whole days followed by nights when their bodies kept vigil over one another in sleep like the side-by-side tomb effigies that stand for loving bodies left deserted by death. If days and nights are going to have to be counted on the fingers, the score is important. Rosa found London a brilliant idea because ideas in this urgent context have only to be practicable to be brilliant. She herself had some complementary to his essential basic one, the reason for him to go to London. A hotel was risky; no matter how obscure, someone who knew him or her might be staying there; after all, there are many reasons for seeking obscurity. A flat was available to her — a key to a flat in Holland Park was always available to her, she had never used it. Never been to England, to London — was Holland Park all right? Bernard was charmed by the idea of showing the jeune anglaise (French people in the village where he had met her made no fine distinctions of origin between English-speaking foreigners) round London. Holland Park was ideal! A short ride on the Underground to the West End.

How far from the London School of Economics?

Laughter and words capering — Ah that’s right off our route, we’ll never find that, don’t worry — But my colleague, now, he lives in Holland Park, he’s going to get me a room in the house of some friends, êh, it’s cheaper than staying in an hotel…and if there’s a phone-call (Rosa already understands the pause, the inference, old Madame Chabalier has had an ‘infarctus’—heart attack — twice, and there must always be a means of reaching her son) there’s nothing remarkable about someone else in the house having answered the phone, no?—

Yes. And yes again. Yes to everything, as what can’t be done begins to be achieved with the zest of practical solutions following step-by-step, carefully planned, because carelessness costs wounds, no one must be hurt if Bernard Chabalier and Rosa Burger are to remain intact and unreachable.

On the 7th of September Bernard Chabalier assembled the type-written pages and hand-written notes scattered in coded disorder round the room where he had worked and made love, both well — he paused to grant it; a remarkable witness, that room he would not wish to be confronted with again, under changed circumstances, ever — and went back to Paris. It was one week before the re-opening of the lycée where he was, like all French schoolmasters, a professor. That was reasonable enough. It was one week before the re-opening of his children’s schools; that was the reason. He could return one day and walk into his classrooms the next — he had taught what was to be taught many times, but his own children liked him to go along when pencils and exercise-books and new shoes were to be bought in preparation for the school year. He had talked to Rosa about his awareness that he did not know, beyond a certain elementary level, how one would have to behave to be what he called a ‘continuing’ father, equal to needs one would have to divine; for the present he simply did what seemed to please the children most obviously? He did not tell her that the date he and she agreed upon for his departure was a specific instance. That was the sort of thing she had, would have to divine in the kind of life he and she were living and going to live; no need to lift the fact clear of supposition that a ‘professor’ needs a week to assume that identity. Loving the girl, anywhere outside the pure state, the principle that no one must be wounded reversed her position from possible perpetrator to possible victim. If nothing were said, and yet she understood why he was committed to himself to leave on that day, this would be another of the unspoken facts that would graft Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier closely upon one another.

He left on a day that denied the date on the airline ticket. Holiday crowds had gone but the ancient stone bones of the village held the marrow of summer. The blue of the sea, triumphant over its pollution, was solid. By contrast the mountains powdered away into delicate haloes of sun-gauze; no memory of snow, it would never come back. From Madame Bagnelli’s car, a smell of geraniums through the windows instead of petrol fumes, and the old men playing their ball-game under the olive trees in the parking ground empty of cars, as Rosa saw him doing there when he grew old. She drove, and perhaps her concentration (still not able to trust her reflexes to keep to the right side of the road instead of the left — which was the rule where she came from) held at bay the desperation that attacked him, so that beside her his hands shook and he breathed with open mouth.

But he was coming to meet her in London in a few weeks. In the meantime he would look for the small apartment for her in Paris in the quartier of the lycée; she would go to London and install herself, waiting for him, in the flat that was available to her always. He would take a week’s leave — he had not had a day’s sick- or study-leave in ten years, he did not care a damn if the term had only just begun — and then they would come back to Paris on the same day, if not the same plane, which is to say, together. It was no parting; it was the beginning of commitment to being exactly that: together. They were no longer one of the affairs of the village. He would telephone her every day; once again, they discussed the best times — she, too, was very good at the connivance of privacies. She did not cry but he was in awe of all she had known in order to learn not to weep; and could not unlearn. It took over again, now; but suddenly she turned from her tight little profile as the angle of a mirror is changed to present full-face and the big calm lips and eyes the colour of the lining of black mussel shells (it had taken him weeks, more than somewhat influenced by the surroundings in which he moved with her and even — at last! — he acknowledged himself as an example of the French preoccupation — the things they ate, to decide the colour). — You are the only man I’ve loved that I’ve made love with. So I feel you can make everything possible for me.—

