The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

Veal

December 1854, Rio Parana

Our dead sailor has begun to stink sweetly – so soon, in the heat. There are problems about the disposal, and so his remains lie on the doctor's cot, where he died, while the doctor sleeps outside.

The boat was quiet all through his dying as the men were loath to wake him (from what?) with their fixing and banging, so the boiler is not yet mended. Now there is another stillness – the one that opens into the world from the mouth of a dead man. A widening in our hearts. The men are all restless, and large. They lumber about or sit, and every slight noise makes them turn and glare.

We do not move, as though to mark this spot in the midst of the flow. Perhaps his soul is still anchored here. Far beyond us – a mile, maybe more – the green fringe of the bank. Now and then there drifts over the water the vegetable smell of things slick and wet. Sometimes, a distant, settling whisper, as some tree gives way and falls, long dead.

They say the silence of the forest is a waiting silence, but I say these trees wait for nothing, neither do they mourn. They grow, that is all. And I feel myself growing with them. There is a pulse in my fingertips, and when I brush my dress, each line and whorl of them tells the silk and reads the pattern woven into its sheen.

Silence. The air moves and the smell of the sailor drifts until we are maddened by it. Francine soaks a cloth for me to hold over my mouth and nose, and my skin is raw from it. Foolish girl.

Senor Lopez wanted to slide the dead man into the river this morning, naval fashion – but he suggested it in such a doubtful manner that no one felt obliged to obey. He faltered, and the men smiled as they turned away. Another day lost. Now, he is in a studied rage. The captain looks carefully blank. The work on the boiler goes on.

The doctor, slung outside his own cabin, dulls his nose with a medicinal flask and finally sleeps – but the smell must creep into his afternoon dreams, as it wafts into mine. Nothing happens except rot and bloat. I imagine the man's stomach swelling, as mine swells. I imagine it might burst and dreadful things come slithering out.

It cannot be so bad. I should look into the cabin to see his calm, dead face: I would get comfort from the realness of it. I am tempted to sneak there just to see how ordinary he is; this man who enters us all now, we breathe him in, and gag.

He is mottled a little under the skin, purple and black, nothing worse I am sure. Or perhaps there is no colour yet, just a slight puffing; a sponginess where the flesh has started to rise. Of course, the doctor should have embalmed him a little, but the wretched man is too busy embalming himself.

This evening, Senor Lopez wants distraction so I try to make up a table for bezique. Mr Whytehead still refuses to make four. I have seen him watching, and I know he loves the way the cards turn, but he cannot play with money, and the maid has none. Stewart flicks up his skirt tails to split them over a tiny chair, and gravely sits; the cards like little sweetie papers, fanned out in his big hands.

'What is it to be?' he says.

To spite Whytehead I say that instead of money we will bet stories, loser tells all.

'Stories?' he says; like this was a worse thing to lose even, than money. And I tell him to be very quiet and give Francine whatever assistance she might require. So we progress. He leans over the maid's shoulder, very judicious and nice, while Stewart breathes a lot, at my side.

In the event it is the maid who loses. I would spare her the embarrassment of it, but my dear friend is in an expansive mood. So she settles herself quite prettily on the edge of her chair, and half-turns her face away. Her story is kept to a modest length, but it is not a woman's tale, at least not the way I would measure such things. If she wants to be loved, she has misjudged. Or perhaps she has judged too well. In this hot room she talks about the cold and I smell the dead sailor on her breath, though I have drenched all our cushions with eau de lilas.

The story is about her grandfather who served with Buonaparte. By the time Francine knew him, she says, he had already lost his fingers' ends and the nose he carried over his dear smiling mouth was lacking by a full centimetre, maybe more. And so on, and in a similar vein, until we reach the Russian Campaign.

'Somewhere in the middle of that vast land,' she says (in a formal singsong tone), 'he sat down on ground that was so cold it seemed warm again. He wanted to lean back and look at the sky, because those winter stars were more beautiful than any he had seen. And then, it seemed that he was lying down, with the shuffling feet of men passing him by. It was so delicious. "Remember this," he used to say. "That death can be delicious too." And the stars came lower until he thought that they were shining only on him.

'He would have died there, quite happy, if a carriage had not stopped beside him. The man who got out was small, and he wore a cockade in his black hat. Can you guess it? He opened my grandfather's coat and worked his hand inside, and "Why are you robbing me?" said my grandfather, "when I have already given you my life?" Le Petit Caporal said nothing, but looked at the papers my grandfather had placed, for warmth, next to his heart. Then he said, "Estella. She has a pretty hand, don't you think? And, see here, the violet she pressed for you, still blue against the page." And the thought of his daughter, who is my mother, brought my grandfather to his feet – numb and blackened as they were, and wrapped in the skins of two Russian chickens. He stumbled on, leaving his trail of feathers on the snow and, when he thought to look for it, the carriage was already disappeared.'

Chickens, no less. I find the shoes as painful and mortifying as the story itself.

'Do you think it is true?' I say. Or was it all a trick of the poor man's mind?'

'Well, yes,' says Francine. 'After a fashion.' Certainly, when she was a child, she had looked at her grandfather with awe. The great Napoleon had saved him; what could be more true than that? Though perhaps he was just giving them all courage for the bitter future they faced, once Napoleon was gone.

My dear friend shifts in his chair. He is very moved.

'So… Francine,' he says. Ί hope, after this, that you will always lose at cards,' and he toasts her, and her mutilated grandfather, and le Petit Caporal, with his glass of Madeira. After which, none of us has the heart to return to the game.

The dead sailor turns over in my dreams and seems to call to me. 'Dora! Dora!' I wake in the middle of the night sick with him.

It is bright. There is a moon, and watery reflections dance on the walls until it is all about me, a river of broken light, rippling and breaking on the ceiling and on the bed and on my skin. I can not bear it, this flickering tide on my arms, the way my body disappears under it so that I am just another surface in the dark.

Outside, under a blank moon, I am free of it. Here is my belly in front of me again, big and hard and round. I stay close to the shadow of the wall and make my lumbering way to the doctor's cabin. He lies slung outside; the smell of old drink cuts like vinegar the awful honey of the sailor's decay. I pass the length of him, from boots to hair, and he stirs and settles, his mouth seeking the comfort of the cloth.

When all is still, I push in at the door. The smell is stronger now: it is absolute. And, instead of darkness, here is the river light again, mocking me as I strain to tell the sailor from the cot where he lies. We are in a flickering, shifting, underwater grave. And there he is. The light makes him look alive. I step forward and want to say… what? That I am here – that I am his Dora, or not his Dora -I have a dreadful urge to whisper it, but I do not know his name.

I let my breath out all at once, and startle myself with the sound. It is a bubble of air soughed from out his dead lungs, I am sure of it. This is how a dead man speaks. They say the last breath rises out of him a day, two days later, and if you listen to it you will hear – a curse sometimes, or a blessing, or a name. What is it, that I want to hear? When I see his face for sure then I will go, and I take a step nearer in the dark.

His eye is open. I closed his dead eye, but now it is open again. It looks, not at me, but at everything – at the light that is all the same and the four shifting walls and at me – it picks nothing out, but lets each fall indifferently into the well of his dead gaze – and we are all the same.

His face, I see as I turn to leave, is not like the face he had when he was alive. It is more stern. And older too. Ancient, and high in the nose. And the livid flesh and the unburned flesh fall alike, in tranquillity, away from all the sharp bones. He looks quite distinguished.

Back in my room, I see that eye whenever I close my own. Also, the open eye of the doctor fixed on me as I shut the cabin door. There is no doubt this one is alive: his pupil, black and wide with fright.

He is in love with me, I think. You can tell at that moment when someone wakes – the thing that dawns in their eyes. Or perhaps we all love easily in our sleep. Because I think I saw love, or something like it – wonder perhaps – before the fright. So I laid my finger on my lips before he should cry out,

Ά little prayer,' I said, and smiled at him, as though I were a dream. I hope that he took me for such.

The ship moves gently on the water, tugging idly, over and over at the anchoring ropes. Holding us all, the coughing, shifting men, the dead man and me, retching into a basin in the watery night.

They say there is a sea in my belly now, and that my child swims inside me. And I think sometimes how dark, how blessed, it must be in there.

Today, enough wind to steer for the bank and the sailor's grave. At last. We are almost beached in our eagerness to reach the shore, and the men leap overboard not waiting for the boats.

The sailor's body is lowered on a chain; covered in hemp and criss-crossed with rope, like a doll you might make out of cloth and twine. He is rigid and, I think, quite ceremonial, as he lands feet-first. I would like to put a hat on him such as admirals wear, and send him off in his skiff for an inspection of the fleet. But they angle him down until he is lying the length of the boat on one side. The rower nudges him at every stroke and lifts his oar in fright and so they go in circles for a while.

There is no proper order to all this. Everyone spills overboard. My dear friend climbs down to bury the poor man; Mr Whytehead supervises the digging of the grave (I am surprised he does not draw up plans). Francine, with a soft look, disappears down the net of ropes. Was that a request? Still, I can hardly call her back. She is handed over by the doctor who turns to me to effect a bow, which he then fails to complete. He gives me a fuddled look that has something of last night in it, and then, to my delight, he turns tail and hops over the side.

Only Milton remains. We look at each other and, for the first time I think, he smiles. It is a very pleasant grin with nothing of the savage in it – but slight and tender; as a man might smile in the theatre, to a woman he once knew and still admires. I smile back – my prettiest – and ask him his age.

'Twenty-two?' he says. 'Maybe twenty-five.' I tell him that he lies. He smiles again at whatever joke is between us now, and moves to the prow, quite naturally, in consideration of my solitude.

Alone. A bare few men remain. The boat is lighter under my feet, and rides high. I have an urge to explore. It is some time before I realise what is the smell that so entrances me – it is the smell of the dead sailor, gone.

I watch the burial party working where the river sand gives way to scrub. The men gesture slowly in the heat and scraps of talk drift towards the boat. After a while they abandon the spot and move farther inland, where the going, too, seems hard. When the two digging men are up to their thighs, there is more talk. They twist themselves out to sit on the edge, then jump clear when the body is swung -one, two, three – to disappear into the flat earth. I listen for a thump, but there is none. I cannot even see the hole. My dear friend stands in his gleaming black hat and reads from a book – a Bible, it must be, though I have never seen one on board. The sailors bow their heads and one, the Galway man it must be, crosses himself.

And so it seems done.

All this while, I lean over the side – his Dora. I press a handkerchief to my eye and dream of a cottage in Portsmouth or Plymouth where I would feed a man mutton and forget to bring his washing from the line. It is not a bad dream. If the man had a wife I will write to her myself.

Dear Mrs Titmouse (or some such English name), it is with the greatest possible regret… please believe me when I say… Your husband, though not loquacious, carried himself at all times with an air of… adventures long and gravely undertaken… gifts of simplicity and faith… with you in your grief, Dona Eliza Lynch Schnock y Lopez; as I would be styled here, as a wife.

I must get a crest for my letter paper. Some sort of colonial theme – two crossed tobacco leaves under a capybara, rampant regardant – God help us – like some sort of demented calf.

The crew are in no hurry to return. They should have brought a picnic. They fill the grave with desultory slowness, one man working while another stands about and suckles the handle of his spade. Senor Lopez strolls a little with the doctor and detains him by the river's edge. The doctor crouches down while my dear friend doffs his hat and looks towards the sky; then Stewart grapples with his face. I am so struck by the tableau that I do not notice the figures of Francine and Mr Whytehead until they have almost skirted the thin river headland and are sinking into the distance on the other side.

It seems my friend has something the matter with his eye. What are they all doing? What are they talking about? Men move into groups of two or three, then break into new clusters. When Francine comes round the headland again, she is carrying her shoes in one hand and I cannot see where her stockings might be. She splashes a little in the water's edge. I can see her turning face smiling at Mr Whytehead and, a long moment later, I hear her laughter on the slow air. All the men look at her naked feet. The doctor hurries forward and dips as though to lift them with his hands. I turn around to find Milton looking, as I am, and shaking his head.

'Very bad,' he says. Tor a white woman. Very bad.'

At least someone has some moral sense, however skewed (he himself being practically without clothes). When I look again, Francine is leaning on Mr Whytehead's shoulder, while the doctor absurdly works about beneath her skirts, fitting her shoes back on. My dear friend stands idly; looking on.

My baby is not blind. I do not know what he may yet have, by way of eyes, but I sense them full and open beneath my skin, watching through the flesh the distant, mellifluous world, as it flows him by.

Poor pregnant Dora stumps from the rail. How can I explain this scene or another to my future child? – it is a question of shoes, little darling, a question of feet. I try to care, but all the world has a sameness to it now, as I rest and he kicks: as I watch and he opens his eyes, and does not see.

I saw something in a jar once, in the private collection of a man on the Rue Vaugirard. And I think, for all my hopes, the thing inside me is still but a thing. I would look closer if I saw the jar now. But all I recall is the crease between shoulder and arm pressed up against the glass. Also, and strangely, the fatness of the gentleman's thighs.

There is a grand satisfaction in the men when they return. They have buried their man – because the dead sailor is each one of them, a little further on. So they have saved his body from the river and the idle current, and put him in as good earth as a man could find at home.

Over dinner, the doctor leans towards me and gestures vaguely around his throat. There are flies, he tells me, in the sand, and they bite. I tell him I do not know what he might mean (does he expect me to go about with naked feet?). He inclines the ugly boulder of his head, and for the next while follows me around with eyes that are as large and ready to weep as a four-year-old child's.

I am frozen all evening, as though with grief, and set about, and tired.

Tonight, in the darkness, my friend puts his two hands on my belly; then he places the side of his face there. I think he cries. There is a wetness crawling across my skin, and I am sure that it comes from his eyes. He is so quiet, so secret in his tears, that I cannot ask what grieves him. But it seems general, this sorrow – I am set to bawling myself, though I am not the crying kind, and soon we are both laughing at it, and blubbing and canoodling, and my heart seems to heave in my chest because I do not want to love him, but it seems that I am loving him a little, or at least kissing him, none the less.

I have no secrets my love, except love itself.

He falls asleep beside me. I lie and watch. His sleeping flesh clings close to the bones of his face and to the ball of his eye. I touch his hair and pinch it hard between my fingers. I want to wake him. I feel a terrible foolish, falling urge. It swoops through me – to tell him everything; to have all known, the men who were frantic or fond or kind, and my own cruelty. I would have him know the blackness of my heart.

The first man who cried for me (my dear friend) was Bennett – the man who liked my father enough to lend him three hundred pounds; who liked me enough to press his lips against my young feet and then rise, weeping, the length of me, as I stood there looking at the wall. This happened, not the first time, but the tenth or eleventh time, in that room in Bordeaux.

I would leave Mme Hubert's school for girls and run down the street, my bonnet swinging in my hand. Some hours later I would return; greet Miss Miller at the door, curtsey to Mme Hubert in the hall, look them (unkindly, perhaps) in the eye. No one said a word.

The room was white and left its dry powder on my clothes or skin. There was a picture of the Magdalen, I remember, painted on tin, hung on one wall. She wore a dress of camel hair and held a skull in her hand. I thought the dress must be made of men's hair – the hair of all the men she had ever known – because this was the greatest surprise to me now, the amount of hair on a man, and the peculiar places it seemed to drift, lodging in the pits and valleys like snow. I was surprised to see that a man's personal hair turned as white as the hair on his head, or as grey, and I thought the Magdalen quite lucky to have a dress that was mostly brown. The skull, too, seemed part of her condition; because during the act, Mr Bennett's skull was always clearer to me than the face he wore over it. When he opened his mouth, I saw the horseshoe of bone where his teeth were set; and suddenly he was all socket and jawbone, and the gaping snub triangle of nose.

And so it seemed to me that the tin Magdalen was not repenting but reliving – the feel of a man's hairy skin and the look of his shapely, dead bones. Because Bennett's touch was sweet as death to me. And oh! Death is sweet when you are fourteen.

I ran to that room. Sometimes I went ahead of the appointed time and the waiting was terrible. It makes me tired to think of it. There was no clock. I could hear the people on the street and, sometimes, the singing class I was missing in Mme Hubert's school for girls. I sat on the bed and faced the door, pressing my feet down hard to stop the trembling. What opened, as the door opened, over and over in my head, was not my legs, or as you might say, my sex. What opened was my stomach and my heart – the flesh you might see on any butcher's block melted into one swooping movement of the soul that yearned over and over again for the opening of that door.

He always looked different and small when the latch clicked up. But that is as you might expect.

This is not yet love, I thought, as Mr Bennett checked about him (though the room was always empty) and then looked over to me, and smiled.

He was kind enough, I have to say, and allowed my curiosity to lead the way. I was very intrigued by the sight of his member, a dull, blushing pink, ticking idly upwards – for the first many times he let me play with it only, to get the cushioned heft of it; its buoyant weight and its ugly, weeping eye. Then, when he entered me and rolled his eyeballs back, I thought I had killed him, which made me frightened and compliant for a week or more. And when I got the trick of it, I did not let it show.

I was waiting for the moment that everything would turn – because somewhere in my fourteen-year-old heart I knew that he was on the brink of it; of some devastation.

And I was right.

I think about it sometimes – the agonies of men in private rooms. I think of the men who would be torn apart by it, the men who would want you to cut their throat, or press into their eye sockets with your thumbs.

There are men who whimper and trick about like babies, as any woman who has worked on her back well knows. I have seen a duke wag his bottom and pant like a dog, and any number of wealthy men giggle and whine. But these things do not interest me. What interests me is that high, lonely moment when you know that you might kill a man and he would only beg to be killed again. And it was the longing for this moment that made me run to that room in Bordeaux.

And so, after a month perhaps, it turned. And here is Mr Bennett weeping on the floor. And here am I, a young girl looking at the far wall, and I am thinking, Now! Now, this is love. And every day I run down the street to sit on the bed and wait to love again. And I take from him, in twenty-one days, the sum of one thousand and seventeen pounds.

One night around that time, I woke to my teacher, Miss Miller, sitting on my bed. At least, I heard the whispering of her dress and felt the dreadful sag of the mattress in the dark. I could make nothing out, and when her hand came forward to touch my hair I ducked and would have cried out but,

'It's only me,' she said.

She sat for a while, then,

'Are you frightened?' she said. I did not reply, and after some moments the mattress lifted and she was gone. I started to laugh. I knew what she was asking – she wanted to know if I was frightened, not of the man, nor of the future (nor even of her own ghostly figure in the dark), but of the act itself. Miss Miller wanted to know what it was like to know a man. This was the mystery that had, in its insinuating way, ruined her entire life. She was so reduced by it that she had to creep into a girl's room at night and touch her hair.

The next morning I woke, and put that same hair into forbidden curls with Jeanette Blanchot's tongs. I walked the passageways and went from one room to another, smiling and free. I had already finished. I was already gone.

Still, I have a horror of bed-ghosts, the ones who make your mattress dip, so all you feel is a weakening – the sense, in your sleep, of something giving way. I am frightened of all things that make you tip in your sleep, so that when you dream it is of falling. These days, I am so big I cannot lie on my own front. If I lie on my back I feel a choking ghost in my sleep. So I stay on my side, crooked around my belly, as my dear friend's child is crooked in me. I would like him to lie crooked around us both, but he cannot stay close. He frets and wakes, then goes over to his hamacato swing and snore.

What was that thing I wanted to say about love? I wanted to say something about the moment when necessity turns to love – because I felt always the tug of my father's three hundred pounds. But still – ask any wife – there is always a moment when necessity turns to love.

He does not know how cruel I am. He weeps against my belly – because we have buried a man today, perhaps, or because he is going home, or because he loves me, I cannot tell. I stroke his hair when he is asleep, and he can not feel it.

Today was Christmas Day. Tomorrow the Feast of St Stephen.

This morning, all washed by a night of tears, my dear friend says into the stillness,

Ί killed a man, once.'

Only one?' I say.

He and his brothers, drunk one night, tied the man to their horses' tails and hullooed through Asuncion. They left shreds of him on the street. You could see the white of his bones sticking out of his raggedy back.

'But it is not the fact or the flesh of it,' he says. 'It is the why.'

'Then – why?' I say, careful not to look at him.

'Why not?' and he gives a painful laugh. Ί don't know. A woman turned me down for him – a not very attractive woman – and it wasn't that either. It was a thing we had to do. The girl was nothing: Carmencita Cordai. She thought her father owned the town, which he did not.'

Or not any more, I think, and say nothing.

'But the man certainly died. I turned him over and saw his eyes empty. I thought I would be sucked into them.'

'And were you?'

'No. Not in the least.' He sounds disappointed.

'So?' I say, and my breath is so caught in my chest I have to slip the word out by subterfuge.

'"Sof" he laughs. 'It was my first truly dead thing. And it changed the whole world.'

We lie there for some time, watching, each of us, the sun-splattered water as it dances on the ceiling, and I want to touch him with the bare tips of my fingers, or with my lips that are all alive, now, with the thought of touching him. I want to touch him where the skin is thinnest so I might drink it out of him, lick it like sweat – a prickling that comes to my mouth from the thought of what lies inside this man.

If I had killed the sailor, say, instead of mopping his brow, would I be so much the stronger? Would I walk upright? Instead of creeping about at midnight to get my fill of him? I might, instead, just live. Just breathe. Because my chest is tighter and tighter, now. It is closing up as my belly balloons, and I cannot fill myself any more, not with food nor even with air. These dainty, quick breaths I must take. This prison.

Lopez stands at the end of the bed and, taking my foot, he lifts it high to place it flat against his heart.

'So, ask.'

'Ask what?'

'Carmencita. "Was she pretty?" or "Do you love her still?'"

I turn my face away.

'What way did the world change?' I say. 'Was the sky more blue?'

'Yes.'

'More full of birds?'

'Definitely.'

'Was the grass sweeter?'

'And so on. And so forth.'

I do not know what we are talking about, now. But it is enormous good fun, of a sudden, and not about death at all.

My sister in Mallow would bring me to things that she was too squeamish to kill; childish things; a frog or a daddy-long-legs, and I would dispatch them, and it would make her cry. And then later, of course, some blurted telltale, and the horrified face of my Mama, the two of them clinging to each other as they watch me walk towards Hell-fire. She always was a silly thing, my sister. She ran off with a visiting piano player and decided to call it 'marriage'. Let her call it what she likes.

But I dream, this afternoon, of daddy-long-legs, and I am the beastie with my belly huge and my limbs all feeble and waving, and bits gone, and so on.

It is very hot.

I think of the time I went for a fitting to the dressmaker on the Rue de Rougemont. The dress was so delicate that two women stood on chairs to lift it over my head. They used two long sticks apiece to make a canopy of the skirt, and I walked in under it. Then they settled it down over me, and it was like the sky falling, in a rush of silk.