— What things?—

She took the tongue of ticket stuck out by the meter at the barrier to the airport parking ground, and did not react the moment the gate lifted. He watched her mouth with the passionate attention of the pleasures he found there. That jaw was almost ugly; she attempted as little to disguise the unbeautiful as to promote the beauties of her face. Her lips moved to find shapes for the plenitude struck from her rock — pleasure in herself, the innocent boastful confidence of being, the assurance of giving what will be received, accepted, without question. Before she drove on she tried. — I can’t say. Things I didn’t know about. I find out. Through you.—

— Through me! Oh my darling, I can tell you — sometimes with you I feel I am that child sent out of the room while the adults talk, now grown-up — lived my whole life — out there…

How much his turn of phrase delighted her! They laughed together at him, in Madame Bagnelli’s old car that brought them to a stop; to the destination of the day. Laughter became embraces and in a state of bold intoxication with each other, totally assuring, they parted, for a short while — less than two hours later, from Charles de Gaulle airport where he had just landed, Bernard Chabalier, having found some excuse to get away for a few minutes from whoever it was (Christine with or without children, aged mother) who had met him, telephoned Rosa Burger. He said it this time with blunt wonder: You are the dearest thing in the world to me. She cried in some unrecognized emotion, another aspect of joy; a strange experience.

She left for London ten days later by train because this was the cheapest way. She had earned a little money practising her old healing profession on people to whom she had been recommended, at the yacht harbours; but the folder of traveller’s cheques she had brought to Europe was almost empty. She felt no particular concern. She had telephoned Flora Donaldson in Johannesburg and explained that after spending the summer in France she now wanted to visit London. A normal sort of itinerary for a holiday abroad; Flora, as Rosa knew she could expect of any one of her father’s associates and/or friends, asked no questions that would suggest anything otherwise and expressed no surprise at or reproach for his daughter having gone abroad without telling anyone of the intention, explaining in what possible manner it could have been realized, or saying goodbye to someone who regarded herself, with justification, as the closest of family friends, who had stood outside the prison door with the girl when she was fourteen and suffering her first period cramps. She did not tell Flora with whom she was staying or where, in France. Flora told her from whom to ask the flat key in Holland Park and found a way to indicate that if money were needed, that could be arranged too. Her voice sounded, out of the past, very close, and soprano with excitement as it always became at the prospect of involvement with problems of evasion and intrigue. Rosa found a way to thank her but explain money was not needed. Flora Donaldson suddenly began to ring out as if she could not be heard properly — But how are you? How are you? Really all right? How are you?—

The little Rôse left behind the summer dresses Gaby Grosbois had made her because English autumns were known, in the South of France, to be like winter elsewhere, and she would be returning to stay with Madame Bagnelli next summer. Oh and long before; —You will come for Christmas, or Pâques — at those times Bernard — it can be a bit difficult for you in Paris. Any time, this is always your home. The mimosa is already out, Christmas week, here — The warm cheek-kisses, the hug smelling of delicious soup vegetables and wood-varnish. And the nightingales? — Of course! In May, you come in May and they’ll be here.—

The London street was not tunnelled through dirty rain and fog they had told about. The trees were a heavy quiet green. Rugs of sunlight were laid by the long windows across Flora Donaldson’s Spanish matting. A ground-floor flat with a shared strip of garden sloping down towards it from the plane trees. Black birds (magpies? Christmas-card birds of the Northern Hemisphere) called sweet exclamations from a soft domestic wilderness of uncut grass and daisies.