What is it about soft things that makes us want to weep? I stroked, once, the foot of a statue, its marble underside so cold and tender it made my eyes shut. But my hands were not soft enough to stroke this silk, which was such a shade of blue. My hands were too numb and rough: I must feel it with my cheek, with my lips, almost, and be rendered by it disbelieving. I tell you, it was the difference between soft and impossibly so, as if there were a degree of fineness beyond which the world melts.

And I knew, at that moment, what money was for. It was so you could have things that were impossible. And around me there appeared a whole country of things that have crossed this line into the wonderful. Things hard to believe, that are for so long hidden, until that time when you spot the first. After which, they all beckon and clamour and call you by name. The most beautiful cloth for blue; the most beautiful shape to be wrought from a gold stitch on a pink field; the most beautiful black marble to set against the white. All absolute. All at a price.

I stood under that dress and it was like lowering my life down over my head. And the soft blue skin of it was armour to me, and transcendence. I swear I did not so much walk in it as float. I looked in the mirror and knew there is something about beauty that can never be touched, that can never be bad, no matter what the price.

I think he knew when he walked into the room: when he gave his little bow and looked up from under it with glittering eyes, I think he knew he was looking at something quite other. Though the look he allowed me was the look a man might afford not a work of art so much as a good dinner before he eats it – the happy thing being that with Francisco Solano Lopez the eating is never done; there is always another course, and then another, which is why I have so many dresses, is it not? – so that the pleasure of removing them will never be repeated, but always new.

I am so nostalgic for him – even though he is here on the boat; even though he is but sixteen or twenty feet away – that I call Francine to sit beside me like some sweet and dutiful daughter, while I talk and sigh.

I ask if she had any intimation, when she opened the door to him that evening, of the journey we were about to embark upon – because it is her journey too. And she says that, No. How could she tell him from any of the others?

Which is pure impudence, of course.

Oh, but now she considers, yes, there was that look he had about him, of a man who will not be thwarted.

I say that when he walked into my room first, I cannot deny it, I wanted him to be taller and perhaps a little more pale; but she was right about the look he had -it made you feel all squirming, but pleasantly so. And she said,

'Yes.'

I say I enjoyed him at cards, because he played properly, and for high stakes. He looked at me over his hand and tried to seem indifferent, not because he wanted to bed me, but because he had two aces and a king. And I won. I would have carried on winning (it was, after all, my deck) but I stopped and said, 'If I win, you will not like me.' It was important, of course, not to drive him away. But also, you know, I wanted him to like me – this man who played a serious game. And I wanted to keep playing, too. And so we were locked into it; whatever amorous battle we are still fighting now.

And he put his cards down.

'Do you remember?' I say, but Francine does not like this break in form. She is a servant. She did not pretend to be in the room at the time, so how can she pretend to remember? To agree would be indiscreet of her, and she wants me to stop talking, now.

And I want to stop talking too, because I realise, as I ramble on, that my dear friend wants to have Francine and that I am bruising her a little, as you might bruise veal, the more tender to have it when the time comes to throw it on the pan.

He bows, and walks on for another round of the deck. Or trots. He is never still. There is always shouting and planning. There is always a huddle in a corner, a call across the room or the deck, a different gathering of men in another cabin for more or different conversation. He gets them one-to-one, and the talk is low and hard, it is all of railway sleepers and branch lines, of wagons and mines and supplies of saltpetre.

I look at him as he recedes. He disappears around the stern and the boat is still. Then he comes back. He is talking to Whytehead, as usual, about the melting temperature of -is it charcoal? – the bulk of it anyway, and wagons. I keep hearing the English word 'wagons'. They are, apparently, the key.

I am swinging in my hamaca, talking to Francine about the first time I set eyes on this man. And the fact we all know -except perhaps the wagon-headed Whytehead – the fact that is generally available to everyone who sails on this boat, is that Francisco Lopez, my dear friend, would like to have a certain amount of time, privately, with my maid Francine. And this fix he has makes us back away from them, as though he held a gun and she was a bird. And indeed, her eye is very like a bird's eye, as she does not watch him and yet does watch him, from out of the side of her head.

I want to slap her for a hussy, but I do not.

I say, 'We must bring some needlework out here, and sew where the light is good.' The girl looks at me; knowing I would rather pick hemp than stitch silk; my fingers so swollen now I can not feel the needle. But go she does, which gives me a moment to breathe.

My dear friend closes in, and bows, Whytehead raises his stovepipe, and they turn to walk the starboard side. We understand each other perfectly, it seems.

When Francine arrives back with the basket, her face is flushed, as though the thing were already effected in the brief time it took for her to fetch it and return. There is a giddiness in her that reminds me – like a blow – of the times I came back from that room to the school in Bordeaux. Miss Miller opening the door. Mme Hubert standing in the hall. I look at her with the same level eyes. Half-hate, half-hopelessness. And it amazes me, the power men have. How we make way for their desire.

And now we sit and sew. Or I swing and pretend to sew, while Francine stitches neatly at my side, and the negotiations begin.

But before they do, there are a few things I want, urgently, to say.

I want to say that I love my husband. I want to shout it out as though I were in some courtroom dock. But he is not my husband, and such love is not mine to declare. Such love is not even mine to have. Which is all to the good, because such love holds for me no fascination.

But it is nice, sometimes, to pretend. To heave a sigh and say,

'When did it begin?'

And a knock on the door is as good a place to start as any. My dear friend walked into my drawing room on the rue St-Sulpice and my life changed utterly. It might have been as banal an entrance as any other – there was no way to tell; so many beginnings are false or aborted. A pair of warm eyes is held a moment too long, and in that moment you think, I could fall, I could spend a long time falling, into that man's arms. Or he stays for one night, maybe three. Or he leaves. Or you do not like him, after all.

No, Francisco Solano Lopez played cards with me and I said, 'If I win, you will not like me.' And he put down his cards, because he wanted to like me too, before he had me. And with such an ordinary civility – a sort of weariness you might call it – was my future decided. A tenderness, a consideration, from a man who is neither tender, nor considerate, as a rule. But how was I to know that? I had entered on to my future. It could have been a short future, or a lousy one. But then, also, we were so very happy in bed. And that's not fate: it is a question of the nose. Or so my tutor in these matters, M. Raspail, once said. It is a question of how they smell.

So you were led here by the nose, said Francine, and we both laugh.

I was led here by the nose. To lie, and swing, and dream of dresses on sticks, and of insects with their legs missing. To lie and caress the son of the man who walks the deck in a careful frenzy while I talk to my maid – almost, by now, a ladies companion – who has become the object of that acquisitive lust that men so often enjoy between themselves. Stewart, Whytehead, Lopez. Who is to have her, if not The Buck?

It could be worse.

He knocked, and Francine opened the door. It seems he brought a future for her too. Not a bad one, either. If she has him – who is to say? It might lead to marriage – a settlement of sorts, perhaps even with Whytehead, as I was once settled on Quatrefages. Because dreadful things, I want to whisper (she is so much younger than me), are never the end. They are just the way through.

But tonight, for all my equanimity, I bite his shoulder until it bleeds and beat him about the head. He clouts me, too, across the neck and then, ringingly, an ear, and neither of us makes a sound. There is nothing for anyone to hear except a scrabbling, or the sound of cushions plumped up, or laboured breath, as Lopez keeps my face at arm's length with the flat of his hand: feints, once, twice, then catches one and then the other of my hands. He holds them by the wrist, dragging them strongly down so my face is leaning into his. We are very close. He looks me in the eye, and there is a word he wants to say, or hiss, into my face.

I wait for it to be said. It is in the air, this word. I want it manifest. But he does not utter it. Instead, he squeezes my wrists, and looks at me, while the child in my belly turns and, lazily, turns again.

Truffles

1865, Asuncion

Stewart called on Whytehead to tend to an injury that he did not want to share with whatever doctors – Fox or Skinner – he had to dinner. Or so Stewart assumed as he made his way to Whytehead's quintaalong the gentle cut in the hillside the locals called Tapé taú nde yurú, 'The path where my kisses eat your mouth'. It looked the same as any other path, except perhaps a little more beautiful. He wondered did Whytehead know where he lived.

Apart from Fox and Skinner, Whytehead had Cochelet to dinner. Also Captain Thompson. Sometimes a lady came to dinner at Whytehead's and left thinner than she had arrived, stunned by the mutton and by the dessert of spun sugar in the shape of some recently opened suspension bridge. Whytehead had perfect dinners, where the talk was all of cannon bore and the world stage and whether pelargoniums would mildew in the heat. A six-course, living death. Or would be, thought Stewart, if he were ever invited, as he made his way up Whytehead's driveway. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Gravel. Imagine that. A sound to make your very boots weep.

Great Britain inside the door in the shape of Eames, an actual manservant from actual Yorkshire. Great Britain ticking gently in the hall. Great Britain in the drawing room and the way Whytehead sat in the upholstered chair, gazing into the middle distance from behind his florid, solid moustache. The flock, the horsehair, and the incredible curtains of plush: the room was a remarkable achievement. Stewart looked around and saw the Mile End Road, swimming in a mirage of heat.

The injury, said Whytehead, was to his hand – the kind of thing his barber might have attended to, Stewart thought, unless the Chief State Engineer had something more to say to the Surgeon General than 'It hurts'. And indeed, there was enough to talk about. There was the war, after all. There was any number of conspiracies to be entered upon, or unmasked. There was money to be rescued, or even made. What his aunt would call 'tradesman's talk'. What Lopez might call 'treachery'.

Stewart uncurled Whytehead's fingers to find the wound. It was an ugly, complex thing of scars both old and fresh. Not so much a cut as a hole – something, or someone, had been digging into Whytehead's hand, then waiting, then digging again. It had been doing so for some time and Stewart feared a parasite, some strangely fixated fungus whose patience was about to be rewarded – being, after months of hurt and healing, nearly through to the other side.

Ί seem to have hit it on a nail,' said Whytehead, when Stewart offered an enquiring look. And in the interests of precision, he picked up the thing from a side table and lifted it for the doctor to see.

'Iron,' he said.

'Ah,' said Stewart.

They both looked at the tip as Whytehead turned the nail between finger and thumb, scoring an imaginary curve on the air of the room.

Well, iron was the man's business after all. Scratching it out of the earth, ounce by painful ounce; smelting, pouring, casting. Sacrificing half a ton of shot because the Minister of War wanted fancy railings around his house, which might have cost the country less if they had been made of solid gold. You can't sink a Brazilian monitor with golden shot. As Whytehead might say at one of his dull dinners, where all the dull men sat, pondering the burdensome fact that they were alive.

Stewart eyed the nail. Perhaps he wanted to say that the colour at the tip was rust, and not blood; or that these two things were the same colour, after a time. Stewart knew better than to touch the thing. Let the man have his comfort, his suck, his gouger. His own little crucifixion.

'Precious stuff,' he said.

The Brazilians were on the river. They were far to the south, but they were there – around a bend somewhere, or the bend after that. Nothing came in and nothing went out. No one could leave Asuncion.

Whytehead put the nail down. Stewart sat in the matching horsehair wing chair. The clock (another clock!) ticked Britishly on. They were both so terribly tired.

It was a pleasant room. The curtains on the windows were moss-green, with little tassels all down the side. There was a framed engraving on the wall of The Queen at Balmoral, seated on her horse Fairy. He would like to marry Whytehead, Stewart thought. There would be enormous comfort in it. No need for speech. Everything ordered and on time. A little woman who works a hole in her hand, when you are away.

And, 'Would you like to see the garden?' said Whytehead.

'That would be lovely,' said Stewart.

They walked out through French windows on to a granite terrace. A row of stone pots held the skeletons of bushes that had been cut into the shape of singing birds. Ordinary birds: sparrows or finches or wrens.

'The ants got to them,' said Whytehead and he stood for a while, looking at the wreck.

Stewart's aunt was of the opinion that all gardeners were insane people masquerading as gardeners. She said the same of men who liked to fish, and she humoured such types in a deliberate, loud voice, so,

'Even in the pot?' Stewart enquired, unflinching.

'Oh they get everywhere,' said Whytehead, and he led the way across the patchy lawn, and on through a gap in the hedge.

The sky was low and kind as they made their way through Whytehead's working garden towards a jumble of sheds. They walked so beautifully together; Stewart could feel the way his own thighs moved as they swung their sticks and paced the land. Beans, manioc, maize: Whytehead pointed them out, with notes of botanical interest, also the decorative rose bushes, carnations and dahlias that were planted between the vegetable rows. They paused at his pigsty. They patted the impossible Jersey cow kept for her milk (made thick as butter, it must be, by this heat).

Stewart was walking the country estate of the Chief State Engineer – Keld Whytehead, thirty-nine years old, half-crucified: whose father was nothing you could mention, whose grandfather had been, at a guess, an Orkney fisherman, which is to say a peasant with three words of English, being 'pence' and 'bailiff and 'Sir'.

'My goodness,' said Stewart. 'Yours?' A tobacco field stretched ahead of them, all alive with the wind and with the shifting backs of peons labouring among the leaves.

Ά good year for it,' said Whytehead. He could not use a word so vulgar as 'mine'. Oh bliss.

They would not talk of the war – like tradesmen, like traitors – they would talk of the weather, like gentlemen, and they would do their jobs, which were to kill and to save on a large scale; to build cannon and hospitals and put their shoulders to the wheel, which was the wheel of History itself.

'And that I grew from a cutting, sent over by Mme Lynch.'

Eliza spent her time these days crusading for the troops. She held grand soirées, at which she stood, taking the ladies' jewellery personally, at the door. 'Gold into guns,' she said, 'gold into guns', and the women went into the ball as though on their way to bed, reaching in a somnolent way to undo the clasps at their wrists and ears and necks.

And still she had time to grow a few lavender bushes, it seemed. Stewart had heard of this slippings and samplers conversation she held with Whytehead across town; a traffic of chutneys and jams, umbrellas for the sun and galoshes for the rain; small comforts such as sisters might send, which were as intimate a sign as might be seen of a nation's grateful solicitation. Eliza Lynch was Paraguay. She had produced, for the honour of the country, three living sons. She was also, since Lopez had deeded his lands to her, one of the richest women alive. And she gave Whytehead dried seedpods she had cut with her own hands and laid in her own wicker basket. Which made it all worthwhile.

'And how is II Mariscal?'

'In excellent health,' said his doctor. 'Excellent.'

'Good. Good. His catarrh?'

'Greatly improved.'

'Thank God.'

They stared at Eliza's lavender bush with gathering regret. The fact was that it was hard for a gentleman (or what passed for a gentleman in Paraguay) to apply himself to the wheel of History when the driver of the Juggernaut was a tyrant like Lopez. Not to mention the slaves toiling at the ropes. Whytehead's miners worked in chains and it disturbed him just to think about it. To use men so degraded, you needed finer blood – blood that flowed somewhere between blue and pitch-black; blood that was not particularly stirred by the sight of green velvet curtains, or even by a framed portrait of The Queen at Balmoral, seated on her horse Fairy.

At the side of the house, they leaned on a very British fence to admire Whytehead's best horse; a big-hearted, gorgeous Colorado who galloped at the sight of them, then stood, trembling, and would not approach.

'The glory of his nostrils is terrible,' said Whytehead and, when Stewart made no attempt to call the verse, he said, 'The horse. Job: 39.'

'Ah,' said Stewart.

'He saith among the trumpets Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.'

Feeling pursued, Stewart pushed back from the fence rail and turned to the house. Whytehead moved with him. He lapsed into an easy tone, as though talking to an intimate; as though talking to someone who quite liked him.

Ί had an idling idea of Israel somewhere hereabouts,' he said. 'When I was on that boat. That terrible journey by sea. I was thinking – well I was thinking of how many tons per mile of track, of course, but also, you know, of a lost tribe. Or some Arcadia.'

'And all is Arcadian here,' said Stewart, hopelessly charitable, pulled into it by the sudden knowledge that the man he was talking to was going to die. And what of that? he thought. So do we all.

'Yes. It has everything,' said Whytehead. 'Except elephants.'

After Whytehead died the Arsenal would collapse and there would be no more guns. It occurred to Stewart, looking at this man's nervous, disrupted face, that his own death had just moved a notch closer. How does that feel,Doctor? And because he knew they had come to the truth of it now, Whytehead stopped and turned.

Ί went to the office of the Minister of War, yesterday,' he said. 'When I got there, I was asked to wait at the gate. In the sun. Of course I did not wait. I have a hundred things to do. I am not a waiting man. But when I wrote to complain of the guard's impudence, he sent me this.'

Stewart took the piece of paper and scanned it from 'Your excessive sensitiveness' to the scratchy signature at the end. Benigno Lopez. The wretched brother. The only surprise was that he could write.

'You must rise above it,' he said.

Ί cannot rise above it. Any of it. I was not built to rise.'

'Then for God's sake sink. Flatter the man a little.'

Ί don't know how.'

This was true. Whytehead could flatter neither rich nor poor. He thought it democratic. Stewart thought it merely small. Which is why he would survive this country, Stewart thought, and Whytehead would not. Skinner treated him for a looseness of the bowel, Fox for cervical rheumatism, and now, Stewart for a hole in the hand. No one however could cure him of his dignity.

He suffered, under Fox, a daily morphine injection, in the neck. Perhaps it was this that made him stop, or turn, or sit down without warning. Or, as he did now, lie down entirely on the grass. Stewart sat beside him, close by his head. He found the arrangement uncomfortably erotic.

'But Ο for the touch of a vanished hand,' said Whytehead. 'And the sound of a voice that is still.'

For a while, one man watched the sky and the other the distant trees.

Ί used to hit my sisters,' said Whytehead, dreamily. 'Quite hard. I don't regret it in the least. It is an odd thing for a man to worry about. Isn't it? But I worry about it now, all the time. And who was that boy, anyway? I am not entirely sure if that boy was me.'

He pushed himself up on one arm, and turned to look at Stewart.

'The boy on whose actions I will be judged.'

'And you think we will be judged?' said Stewart.

Ί am sure of it.'

'Harshly? I mean.'

'There is only one way.'

Ί am very taken, recently,' Stewart ventured, 'by the idea of a compassionate God.'

Whytehead laughed.

Stewart walked back along The Path Where My Kisses Eat Your Mouth. He wished he knew what joined him to this man. Race was the least of it. Every time the threads of their lives crossed, they snarled into a knot. No wonder they avoided each other. Or repelled each other, rather, like magnets – if one or the other turned, even slightly, they swung around and were stuck fast.

They were also rivals in business, of course. Lopez, who liked a foreign bank account, afforded them the same easy deal, though Whytehead was doing rather better out of it than he was. Money, thought Stewart, it was always the money that smothered a man's heart.

It was the money that maddened them now, the better sort of British man trapped in Asuncion, or working down the railway line in the huge military camp at Léon. As the war trickled on, somewhere in the Mato Grosso to the north or Corrientes to the south, their pay was changed from gold to silver and then to paper, until it was hard to tell if they were paid at all. Still, they held on. If anyone were to funk, it would be late at night after too much to drink with something blurted and wrong – the chances a chap had of making it overland to Buenos Aires, for example, or whether Lopez was 'sound', or who the war was against, anyway. And Stewart, being sober, would sit in a corner, silently answering each in disgust that, No, a chap had no chance of making it to Buenos Aires, since the Brazilians held the river, and, No, Lopez was not 'sound', he went to the wrong sort of school, don't you know, and finally that the war was against everyone. Of course it was – it was a war.

He made his way home from such gatherings shouting things out in his head. This is a man, he wanted to say loudly, who has no access to the sea. He is like a rat in a bag.

But more than that, this was a man who never read his Homer; he does not realise that wars are things you wage one at a time, so his war is gradually, inevitably, against everyone – if there is a problem in the Oriental Republic let us annex a bit of Brazil. Let us send our armies across Corrientes, which is now the Argentine. And so on, until the three of them, so recently a bundle of jostling provinces, sign a pact against you; three nations: Uruguay, The Argentine Republic, The Empire of Brazil – all sworn to the destruction of Francisco Solano Lopez.

But more than that again – this is a war that is waged at home, where a man might be shot, for no reason you could tell, right here in Asuncion. A man might be shot as you made your way home for afternoon tea. This war was everywhere, like air. It was waged in the silent heart and the silent mouth of the Indian. It was fought for ' Paraguay '. Which was to say, for nothing at all. By British standards, Lopez was quite mad.

But Stewart liked the man; he thought he was quite perfectly himself. He liked his intelligence, which was considerable. And, as he walked home during those early nights of the war, he thought about feeding his animal Lopez with this fact or that. What Cochelet said, for example, what Thompson inferred about the competency of his brother Benigno to construct a defence for the camp at Léon, what Benigno muttered about his friend Eliza Lynch. He might just get tired, some day, of all these drunks, and let slip a word or two in his Master's furry ear.

By the time he reached his own door these thoughts of loyalty and betrayal had fused into the single desire for a drink. There was nothing so tedious as this reduction. Once or twice a month, Stewart suffered a craving. He craved the immoral act. He raged against the unfairness of his life; knew he deserved something by way of succour or revenge, something small and poisonous. Something filthy. Or harmless. A nip of brandy, perhaps.

He knew why he hated these men, Benigno Lopez, Thompson and the rest. It was because he wanted to pull the glass they were drinking from away from their lips. But he did not touch the glass and he would not betray the men. He walked. From midnight till, say, three o'clock, he tramped the streets and on to the country roads. He knew that he would always be shut out, now, that this was the nature of it, and so he took pleasure in the darkness and solace from the sleepers he passed; animals or men. He stopped to look at them as they twitched and sighed; reaching, chasing, moving their lips – wanting and having, wanting and not having, wanting and finally getting, all night long.

It was on one of his 'nocturnal peregrinations' that he met, and kissed, Eliza Lynch. Or thought he kissed her. Or no, did actually kiss her. Did something, anyway, for which you might use the word 'kiss'. He also felt – and he was convinced of this – a considerable wetness between her legs. At least, that is what he thought about, afterwards, though he did not, how could he? stoop and lift her skirt, there in the street. He touched her, yes. He touched her, but not so intimately. And it was not the leap his mind took that worried him so much as where it landed – this liquid shock; this symptom of disorder, whether genital or mental, that shamed the doctor in him – mocked as he already was by the desire this too-late encounter provoked, the years it had taken his hand to travel so far into the madness that was Eliza Lynch. He was rendered stupid by it – by a heat that started above his knees and trembled to a fluttering apex under his ribs. The feeling was not simply anatomical -although it was also overwhelmingly so. If it were just a question of the body, he thought later, then at least he would have known where to aim the thing, instead of this opening, heaving urge to be inside, outside, and all the way through: to be over, under and between Eliza Lynch.

But it was also a question of the body. It happened in the dark. But, whatever it was, it did happen. Let us call it a kiss. It was given, or taken, when the war was still just an idea that was being played out to the north and west of them. When Stewart's hospital cots were occupied by broken legs and the occasional fever. It was early June. The brink of things. It was the night before the main army, and half the city with it, decamped down-river to the fort at Humaitá.