More like a house! She was excited, on the telephone. A kind of wooden clock-face with a movable cow-tail to indicate how many pints the milkman should leave outside the door. A wall of books and a freezer full of food; one could withstand a siege. But the French did not know what England was like — England was the sun, and birds and lovers hidden in the grass. She was indoors hardly at all. She walked in the parks and took the boat to Greenwich. She knew no one and talked to everyone. Bernard Chabalier had to postpone his arrival for another two weeks because one of his fellow professors developed oreillons and the lycee was short-staffed. (What on earth…? He did not know the name of the illness in English but described the symptoms — mumps, that’s what it was, mumps.) He not only telephoned every day except Sundays at home but also wrote long letters; the delay merely gave her longer to enjoy the anticipation of their being together, alone, among all these gentle pleasures. She was taking an audio-visual French course at a student centre — it cost little and was excellent. She had been to the French Consulate and was awaiting information about the validity of her BSc. physiotherapy degree in France. He had spoken confidentially to the Anti-Apartheid Committee chairman in Paris about arranging permanent residence and a work permit for her, probably using some such terms as ‘an unnamed member of a white family of prominent victims of apartheid’. Even between Paris and London, on the telephone or in letters, he was not more explicit than simply to let her know he had ‘talked to friends’, as if — another lover might pick up tics from his mistress in a desire to identify with the way of life that formed her before he knew her — he had taken on the customs of a country he never knew.

Whereas apart from the precaution of registering at the student centre under a surname not her own — but that was for private rather than political reasons — Rosa Burger was relaxedly communicative and did not find herself in any conversations whose subject required discretion: exchanges with young mothers about the ingenuity of children making houses of sticks and leaves; discussions with barge-men about the fish who had come back to the Thames: arguments with fellow students about the meaning of this scene or that in a Japanese film everyone was seeing. Her quick responses did not extend to allowing herself to be picked up in bars — she had the invincible smiling trick of being able to turn aside such attempts that is possible only for a woman already in love. But she did go to a party with a young Indian couple who were learning French along with her. The girl came from India but the man spoke English with the accent Rosa recognized as he did hers. At the party there were other South African Indians; she had told the young couple her real name but asked them to respect her privacy for the time being — the other guests did not know her as anything more than a student from home. She met them again at the young couple’s flat. These casual encounters had the curious and unprevised effect of making her think, or daydream, about looking up the people it had been easy for her to undertake to avoid, because she could not have imagined herself wanting to do otherwise. Now she saw herself talking to them, accompanied by Bernard Chabalier. The next time one of the faithful in exile telephoned the flat on the chance that Flora might be there, Rosa no longer answered as an anonymous tenant; accepted the enthusiastic assumption that she would come round; sat on a Saturday afternoon in Swiss Cottage, a political refugee talking over old times. It was assumed that like them, she would be carrying on the struggle in one way or another; someone said she had mentioned France as her base. She went to another gathering; this time it turned out to be in honour of a Frelimo delegation in London to seek aid from the British government. Some of Samora Machel’s men had been to school or university in South Africa. In the common Southern African revolutionary cause between the blacks of Moçambique, Angola, Rhodesia and South Africa, the Frelimo government was part of black South Africans’ own self-realization, proof of themselves. Black Moçambiquan migratory labourers still worked alongside South African blacks in the gold mines and as servants in hotels and houses all over South Africa. The exiles from both countries had sat in refugee camps together, trained as guerrillas together in distant parts of the world, taken sides in each other’s internal power-struggles, splits and realignments; they spoke one another’s languages, and the white man’s English that had culturally industrialized the whole tip of their continent even where the language of the colonial power was Portuguese. It was not easy to say which among the black men in the loudly crowded room was from Moçambique and which from South Africa. Among those in the uniform of leadership, at least: the well-cut suits or Mao jackets were favoured indiscriminately by the same kind of authoritative, path-clearing face, whether ANC or Frelimo, moving from group to group. A speech was made about Frelimo and the beginning of the end of colonialist-imperialism in Southern Africa. A speech was made about the African National Congress and the fight against racism and world fascism, linking Vorster with Pinochet. ‘A few words’ were spontaneously said — and developed into an elegy with the eloquence of one (of the faithful) who had drunk just enough to gauge his moment — about the great men who had not lived to see oppression in Southern Africa breached — Xuma, Luthuli, Mondlane, Fischer, and of course Lionel Burger, who was particularly in the thoughts of many people tonight because ‘someone closest to him’ and his wife Cathy Jansen, another fine comrade — was present among them. Lionel Burger’s role in the struggle; the callousness and cowardliness of the Vorster government, keeping an ageing, dying man in jail, in contrast with the courage of that man undefeated to his last breath who refused to allow any appeals for compassionate concessions on his own behalf, who asked nothing of Vorster less than justice for the people. The white racist government had stolen his body but his spirit was everywhere — in Moçambique; in this room, tonight. An elderly white Englishwoman came up and kissed the girl. She was taken off to be introduced to the Frelimo contingent. A middle-aged ANC man reminisced about campaigns of the 1960s, working with Burger. She smiled and thanked, like a bride at a reception or an actress backstage. Bernard Chabalier was privately present to her, keeping her surely in another order of reality.

A Guardian journalist asked whether there was any chance of an interview? An independent television producer wanted to arrange to talk to her about including Lionel Burger as a subject in a television series with the provisional title, ‘Standing on The Shoulders of History’. Was there access to photographs, letters, as well as (so fortunately) the testimony of many exiles right here in England who could talk about him? She mentioned a source in Sweden. The man solicitously drew her over to the table where hot sausages were being fished from a vast pot. There were some young black men eating clannishly, their knot turning backs upon the room. He broke in among them, chatting about his project, introducing the one or two he knew, murmuring the polite English burble that disguised a lack of names for the rest. They made the laconic response of people intruded upon. She was looking at one who, while he stood with tall shoulders hunched towards his plate, chewing, stared at her as if she threatened him in some way. He had given her a thin, hot dry hand for a second, then it was stabbing at tough sausage-skin with a fork. She took her plate of food; the group that now included the television man and herself was again invaded by others, she became part of a new drift-away and nucleus. But she took no part in the conversation contained within this one. She ate slowly, and drank in regular swallows from her glass of wine. Presently she put aside plate and glass as if at a summons; the person talking beside her thought she had been waved to by someone outside all angles of vision but her own. She went back to the clique of young black men. Gritting words along with mouthfuls, he was talking, low, in Xhosa, to his neighbour, but the touch she had had from him earlier interpreted itself and she interrupted — Baasie. — The answer to a question.

A piece of skin or gristle that wouldn’t go down. He swallowed noticeably. The tendons connecting mouth to jaw pulled on the left side as he tried with cheek muscles to dislodge something caught between two teeth. The movement became distorted; into a smile, resuscitated, dug up, an old garment that still fits.

— Yeh, Rosa.—

She came on awkwardly (he put away his plate).

She resorted to that foreigners’ greeting, brought from every café, bar and street-corner encounter, strained up to brush him on this cheek and that. He wiped his mouth as if her mouth had been there. — Yeh, Rosa. I saw you when you came in.—

The conversation seemed to follow some formula, like a standard letter copied from a manual that deals with birthday greetings, births and deaths.

— Are you living here, then — have you been away for a long time?—

— A couple of years, on and off.—

— And before that?—

He frowned to dismiss the importance of any chronology; or to establish a constant in its vagueness. — Germany, Sweden. I was around.—

— Studying something? What’s Sweden like? I’ve had an invitation to go there, but I’ve never done anything about it. They seem to be very helpful people.—

He gave a sad, sour laugh. — They’re okay.—

— Were you working, or—

— Supposed to be studying economics. But the language. Man, you’ve got to spend two years learning that language before you can take a university course. You can’t understand what’s going on at lectures.—

— I should think not! It must be terribly difficult.—

— Oh you just give in, give up.—

— And Germany?—

— It’s all right. I mean, from Afrikaans — it’s not so hard to pick up a bit of German.—

— Are you still busy with a course, here, or have you graduated? — He seemed uncertain whether to answer or not; not to have an answer. — Well, here, once you live in this place (a laugh, for the first time, his whole face trembled) — I haven’t really got back to it properly. I have to pass some exams and so on, first.—

— Yes…I wonder if I’d be allowed to work, here. If my qualifications would be recognized.—

— But you’ve been to a university, isn’t it? — Like many blacks from their home country — his and hers — for whom English and Afrikaans are lingue franche, not mother tongues, he used the Afrikaans phrase translated literally, instead of the English equivalent.

— Yes, but not all degrees are international. In fact very few. I took some sort of medical one. Not what I really wanted to do… but… — The reasons were implicit, for him.