Stewart came back to Asuncion that night to collect some things; among them, a last sight of his wife. He was not expected, and made his way from the new railway station on foot. After the camp, the walls of the houses were particularly blank, and female and domestic. It was hard to say if anyone slept. There was the sound of scrabbling as treasures were hidden under floorboards, the muffled sound, or so Stewart imagined, of children being conceived and tears shed. Also disappointment, the distant mewling of women who looked at what they were about to lose and cried that it was never that much, anyway. When Stewart faced his own door he knew exactly what lay behind it. He thought, with a shock, that he was in a war now, that he might be killed, and if he were killed it would be for this: his bickering wife, his senile father-in-law, his home, Paraguay.

And so he started to walk. He chose the straight road because the night was dark and he did not pause until he found himself beyond the gates of the cemetery at La Recoleta, where he saw a woman, palely dressed, walking, as he walked, along the side of the road.

They might have been fugitives. She had no horse, no servant that Stewart could see. And he thought that this is what ghosts were – figures who have nothing, who are always walking away. The moon was high and the smooth sheen of her hair awoke in him a kind of dread. He did not want her to turn around. He did not want to see whatever look was on her face, now: some mute and terrible appeal, or an entirely usual expression, made hideous and slow. Was Eliza dead? It was years since he had seen her like this – ever since she became a kind of national Thing, Eliza was never alone.

She was alone now. She walked the road ahead of him on the same side, reaching and passing each in a row of young cypress trees. For a while he did not approach, but matched his pace to her dreamy tread; and although she did not speed or slacken, he knew that she sensed him behind her in the night. She was alive, then. She was more than alive. He could feel her thoughts seeking him out, as his thoughts played at her back. He would have called out to reassure her but there was, he found, a keen, and unexpected, pleasure in keeping silent. And so he matched her, step for step, shortening his stride by so much to keep the gap precise – his pace ever more mincing and predatory, until the moment lapsed and she was no longer afraid.

She turned. Stewart had expected a girl to turn, but it was a woman who faced him, and the greeting she gave might have been offered in any drawing room: it built walls around her and ignored the night.

'Doctor Stewart,' she said.

'My dear Madame Lynch.'

The distance between them made him feel foolish, now that he had to cross it.

'You will see me home?' she said.

'Indeed, it is very late.'

'Thank you.'

She turned and took his elbow – so neatly, they might have been stepping out to dance. But Stewart found that he could not accompany her and there was a little, frightful awkwardness as she pulled at his arm, like a mother might drag at a schoolboy who balks on the road.

He had, he discovered, something to tell her.

'Eliza,' he said.

He wanted to tell her how she was seen, these days. He wanted to warn her of what she might become.

She was, in the first instance, more beautiful. Stewart was at the age when men become addicted to youth, so Eliza's increasing, and increasingly new, beauty was a mystery to him. She was, by general standards, old. She was also fussy. She came into his medical tents with a great show of entourage and ladies, and you might think the men would find it an irritation, but the truth was that her face was a solace to them, her smile a balm, and the few words she uttered (to Stewart's sometime annoyance) a cure in themselves. And it was not just the gullible and the forgotten who felt the force of it. When she entered a room – it might be some bare room in the camp at Léon – when the men scraped their chairs back and stood, it was more than courtesy that moved them, it was the knowledge that, unlike the wives-daughters-sisters-camp girls, she understood the gravity of their great enterprise, and that, in some lovely, easy way, she belonged to them all. The most beautiful woman in the world.

So this was the first thing that Stewart had to tell Eliza, in the incongruous dark, by the side of the road – that she was beautiful. The second thing he had to tell her was that she was evil, too.

It was not a word he might casually use, but the war was exciting as religion to him now, and it was vital to keep Lopez pure. II Mariscal slapped his crop against his boots, he stalked, he was everywhere; and when the band played ' La Palomita', he looked twice as large and very fine. And in his stalking, slapping way, he might have a man whipped, or a man shot. He might have late dinners, which a woman would be wise not to attend. This is what Stewart wanted to say: that Eliza must strike with her Great Friend an attitude – such a one as you would find, indeed, on an old vase. She might fall on her knees. She might soothe. She might plead. But she must stay away from early whippings and late dinners. And she must never, ever whisper in his ear.

As he had seen her do, quite recently, as they stood on the dais at Cerro Léon. It was during a grand parade. She whispered, he laughed; then they both turned back to watch as men marched past on their way to the grave. Eliza's face, without changing at all, had become implacable, somehow, or greedy. Or hideously serene. She had gone from Angel of Mercy to Angel of Death, without a blink of her lovely eye.

Was it too late to turn back? Was there any other way for her to go? Stewart wished that Lopez would marry her – he almost longed for it. He felt, in the most foolish part of himself, that there might be something this woman could do – a bedroom something that their beautiful Eliza might say to their impetuous Mariscal that would stop it all, the torment and horror that was about to descend on them. Because it was the fate of angels, was it not, to intercede?

And now here she was, her ordinary flesh beside him on the roadside, and Stewart her protector. She was smiling at him, after pulling at his arm and letting it drop. He had just said her name.

'Eliza.'

'Yes?' she said, and took his elbow again, quite patient and sisterly.

'Be careful,' he said. And this time he walked on with her, because, pathetically, he did not know what else to say.

Ί am always careful,' she said (evil, quite evil) and the toes of her satin shoes slipped, one after the other, out from under her dress and on to the grit of the road.

It was not far to her house. She talked, remarkably, of Southern England, the small town in Kent where she had been married. 'For I am married, you know', to a M. Xavier Quatrefages. A beast, but a very minor beast, she said. A horse doctor in the military. But Kent was beautiful, all the same. The Weald – was that Kent? Perhaps it was Surrey. And so they came to the gate of her quinta, where she turned and took his hand in hers, and he, like some village Romeo, pushed forward to kiss her on the mouth. Or on the cheek. Or he brushed his mouth against the skin of her face, as she turned away.

He did not even like the woman. It was a part he was obliged to play, and she, to complete the scene, turned and fled prettily into the house. The theatre of it annoyed him, but not as much as the riot in his blood that had been gathering ever since he tracked her in the dark. He felt trifled with. He felt tempted, and scorned. Even if this were true (and it was not true) – no matter. What mattered was the violence with which he had wanted her, a woman talking of Kent or was it Surrey, as though she did not want him too. Was this passion? This epilepsy?This urge to destroy, like a child in a fit, the room, the house, the entire world? And that anatomical thing, his member, foolishly forward, seeking a place he could no longer imagine, let alone name, until there, on his hand, an appalling, imagined wetness; poor forked animal that she was. Gone now, through the gates of her house. Gone to bed.

He shook it off like a dog and headed back to town, and like a dog, he felt he had been whipped. But the road was straight and he knew where he was going. He was going to his annoying wife Venancia for some love. Just that. The odorous cushion of her breast beneath his ear.

For a long time, the memory of that night's encounter clung to Stewart like a dream you cannot wash off in the morning. It returned, in one detail or another – the sound of the insects in the dark; the turn in the road; and what might have happened if some different move had been made. If he had spoken more, or better. If he had stopped. If one or other thing had shifted even slightly and he had ravished, or been ravished by, a woman he did not even like, who walked out at night as he did, alone.

Nothing much, of course. The sexual act. A different way of looking at Lopez. His own throat quietly slit perhaps (or perhaps not). A great passion, or no great passion. A mess. Any number of things, none of which would increase the sum of his pleasure in seeing Eliza secretly in the dark, as though she had invited him to this assignation, and him alone.

Of course she was not there for him. What Stewart knew – but did not realise for some time – was that Eliza's stillborn daughter was buried in the graveyard along whose walls she walked that night. It came to him, seven years later, when he buried a child for Venancia, who could not attend, being not yet churched. It was their sixth, a meagre little daughter who died as soon as she was born. They scraped out some earth and put her in. Stewart looked up, and Venancia's absence on the other side of the tiny grave made him think of other ghosts – the lilac paleness of Eliza that night, in the June of 1865, when the war was still something you might win or lose.

The graveyard was beautiful. It was one of those blessed days when you thought there could be no hardship in such a place and with such weather. The jacaranda trees were in smoky bloom, the birds sang into the stillness, and the whole world seemed to whisper 'Afterwards. Afterwards'. It was all finished, now. The war. Lopez. Any number of dead. Stewart found it hard to care, after so much slaughter, for his own tiny child, but of course he did care, and the animal sorrow he felt seemed so unfair – that you should never be free of it, that, like hunger, pain would always be new and hard. And as he turned away he remembered that Eliza's daughter was buried here too. So that was what brought her out along the road that last night in Asuncion. She had come to visit the bones of her baby – so light and tentative and barely formed. He thought of them as they lay in the earth now, open and loose; melted back from each other where the cartilage had not had a chance to harden into bone.

Stewart stepped back with a snort that surprised the gravedigger. He had remembered – but last of all – the kiss. And with the memory came the thought that the kiss, despite its opiate clarity, might not have been a kiss, after all. Also, and either way, that it did not matter now. Perhaps it had not mattered then. And Stewart felt a fierce nostalgia for the war. Standing alive, as he stood now, among the great sighing mass of the dead.

It is possible they all saw themselves as standing on a magnificent canvas, one that might run the length of an old hall. It would be filled with smoke. There would be hills with men toiling up the slopes, other men firing down from above. A gorge. A swamp. Far embrasures and redoubts – strategic details compressed into a tea-coloured distance before the Paraguayans run out of wall. In the centre, the river, shallow and lazy, flows or dallies past the story of the war fought along its bank: the battles of Riachuelo, Tuiuti, Curupaiti, the trenches at Curuzú and, looming above it all, the besieged fort of Humaitá; its builder, the gallant Captain Thompson, unrolling his plans high up there on the mud wall.

Below him, Brazilian ironclads squat on the river while, from ship and shore, the mouths of cannon spit primitive flame. The river is spattered with shot that falls just shy of the ships: the walls of the fort, though vaguely pocked and dented, are never breached. It seems a pleasant enough stalemate – an expensive way to fish. Along the wicker battlements, men point into the middle distance or click out a telescope to glint in the sun. Their names might be written on ribbon unfurling below them. In the centre, Lopez; with an unlikely white stallion rearing under him on the high wall. Pedro Inácio Meza, the ruined hero of Riachuelo dying of his wound, stiffly, on the church steps. Colonel José Diaz charging, and taking, a battery of La Hitte cannons from the Uruguayans at Estero Bellaco. Huzzah! General Francisco Isidoro Resquin running up the left flank at Tuiuti, General Vicente Barrios on the right, the fierce Guarani soldiers wading through swamp and thicket under close enemy fire to face the sixty thousand Brazilians, Uruguayans and Argentines, housed in that vast city of cloth. How could one man paint them all? And though we see men throw up their arms and roll their eyes, although we see the bullet even as it enters; the stricken faces of comrades who reach but can not save ('oh, no!' the picture might be called. 'Oh, No!'): although we see plenty of dying, we do not see one corpse – so quickly are bodies emptied and then discarded, even by their own stories – nor do we see the vast heaps of the dead. We might miss the vast heaps of the dead: we have come to relish them; the unexpected anatomy lesson of a man's neck open to the spine; the way a group of bodies tangle and subside; the way we must follow the line of a leg to see whose foot that is, so strong is our impulse to unite the body and give each man his proper parts. Also the horror, of course, when the leg stops short. Ten thousand men died at Tuiuti, and as their skin leathers in the open air, the hill of the dead settles and grows horribly flat (who would have thought there could be so many elbows in the world?). A lone photographer stands on the field of death, and there is no one to paint them: the painters are all fled. What happened at Tuiuti? A battle, that is all. Nothing but swamp was lost and nothing but swamp was gained. But the man who lost the swamp was Lopez.