— Oh I’d thought you were a doctor, like your father? — The television man was back, and a young couple attendant, waiting to be introduced to Rosa, listening with polite movements of the eyes from one face to another in order to miss nothing. — Incredible the way he just went on with his job, inside the jail, is that true? The warders used to come to him with their aches and pains, they preferred him to the prison doctors? They weren’t afraid he’d poison them or something? — He laughed with Rosa; turned to the couple. — Fantastic man, fantastic. I’m inspired about doing him in the series. This is his daughter, Rosa Burger — Polly Kelly, Vernon Stern. They run the universities’ AAA, that’s nothing to do with the RAC — Action Anti-Apartheid—

There was no need to introduce anyone else; the couple signalled greetings all round, they had met the company before. Rosa found an urgent way through the talk. — When will we see each other. — Before there was an answer — Come to me. Or I’ll come to you. We can meet somewhere — you say. I don’t know London. Are you very busy?—

— I’m not busy.—

She borrowed a pen from somebody who fished it out of a breast-pocket without breaking the train of a conversation about migratory labour with Kelly and Stern. She wrote the address of the flat and the telephone number, and put the scrap of paper into his hand. He was glancing at it when someone else spoke to her and her attention was counter-claimed. He was here and there in the room all evening, not far from her, and once or twice she smiled, thought he might have felt her eyes on him, but he and she were not brought together in the crowd. He had always been slight; the type that will grow up tall and thin. A little boy with narrow, almost oriental eyes and the tiny ears of his race — her brother’s ears were twice the size when they did the anatomical comparisons children make in secret out of sexual curiosity and scientific wonder. There was an unevenness in his gaze across the room, now; standing close up, she had noticed that the right eye bulged a little, flickered in and out of focus. A scar cut across his frown; an old scar with pinhead lumps where stitches had been — but he hadn’t had it, that far back. The university couple followed her from group to group; she found herself the centre of women who wanted to know how women’s lib could have an explicit function in the South African situation (she should have referred them to Flora), and passed, by way of various people who claimed her, back to her Indian friends, where her father’s association with their leaders, Dadoo, Naicker, Kathrada, was being explained to the Guardian journalist. Very late, she was talking alone to one of the Frelimo men whose passion for his country was a revelation, seen from the remove of the Europeans who had accepted her as one of themselves, who understood nationalism only in terms of chauvinism or disgusted apathy. A sensual longing pleasantly overcame her, the wave of relaxation after a yawn; for Bernard; to show off this revelation of a man to Bernard Chabalier. — When your delegation goes to France, I’d like you to meet someone there.—

He was enthusiastic. — Anyone who’s interested in Moçambique, I am interested… You understand? Anyone who will help us. We need support from the French Leftists. And we get it, yes. But what we need more is money from the French government. — The pretty white girl said she couldn’t promise that…but the three of them could eat together, drink some wine. Their dates of arrival in Paris, so far as they could predict from present intentions, accommodatingly overlapped. She promised she would confirm this after her usual telephone call from Paris next day.

The telephone ringing buried in the flesh.

Bernard.

Staggered — vertigo of sleep — hitting joyfully against objects in the dark, to the livingroom.

The voice from home said: Rosa.

— Yes—

— Yeh, Rosa.—

— It’s you, Baasie?—

— No. — A long, swaying pause.

— But it is.—

— I’m not ‘Baasie’, I’m Zwelinzima Vulindlela.—

— I’m sorry — it just came out this evening…it was ridiculous.—

— You know what my name means, Rosa?—

— Vulindlela? Your father’s name…oh, I don’t know whether my surname means anything either—‘citizen’, solid citizen — Starting to humour the other one; at such an hour — too much to drink, perhaps.

— Zwel-in-zima. That’s my name. ‘Suffering land’. The name my father gave me. You know my father. Yes.—

— Yes—

— Is it? Is it? You knew him before they killed him.—

— Yes. Since we were kids. You know I did.—

— How did they kill him? — You see, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t talk about that.—

— I don’t…because why should I say what they said.—

— Tell it, say it—

— What they always say — they found him hanged in his cell.—

— How, Rosa? Don’t you know they take away belts, everything—

— I know.—

— Hanged himself with his own prison pants.—

‘Baasie’—she doesn’t say it but it’s there in the references of her voice, their infant intimacy — I asked if you’d come and see me — or I’d come to you, tomorrow, but you—

— No, I’m talking to you now.—

— D’y’know what time it is? I don’t even know — I just got to the phone in the dark—

— Put on the light, Rosa. I’m talking to you.—

She uses no name because she has no name for him. — I was fast asleep. We can talk tomorrow. We’d better talk tomorrow, mmh?—

— Put on the light.—

Try laughing. — We’d better both go back to bed.—

— I haven’t been in bed. — There were gusts of noise, abruptly cut off, background to his voice; he was still somewhere among people, they kept opening and shutting a door, there.

— The party going strong?—

— I’m not talking about parties, Rosa—

— Come tomorrow — today, I suppose it is, it’s still so dark—

— You didn’t put the light on, then. I told you to.—

They began to wrangle. — Look, I’m really not much use when I’m woken up like this. And there’s so much I want… How old were we? I remember your father — or someone — brought you back only once, how old were we then?—

— I told you to put it on.—

She was begging, laughing. — Oh but I’m so tired, man! Please, until tomorrow—

— Listen. I didn’t like the things you said at that place tonight.—

— I said?—

— I didn’t like the way you went around and how you spoke.—

The receiver took on shape and feel in her hand; blood flowing to her brain. She heard his breathing and her own, her breath breathing garlic over herself from the half-digested sausage.

— I don’t know what to say. I don’t understand why you should say this to me.—

— Look, I didn’t like it at all.—

— I said? About what?—

— Lionel Burger, Lionel Burger, Burger—

— I didn’t make any speeches.—

— Everyone in the world must be told what a great hero he was and how much he suffered for the blacks. Everyone must cry over him and show his life on television and write in the papers. Listen, there are dozens of our fathers sick and dying like dogs, kicked out of the locations when they can’t work any more. Getting old and dying in prison. Killed in prison. It’s nothing. I know plenty blacks like Burger. It’s nothing, it’s us, we must be used to it, it’s not going to show on English television.—

— He would have been the first to say — what you’re saying. He didn’t think there was anything special about a white being a political prisoner.—

— Kissing and coming round you, her father died in prison, how terrible. I know a lot of fathers — black—

— He didn’t think what happened to him more important.—

— Kissing and coming round you—

— You knew him! You know that! It’s crazy for me to tell you.—

— Oh yes I knew him. You’ll tell them to ask me for the television show. Tell them how your parents took the little black kid into their home, not the backyard like other whites, right into the house. Eating at the table and sleeping in the bedroom, the same bed, their little black boss. And then the little bastard was pushed off back to his mud huts and tin shanties. His father was too busy to look after him. Always on the run from the police. Too busy with the whites who were going to smash the government and let another lot of whites tell us how to run our country. One of Lionel Burger’s best tame blacks sent scuttling like a bloody cockroach everywhere, you can always just put your foot on them.—

Pulling the phone with her — the cord was short, for a few moments she lost the voice — she felt up the smooth cold wall for the switch: under the light of lamps sprung on the voice was no longer inside her but relayed small, as from a faint harsh public address system in the presence of the whole room.

She hunched the thing to her head, clasping with the other hand the wrist of the hand that held it. — Where did they take you when you left us? Why won’t you tell me? It was Transkei? Oh God. King William’s Town? And I suppose you know — perhaps you didn’t — Tony drowned. At home.—

— But he taught us to swim.—

— Diving. Head hit the bottom of the pool.—

— No, I didn’t hear. Your little boss-kid that was one of the family couldn’t make much use of the lessons, there was no private swimming-pool the places I stayed.—

— Once we’d left that kindergarten there wasn’t any school you could have gone to in our area. What could your father or mine do about that. My mother didn’t want your father to take you at all.—

— What was so special about me? One black kid? Whatever you whites touch, it’s a take-over. He was my father. Even when we get free they’ll want us to remember to thank Lionel Burger.—

She had begun to shiver. The toes of her bare feet clung, one foot covering the other, like those of a nervous zoo chimpanzee. — I just give you the facts. He’s dead, but I can tell you for him he didn’t want anything but that freedom. I don’t have to defend him but I haven’t any more right to judge him than you have.—

His voice danced round, rose and clashed with hers — Good, good, now you come out—

— Unless you want to think being black is your right? — Your father died in jail too, I haven’t forgotten. Leave them alone.—

— Vulindlela! Nobody talks about him. Even I don’t remember much about him.—

The shivering rose like a dog’s hair along its back. — I want to tell you something. When I see you and we talk. Not now.—