Still, you must never underestimate the Guarani soldier. He is there in the picture too, in dull-eyed ranks and rows, ever-advancing. Again and again, facing superior forces and overwhelming odds, the Paraguayan Indian outfoxes, outfights, outdies the combined enemy. His pants are blue and his coat is red. And he takes both off to fight in the swamp, which he knows and calls home.

He is sickened by the meat, though, as Milton tells it many years later. Not because the meat is rotten, though it is often rotten, but because these men are not used to eating such stuff – they only make it, or become it. In which case, there is plenty meat made in the five and a half years of the war. As the battles slowly creak into place, and one strategy slowly crunches into another, the Guarani Indian fights on; bilious, gripe-ridden, suffering from meaty breath and meaty wind; and there is no surrender. Ever.

Despite which, the story of the war is a story of retreat. Curupaiti held and lost. The cunningly double line of trenches at Curuzu, then back to the fort of Humaitá: three hundred and eighty guns, a mess of defences out front, the ground seething with twenty thousand boys and old men, because only boys and old men are left, now.

The stranglehold tightens around them and the names keep unscrolling in the painterly wind: on the river, the fearless Diaz floats in his fatal canoe; General Barrios makes a sortie, Paulino Álén shoots himself, in the face of defeat; Bernardino Caballero holds Acosta Nu – these are names that must be said out loud. As too must the names of the staunch ships who sailed in this war, the Tacuari, the Paraguart, the captured Brazilian steamship Marques de Olinda, the Ygurei, the Salto Oriental and the Pirabebé. Ships where men fought, and in which they burned; ships from which they drowned.

There is some comfort in listing the brave men of other wars: history is a litany, and all we are doing, here on this earth, is making lists of the dead.

So busy intoning, indeed, that we miss the three Brazilian boats as they cut the chains that have been slung across the river, then run the battery at Humaitá. They are the Barrosso, the Tamandaré and the Brasil: all monitors; blind-looking things of unnatural iron – even the deck is closed over, so that the men inside it are either safe or dead: there is no middle way and no romance to them either. Monstrous modernity, which chugs past the open mouths of two hundred and four guns – from the Curupaiti battery to the final array at Humaitá – as though they were going on a picnic. Then moves upriver to pound Asuncion.

And so there it is. The city is burning. Somewhere in the background, the ghost of Whytehead lays his hand on the bulge of a cold smelter, looking sad yet proud. So much for the remnants of the maiden Tacuari – they pale in comparison to the great names of this war, Spanish Creole and Guarani. At the very end of the canvas it is the gallant Captain Thompson who surrenders, finally, the fort at Angostura, because no Paraguayan knows how.

And where is Stewart? Was he brave? Low down, on a nameless piece of ground, he lifts some dying man by the shoulders, as though to help him face out of the picture. The man rolls his eyes. His last, trembling gesture is back towards Humaitá and the unlikely stallion on the high wall – my captain, Lopez. (Or is that Lopez himself, impossibly dying in Stewart's arms? With more beard, perhaps, and a different look in his eye?)

And where is Eliza in his hour of need? She is out of the picture. Her portrait would be hung on the opposite wall, endlessly looking. Trying to discover where it all went wrong.

She will not find it here. This is a heroic painting -one of the last such – and tenderly naïve. It is full of errors, of course, but that is a different thing. Stewart might have pointed out that the chains slung across the river were, for the duration of the siege, most beautifully clogged with water hyacinth. Every morning he wondered at the line becoming sharper – the water downstream becoming smooth as glass, as the river behind grew solid with vegetation. One morning the whole thing flowered and he had the greatest urge to walk the floating path from the near bank to the freedom of the other side.

He might, either, have complained about the lack of red – that most distracting colour. He might say the painter had failed to capture the various and romantic colours of blood, for example, from the dry rust first pointed out to him by Whytehead, to the liquid red of the river, soaked with light as the sun went down. It might be bougainvillaea shooting, from one day to the next, out of the rich mud beside his hut at Humaitá, or a man's shirt in full bloom just before he died, but Stewart's eye was punctured by red during the war, as his heart was sometimes pierced by the peculiar blue of the sky.

Most important, there would be nothing in such a picture of miasma, or of mud. There would be no mud-covered carrion, or living men covered in mud. Above all, there would be no women slathered with the stuff, or even women who, like Eliza, remained amazingly mud-free.

In fact, the fort at Humaitá was crawling with women. They detached themselves from the mud of the walls to approach in their mud-coloured dresses, and they opened their mud-coloured faces to show the wonderful, clean, inner red of their mouths, livid with teeth of yellow. And whatever they had to say, it was always a bother – a plea of some sort, for news of some man, for intercession over a scrap of cloth, or a scrap of roof to put over their heads, or, later, for food. They offered nothing in return, some of them, except the sight of their winning, female faces, or the prospect of leaving your sleeve alone. They might, either, offer some sexual service of great frankness, but their bargaining powers were in general poor, and they might switch from nothing to everything without seeming to tell between the two.

In the universal muddiness that pertained after that first action at Riachuelo (no one dared to call it a defeat), the merest wipe of a rag was enough to make you advance. The woman who fared best – at least the one whose sleeve Stewart would end up tugging before the war was out -started out with a clean face and a stand of rushes she cut from the swamp to repair your roof. She ended up supplying all kinds of things, from a bottle of French wine to woven baskets for the wall of the fort. She could be seen tramping them like a dumpy skirted engineer in increasingly good boots, with gold chains around her neck and other, dangling things hidden under the cloth of her shirt.

She was never hit. When the water rose, the Brazilian boats drew closer and the thick cushions of earth that were the walls became fatter and dangerously low, like hills. It was hard to tell if they were falling under the pounding or reverting to some more natural state and Stewart could not help feeling that they were quite happy subsiding like that, back into the easeful flat, or slipping off into the river again, as mud. He could not help the feeling that even the earth was betraying them now.

Still, it was fun. Every morning, they cheered a little paddle wheeler that steamed down to lob a few twelve pounders into the Brazilian fleet, making them scurry a bit, whip up a bit of foam. When it was sunk they sent Jaime Corbalan down instead – one man in a canoe full of torpedoes, with a ribbon presented by Eliza fluttering at his throat.

'We'll put a hole in them yet,' said Lopez as they waited for dawn and the sound of the first explosion, the plump ball of water bursting in the air. But there was nothing. There was an uneasy silence, which filled up slowly with the different kinds of misadventure and funk and betrayal, so by the time the first jeering whistle broke, they knew what had happened. The Brazilians had swallowed him up. Corbalan was a rich boy and this was the trouble, said Lopez, who, in his cheerful way, had the man's brother shot.

Then new boats appeared, and the shells flew high over the walls, churning an arc of mud where huts and shanties once stood. Every morning, the women went out to collect the unexploded canisters, then brought them to the gunners to be better primed and shot back. They cheered as they ran towards them, and jostled each other out of the way to keep their courage up, because although the shells looked like nothing at all lying there – just lumps of metal lodged in the muck – sometimes one would, under a woman's gentle touch, revive, and so explode.

Stewart faced the problem of the women whenever their anatomy ambushed him in the operating hut – every time he panicked that a man's member had been blown away and grubbed through blood and hair looking for the nonexistent wound. Every time he unbuttoned a shirt and found a breast, or two, beneath, he would sigh at the problem of the women. If Venancia were here, would she scavenge for shot? (Venancia becoming, as the weeks and months went by, as beautiful in his head as a glass of water, a plate of fresh food.)

Why, he asked himself, did the women do such a thing? There was a pot of corn for each shell, but there were other ways and other places where a woman might find food. Ί had a man who died,' said one, 'and then I had another man who died.' When life was so cheap, she seemed to say, love became general. So they might do it for a general love. Or for love of the General – Lopez. Or because they were told to – as simple as that; the love of discipline. Or because they loved the risk, as some of them undoubtedly seemed to do. They might do it, finally, because no one likes to lose -which is nothing but the love of victory, with her laurels and her wings.

Stewart was much exercised, philosophically, in his cholera tent and in his typhoid tent, by the problem of love. He thought about it obsessively. Perhaps it had always been thus, he thought, as he lifted a mustard plaster from a cholera victim's chest, or paused to examine the gassy, bulging ground over the pits where they buried the dead. 'My aunt always said I was a worrier.'

'But all love is a worried love,' he said, inadvertently aloud, and more than once. 'All love is fuss.'

He thought that he was beginning to love Eliza Lynch, for example. But properly, this time. This did not bother him much: it was a spiritual, even androgyne love – it was not a yearning thing. He did not wait for her to appear. But when she did walk out – her dress bouncing on its hoops, just clear of the mud, and her parasol glowing like a living membrane in the sun – her eyes were so kind, her whole air so simple and redeeming, that it was impossible to call her a woman at all. She was like a sister when she moved and like a dream when she was still. She was what they were all fighting for.

Of course, he was also in love with her in a dashing sort of way – they all were, it was the accepted thing to be. 'We have died and gone to Eliza's', was the joking toast they gave, in the little place she kept beyond the church at Humaitá – meaning no disrespect in this use of her Christian name, but on the contrary, a kind of bantering beatification.

Eliza's house was a haven – partly because it was so well back from the arc of bloody muck that was the ballistic limit of the Brazilian ships. Which is not to say that Eliza was a coward; she walked freely out; a distinctive sight -you might even say a target – a swirl of colour with two boys, fore and aft, to lift and lay boards for her feet. They got so adept, it became a kind of game with them all; Eliza walking faster and faster as they ran around her, forming an impromtu wheel on whose inside rim she walked safe.

Stewart could have used the boys, but he did not grudge her this courtesy. It lifted all their hearts to see her looking so fine. There was not a man among them, would not lay down his life to save her stockings from a splash of whatever liquid might taint her: muck, blood (sperm, he idly thought), pus, noble or otherwise, and, God knows, sweat; the soup of putrefaction; good, old-fashioned shit -there being so many ways in which a lady's stocking might get wet, these days.

Every time Stewart saw Eliza, she had grown. He was not surprised by this; Venancia had, for example, shrunk in his head, until she had become a sort of daughter to him – a body he might take up in his arms, fresh and light and loose as water. And sometimes the body was alive and sometimes the body was dead. Either way, even though Stewart knew she was eating her way through her father's estate upriver, along with his own worthless salary, she still became, as the months and years went by, lighter and lighter in his mournful arms.

He himself, he thought, was pretty much the same size, although he could feel his heart getting bigger. His heart seemed to be, by now, the size of a horse's heart, and as the pile of food shrank and the pile of bodies grew, it felt like his heart would take over the entire cavity of his chest, until he was just a thumping, possibly empty, thing of muscle and bone.

There was nothing wrong with any of this, though he found the massivity of his heart, imagined or real, sometimes affected his lungs. He could not draw breath any more, or at least not a proper, manly breath. It was the grief, he thought. He had heard men complain of it -a tightness in the lungs that eased itself only in tears and that had no pathology that he could see. It was just that, as the number of the dead grew, your lungs shrank. As if to remind a man what it was to inhale and so to live.

His stomach escaped this inventory because he did not think of it as belonging to him anymore, and so it might be any size at all. It might be as big as the wide world, or as small as a bullet lodged in your gut. Mostly, he tried to ignore it, so capricious was it, and independent, and mean. But then the hunger moved to his mouth, and this made him want to wrap his gums around things – all manner of things – in order to assuage it. Or he might, in opening a wounded man, catch a glimpse of his last meal, and find a jealous spittle flood his own maw.

It was not that they were famished. They had food -or some food. It was just not the right food. There was something a man craved to see on his plate, but could not name. And as the months went by the soldiers sat around more, and their eyes became more inward-looking and difficult and complicit with their own pain.

It was around this time that the story went about that Eliza ate the flesh of the dead. She said it tasted just like pork, but gamier – like the truffle-hunting boars you get in the Auvergne. Some said it was Brazilian flesh she liked – though there was little enough of that about – others said it was their own. The story was universally believed – it was the truffles that did it. You could not invent a detail like the truffles: besides, who among them had ever heard of the Auvergne? And the taste of gamey pork circled endlessly in their mouths; the wetness so bad they must spit as they thought of Eliza pulling a long strip of pale ham from an amputated joint. These were men who looked at their own arms now, during a long day in the trenches, and judged the ratio of lean to fat. And though there was a horror to it, they did not exactly blame Eliza her portion, so much as blame this gaping world, into which you threw bodies, perhaps your own body, as though the sky itself were starving.

Then, when she appeared, the cannibal thoughts had nowhere to land. Eliza was, in all the mud-coloured world, the most beautiful thing. And they ate her with their eyes.

But what of love? said Stewart's worried thoughts. What has all this eating to do with love? Of course he found the cycle of life here uncomfortably close. They all did. During the endless afternoons, his medical heap of discarded flesh was often raided by dogs, who might be shot as they worried their human spoils. The shot dogs were then eaten. Of course they were cooked first and this made a difference, but the closer a man got to the line the more important it was to maintain it. And what else would keep the line, but love?

He was not the only one who felt this way. There was a keen trade in priests, these days, or the priest-like – men with a mellow, melancholic wisdom that in peacetime would have tempted you to hit them across the back of the head with a shovel – they drew their pipes on other men's tobacco, and gave, in return, a wise sigh and a story, preferably one of woe. Stewart did not listen unless it was a tale of love, because although love still frantically concerned him (also fate and mischance), death did not trouble him at all. The last death he had cared about was Whytehead's, and Whytehead had died some years ago. It was hard to remember when. Before that first action at Riachuelo, or after? It was certainly before any of the big engagements of the war. Whytehead was missing all the fun. No, the last time Stewart had seen him, the band was playing ' La Palomita', and the crowd were cheering their heads off, and Whytehead was just standing there, looking at them all.

It was the morning after Stewart had, or had not, kissed Eliza Lynch; the morning the fleet was dispatched to break the blockade. The whole town stood in Plaza de Palma cheering, one more time, the Tacuari. With her now were the Paraguari, and five or six more, including the Ygurei, the Jejut, and the Salto Oriental. The captured Brazilian steamship Marques de Olinda was re-rigged with the national flag and it all looked so fine, and so very much his own, that Stewart forgot about fumblings with this woman or that. No man's heart can resist the tug of ships and, as they pulled slowly away, Stewart flung the stupid kiss, and all kisses, after them, as you might lob a pigeon; a flurry of muscle and emotion, which soared up to drift awhile in their wake.

'Huzzah,' he shouted, and he waved his very British hat. 'Huzzah!'

And Whytehead gave him a narrow look.

So he was almost pleased when, after a few weeks in the field, the news came of the man's death. The ships had engaged in the shallows of Riachuelo and the action had failed. The Jejuiand the Salto Oriental were lost, the Paraguarilaid helpless. The commander of the fleet, Commodore Meza had, wisely, stopped off in Humaitá to die of his wounds. And it was at Humaitá that Stewart heard the news that, upriver, the Arsenal had lost its chief engineer and the army their free supply of matériel. And he felt whatever thread tied him to Whytehead snap.

He was curious to find that there actually was a thread somewhere, like a tendon in his chest in which the connection he had to this man had been manifest. He was surprised to feel an actual sensation of loosening. The picture of the Fates was, he thought, quite just – their big shears cutting the threads of a man's life – because what the world feels when a man dies, even at a distance, is an unravelling.

The body was found in his tobacco barn and the story circulated that Whytehead had hanged himself from a beam there. His dinner doctors, Fox and Skinner, had diagnosed self-poisoning: he had taken an infusion of nicotine they said; a pesticide he concocted against aphids. Stewart knew he would do no such thing. It would mortify his sisters. And he sat down to write and tell them so. 'Dear Misses Whytehead,' he began. Thinking that the letter would never reach them. Wondering how much of their brother's money would ever make it to the Mile End Road.

In the months that followed, Stewart's thread theory, or tendon theory, was of some comfort to him. It was as though he had a little packet of humanity stored safely in his chest, and he occasionally patted himself there, as a man might check for his pipe, while around him the cholera came and with it all other kinds, shades, varieties and types of shitting – dysentery, typhoid, and the rest. He wondered why God had not designed for mankind a convenient plug. He thought, also, that if he saw another man with his pants stinking, he might kill him, just to save time.

In October the northern army had limped down from the Cordillera and there was little enough for Stewart to do. Only the minor wounded made it back, carried over that great distance by brothers, or friends, or even strangers -who must have been put out when Lopez shot their burdens as soon as they set them down, in order to purge the shame of the surrender at Uruguiana.

The general was shot first – which was the difference between Lopez and other commanders of men. There he goes, thought Stewart. My animal Mariscal with his animal war. He walked up the lines of the wounded and stared each man in the face, checking his eyes as the band played ' La Palomita'.

The great slaughter had begun, and it was years before Stewart cared again.

Then, in June of 1867, a man came up to him and spoke a sentence so clearly that Stewart wondered at the path this news had taken – it had travelled such distances to hit with precision the side of his head, where nature had placed an ear to receive it. The Doterelhad been let through in June with a new English envoy; perhaps the news had come in a letter that Venancia opened on his behalf. Was it her voice he heard through the man's face, as he came up to him in the middle of a busy afternoon and said, Ί am to tell you that Miss Steerat of Edingbur is dead.' It was news, he said, for Έ1 Doctor' – who indeed had an aunt called Miss Stewart who was by now long dead in Edinburgh as opposed to any other town. Where the news had come from, or who had paid for it, Stewart did not know. When he lifted his suddenly heavy face to thank the man, he had already turned to go.

'She was a mother to me,' said Stewart, pathetically, to his back, and the man looked over his shoulder at him, very like the statue of Perseus at Albani.

And so the previous, ordinary months of siege became extraordinary months, in which he had been alive, while his dear aunt was dead. If it was possible to experience life in retrospect then that was what he was doing now – a rush of sensibility pouring through the days, a lurch in time, a doubling back – as though he had dropped her death along the path, all unawares, and was returning to collect it, now.

The heavens were open to him. There was no one between him and the wide blue sky any more. Stewart looked up, as though for the first time, and decided that there was none so peculiar a colour as blue. The woman who reared him was dead, and he had felt nothing – no intimation before the news, no emotion on its receipt. And so his thread theory of human connection itself unravelled, many miles from home.

Of course, when he last embraced her, he knew that he would never see the woman again. Which is just as we all do, he thought, because 'Farewell' with a woman is always for all time. Even the small partings. Even if she puts her bonnet on and walks as far as town, which is not very far. Farewell. Because that is what women are for. For leaving, and loving from a distance, very like the way we love the dead. And he thought of the slender angel he would like to set on her grave – he spent his time inscribing the headstone beneath with one phrase or another. Finding the right words and forgetting them, re-making them in his head. Some day the thing would be settled with a pen and paper, but in the meantime he managed and forgot sentence after sentence until the moment when his mind was stilled with some lines that Whytehead had recited to him that day in Asuncion.

But Ο for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still.

And with this, a sadness filled his (already much engorged) heart, and although Stewart still, in general, liked the war, he could not remember how it started, any more.

But now that his aunt was dead, he felt a need to dress in the evenings and to look at the men about him with social eyes. Instead of a jaundice, he might see, for example, a tendency to cut corners. He applied his aunt's horse language to them: that one was a bolter, another a swerver, when faced with the great ditch of life. And, as though Eliza realised this from a distance, one morning, busy (as a man might occasionally be) with his lice, he was interrupted by a small girl with a card.

Mme Eliza Lynch

requests the pleasure of

Dr William Stewart's

company at dinner

on Saturday evening July 7^th

at half past seven o'clock.

It was this that brought him, finally, to tug at the sleeve of the woman who walked the walls. He found her ordering the wicker gabions into a high gap and he interrupted her for so long as to request a piece of paper, if it could be found. It arrived that afternoon – quite a good sheet – in return for some future life saved, or lost (she would tell him when the time came), and he rinsed his hands with dry grit before picking it up.

Humaitá, July 4^th

Dr William Stewart

accepts with pleasure

the kind invitation of

Mme Eliza Lynch

for dinner

on Saturday evening July 7^th

at half past seven o'clock

Spacing one line after the next, so sweetly, filled him with a quiet elation. Just this – the simple cross and return of a pen, made him feel almost noble again.

Her recent confinement, and the birth of a fourth son, meant that it was many months since Mme Lynch had entertained in her little house in the compound behind the church. This was a pity, because Eliza by candlelight was a wonder. She gave her guests the gift of an easy, profound attention, and the liquid approval of her lovely black eyes. Her voice, when she spoke, was both light and proud; her whole conversation so carefully matched to the male mind that one was never obliged to stall or defer. This all he told his aunt as he scraped his face with a bloodied bistoury on the eve of the dinner, and followed the line of cut hair with a blind hand. But because she was dead, his aunt kept asking him questions, as though vetting a woman he might bring through her own door. (Eliza there – good Christ! – in his aunt's parlour. And when her dress falls away there is nothing under the whalebone but more bone, and then more bones. Eliza falling at his dear aunt's feet in a clatter.)

He stepped into what was left of his broadcloth, and attacked a green and spreading stain that fed on its map of sweat. He unfolded the revers across his chest, for lack of linen, and knotted a rag around the collar to keep it all in place; all the time attempting to answer his aunt in his head.

Eliza's Irishness, for example – was she really Irish? And what kind of Irish, while we were at it? The right kind, Stewart answered, in the main – her manners seemed bred, not learned. Though it was possible she was about as Irish as any woman who wanted to do well in Paris where they thought the Irish sauvage and the English only spinsters.

But why should she doubt it? (His aunt was being most vexing.) Of course Eliza was Irish. There was the whole business of those 'laughing eyes'. There was the embarrassing tendency towards politics. An insistence, almost.

There was the frankness of her habits; a sometimes comic sense of cunning, which seemed to wander wherever, and tease at a man, particularly at his privates.

And what of it? She is more than all that, he told his dead aunt, as he made his way through the muck – she is also Eliza.

Her house was a lantern. A low, ordinary bungalow, quite large; instead of walls there were curtains of canvas hanging from the eaves. The lights glowed through the greased cotton until the whole shallow cube seemed to float in front of a man's eyes: particularly if he was hungry. If he was very hungry, the place seemed to dance and recede, and then it seemed to be in front of his nose and very bright, just a little bit too soon.

A man might push aside the flap of the door as Saladin entering his pavilion, or Genghis Khan his Mongolian yurt. Stewart swept the canvas aside and stepped into the 'hall'. He had brought a copy of Suetonius for Eliza to read, but thought it, of a sudden, all wrong, and slipped it, quietly, on to the card table as he waited to be shown through. The inner walls were also cloth and he followed an embroidered scene down to the dining room; a little miracle fashioned from curtains and tapestry and painted cotton.