— Why should I see you, Rosa? Because we even used to have a bath together? — the Burger family didn’t mind black skin so we’re different for ever from anyone? You’re different so I must be different too. You aren’t white and I’m not black.—

She was shouting. — How could you follow me around that room like a man from BOSS, listening to stupid small-talk? Why are we talking in the middle of the night? Why do you telephone? What for?—

— I’m not your Baasie, just don’t go on thinking about that little kid who lived with you, don’t think of that black ‘brother’, that’s all.—

Now she would not let him hang up; she wanted to keep the two of them nailed each to the other’s voice and the hour of night when nothing fortuitous could release them—good, good, he had disposed of her whining to go back to bed and bury them both.

— There’s just one thing I’m going to tell you. We won’t meet, you’re right. Vulindlela. About him and me. So long as you know I’ve told you. I was the one who was sent to take a fake pass to him so he could get back in from Botswana that last time. I delivered it somewhere. Then they caught him, that was when they caught him.—

— What is that? So what is that for me? Blacks must suffer now. We can’t be caught although we are caught, we can’t be killed although we die in jail, we are used to it, it’s nothing to do with you. Whites are locking up blacks every day. You want to make the big confession? — why do you think you should be different from all the other whites who’ve been shitting on us ever since they came? He was able to go back home and get caught because you took the pass there. You want me to know in case I blame you for nothing. You think because you’re telling me it makes it all right — for you. It wasn’t your fault — you want me to tell you, then it’s all right. For you. Because I’m the only one who can say so. But he’s dead, and what about all the others — who cares whose ‘fault’—they die because it’s the whites killing them, black blood is the stuff to get rid of white shit.—

— This kind of talk sounds better from people who are in the country than people like us. — Impulses of cruelty came exhilarating along her blood-vessels without warming the cold of feet and hands; while he talked she was jigging, hunched over, rocking her body, wild to shout, pounce him down the moment he hesitated.

— I don’t know who you are. You hear me, Rosa? You didn’t even know my name. I don’t have to tell you what I’m doing.—

— What is it you want? — the insult thrilled her as she delivered herself of it — You want something. If it’s money, I’m telling you there isn’t any. Go and ask one of your white English liberals who’ll pay but won’t fight. Nobody phones in the middle of the night to make a fuss about what they were called as a little child. You’ve had too much to drink, Zwelin-zima. — But she put the stress on the wrong syllable and he laughed.

As if poking with a stick at some creature writhing between them— You were keen to see me, eh, Rosa. What do you want?—

— You could have said it right away, you know. Why didn’t you just stare me out when I came up to you? Make it clear I’d picked the wrong person. Make a bloody fool of me.—

— What could I say? I wasn’t the one who looked for you.—

— Just shake your head. That would’ve been enough. When I said the name I used. I would have believed you.—

— Ah, come on.—

— I would have believed you. I haven’t seen you since you were nine years old, you might have been dead for all I know. The way you look in my mind is the way my brother does — never gets any older.—

— I’m sorry about your kid brother.—

— Might have been killed in the bush with the Freedom Fighters. Maybe I thought that.—

— Yeh, you think that. I don’t have to live in your head.—

— Goodbye, then.—

— Yeh, Rosa, all right, you think that.—

Neither spoke and neither put down the receiver for a few moments. Then she let go the fingers that had stiffened to their own clutch and the thing was back in place. The burning lights witnessed her.

She stood in the middle of the room.

Knocking a fist at the doorway as she passed, she ran to the bathroom and fell to her knees at the lavatory bowl, vomiting. The wine, the bits of sausage — she laid her head, gasping between spasms, on the porcelain rim, slime dripping from her mouth with the tears of effort running from her nose.

Love doesn’t cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least. Because Rosa Burger had once cried for joy she came out of the bathroom and stalked about the flat, turning on all the lights as she went, sobbing and clenching her jaw, ugly, soiled, stuffing her fist in her mouth. She slept until the middle of the next day: it was another perfect noon. This spell of weather continued for some short time yet. So for Rosa Burger England will always be like that; tiers of shade all down the sunny street, the shy white feet of people who have taken off shoes and socks to feel the grass, the sun wriggling across the paths of pleasure boats on the ancient river; where people sit on benches drinking outside pubs, the girls preening their flashing hair through their fingers.