'Welcome to my field tent,' said Eliza, with a wave at the vaguely billowing walls, and she walked with a frank affection towards him, raising her hand for the kiss. Then she turned and swept him towards the other men.

'Doctor Stewart,' she said.

It was a small group. Paulino Álén, the Caballeros, Bernardino and Pedro – what might be called the coming men, though the truth was that they were the only men left. Paulino Álén was a boy, and there was something embarrassing about this: his snot-nosed gravitas, his beautiful clear skin. He ran an abrupt hand on the seat of his pants, then held it out. Stewart, quite moved, shook it, then turned to peruse the cloth along the walls. Among the drapes of Pompeian-red and soft olive was the same green as poor, timid, Whytehead's curtains – perhaps Eliza got them from the same warehouse; there were so few in Asuncion. Then he saw the tassels, and the thought occurred to Stewart that she might have taken them from Whytehead's own windows, after he died.

A cage of stuffed birds! When there were so many living ones in the swamp beyond the walls. They were not the exotic birds you might trap on your rooftop here, but – even more exotic – birds such as you might find at home. A startled sandpiper chirping its alarm, a pheasant picking up one claw to run. A very Highland theme. The cloth spread beneath was a new tartan, in a wonderful close pattern of turquoise and yellow and grey. Eliza was turning him into a woman, it seemed. Stewart wanted to run the cloth along his cheek; he wanted to stuff it inside his jacket against the skin of his chest. He wanted to have this piece of cloth, and love it, and take care that it should not be torn.

'Ah, you have seen my birds,' she said. 'Do they not remind you of home?'

'So much,' he said.

He thought she should have offered the birdcage to him then, so he could refuse it and beg the cloth instead. But she did not.

Why should she? She owned it.

A knocking announced II Mariscal Lopez – as ever formal when entering the house of Eliza Lynch.

'Let him in,' she said to the servant, who lifted the flap for the Dictator to walk through. After which theatre, he looked a little silly. He was always smaller than you remembered him to be.

Lopez kissed the hand of his consort, then waved for them all to sit down. You could not oblige a soldier to wait, these days, when the smell of cooking was in the air. As the chairs were pushed in under them, a figure slipped into the place beside Stewart.

'Late, Pancho,' said Eliza. 'You must always be late.'

'Sorry, Mama.'

He was sitting beside the Little Colonel, and this made Stewart's pleasure complete. They were all so fond of the boy. His eyes were the lightest green you might see this side of the Atlantic; so green as to look quite blind in strong light. The blankness of them was almost decadent. The lurking passivity of his youth and the slowly blinking lashes made a man think about women's eyes; ask what they were doing – so modest and yet knowing – in the middle of a boy's face.

But he was a boy – there was no doubt about that – as precious and wild. He was also a National Thing, being, one day, the reason why they had all fought this war. And as such he was already glowering at Álén who, quite wisely, examined his cutlery and did not look back.

There was quite a lot to examine. When Stewart caught Alén's eye, he tapped the outermost of five forks, to the boy's hidden relief. If the truth be told, Stewart only knew what three of them were for: meat, fish and pastry – even this act of identification made his mouth indecently water. He reached for a glass and faltered, at which Eliza's manservant leaned out of the darkness and, with a whisper almost sexual in its tact and generosity, called the glasses out to him. 'Water, Chambertin, Latour, champagne.' Then he withdrew.

Stewart sought, and found, the Little Colonel's eyes of mineral green.

'Any good shooting, these days?'

He was about to weep. It was possible he was weeping already. He looked at the boy speaking to him and did not hear a word that came from his young mouth. Perhaps because she understood, Eliza served, almost at once, not a soup, but a camp stew such as they were used to of manioc and meat. A good one. There was a terrible silence as they fell to. After which incontinence, the meal proper was possible, in all its ritual loveliness: soup, salad, fish, game, meat. The salad was a little 'Indian', and the fish was the usual fish bombed out of the river, but it was fresher than Stewart was used to, being snatched from under the snouts of Brazilian guns, and it looked up at him from a sauce à Vestragon. All in all the food made him feel quite patriotic. The bird was local game, shot before it reached the enemy guns. The leg of pork was a gift, Eliza said, from someone grateful, and the chocolate mousse was particularly colonial and fine, being made straight from the cocoa bean. But as for the last dish – that last fork sitting so mysteriously on its silver rest – when the last dish came they all cheered. Sorbet de cassis.How did she do it?

It was a dream. Sometime during the fish Stewart woke briefly to see, rising above the glittering crowd of cruets and epergnes, a centrepiece of flowers and – could those be grapes? It looked as beautiful and familiar as another life – a life he might have led but had not. And he wondered where it had got to, and who was living it now – Stewart's other life that was intimate with such flowers, strewn with them: purple, orange and blue, they gathered the shadows into their moist hearts, and he found himself sinking his face into the colours and the scent. And then, of course, he was doing no such thing. He was eating a whole fish, and the fish had an amused look in its dead eye and he was talking about Scotland, trying perhaps to claim for himself that piece of new tartan, with its overlapping squares of yellow and turquoise and grey.

Over the pork, he seemed to mention his aunt, but he must have forgotten to say that she was dead, or that she was his aunt, because Eliza was laughing. The pork had very hairy crackling, and it was most distracting – perhaps he had been witty, all unawares.

Oh, the English,' said Eliza. 'The English have no mothers. They grow like cabbages in a garden: they are entirely self-generated. Or if they have such a thing as a mother, it is always a matter of furniture. "I am expecting my mother's furniture" or "This armoire, do you like it? It belonged to my mother." Behind every Englishman there is a woman in a mob-cap surrounded by lumps of walnut and mahogany, and completely beside the point. Frenchmen – now their mothers write novels, or burn novels in their drawing room grate, their mothers are distinguished lovers, or know how to mend a clock that has not ticked since 1693. A Spanish mother is an object of terror, an Italian's mother an object of piety absolute, but an Englishman's mother… mob-cap, a little needlework, and a Queen Anne writing table of oak inlaid with yew.'

Stewart was comfortable with none of this. He was not English. He was about to remonstrate – he was quite strongly moved to it – when he remembered that he was not wearing any linen, so instead of banging the table and shouting, he brought his clenched hand up to his mouth, and cleared his throat,

'You are too harsh, Madame Lynch,' he said.

Ί am delighted to hear it,' said Eliza. 'We Celts have enough reason for harshness, we must not renegue.'

It was becoming clear to Stewart that he had missed some essential link in the conversation. Or perhaps it was not just this conversation, but all conversations. Perhaps he would not be fit for society, ever again. Something about this prospect seemed disastrous to him. So,

'And what of the Irish mother?' he bravely said.

'The Irish? Oh we eat them,' said Eliza. 'You should see it. We start at the toes and leave nothing out.'

They all looked at the pork, and there was a small silence, into which Pancho, for some reason, cheered.

'Diabolito,' said his mother, while Stewart's mind nibbled along the legs of some poor woman to arrive at a most unthinkable place. The woman was, of course, Eliza, but it was also, a little, his poor rotten aunt, or the clean bones of his long-dead mother, and Stewart felt the violence of it so keenly he wanted to shout 'Whore!' or some other desecration. 'Irish bitch!' was the phrase that sprang to mind. How strange, he thought. And useless. How could he explain to Paulino Álén, or to any of them, that this woman came of an irksome race?

Then the sorbet appeared, and Stewart tried not to groan aloud as he ate. Through all the meal, not one word had been uttered about the war or their current situation, and the dull splashes of shot landing in faraway mud were, when you remembered to listen out for them, almost pleasant to the ear.

Then Lopez pushed back his chair.

'Senor,' he said to the boy Álén, with mock formality, and Eliza stood to allow them retire. They went to a table in the corner, where a map was unrolled while Pancho's eyes grew wide with rage and pleading.

'You must come with me, Doctor,' Eliza said. 'While Pancho has his war. You must keep me company and pretend to listen to my pulse.'

Ά pleasure,' he said. He offered his arm, hinging it stiffly from the shoulder like an old man. As they left they paused for Lopez to kiss his mistress's hand. And it really was like being in bed with the two of them, the way they looked each other in the eye. The galvanic charge of madness from Lopez (for he was quite mad) made Stewart feel quite dizzy. But Eliza seemed to like it, or soothe it, or take it in – at any rate she looked straight at it, as though she would quite like to bed it, by and by.

'Coffee!' she said into the air in front of her, and she walked on – dragging Stewart a little, who had some difficulty getting past the pathetic piece of tartan under the bird cage, his desire for it still shamed him so.

For a moment, in the small space that was Eliza's reception room, Stewart felt the burden of future conversation. What could he say to this woman? She was too large and he was too tired.

She walked a little away from him, and begged him to sit. Then she paused. Then she walked back to join him, and turned her head a little away as she sank into the matching chair. There was a silence; it seemed easy enough, but a bubble of misery rose quickly to the surface, and broke with,

'You know, Doctor, I am immensely weary of it all.'

Of the war?'

'No. Of this, my dear Doctor. Of all this.' She turned and indicated, it seemed, her own skirts – unless it was the floor she was pointing to; the Aubusson blue of the rug that toned so strangely well with the beige of the mud floor. She swept her hands wide and then let them fall into her lap. Then she lifted her face to his with a gaze that might well have been called 'radiant and sad'.

Ί am immensely weary, Doctor, of being Eliza Lynch.'

Ambushed again, thought Stewart, as the urge to free her came over him, not from the mud or the bullets – though these played their part, as he threw her over the pommel of an imaginary horse and rode her out of there. No, he would grab her and kiss her and take her most violently, and in so doing release her, not from the war, nor the world, but from the terrible prison of herself. This hair, these clothes, this high and graceful look. Come with me and we will simply live. There will be butterflies in the meadow, and so on. Christ, he was tired.

She picked herself off the chair to trail a little across the room. Her dress was the most beautiful thing he had seen for a long time – if you did not count the sunset that daily broke his half-mended heart. It was green. What kind of green Stewart could not say. Green that bristled with a silvery light, there in the dark room. She picked up a photograph of Lopez, then set it down again and drifted on. She had sunk, Stewart realised, at least three bottles of champagne. Eliza always was a hearty girl.

Ί work quite hard you know,' she said.

Ί know that,' he said.

'At table for example, I work quite hard to keep it smooth, and I am not looking for admiration, Doctor, not so much – but these bitter little looks and the sentences that creep out of people's faces, these Ungenerosities, when I have waded through hail and fire to put an acceptable something on the table in front of them. The centrepiece

– those careless flowers in their urn – I copied from an oil by Jensen, the Dane. The work, Doctor. The work! And why do I do it? I do it for love. And high endeavour. I do it so that we should not always be so small, and it is vulgar of me to say so, Doctor, but pearls before swine is one thing, at least the swine don't despise the pearls, the way these men despise me.'

'My dear lady,' said Stewart, surprised by her nonsense. 'You are beginning to sound like…' He was going to say 'my wife', but he skipped, quite quickly, to, 'a quite ordinary woman'.

For one gaping moment Stewart thought he was drunk. Then he remembered that it was the war that made him feel like this; the war and this room within the war; this house

– a bowl of light like a diamond in mud, or a diamond, even, in some man's turd – and he had some memory of a man with his belly slit – or was it the entire length of his intestine? – he had a memory of a man, at any rate, with a jewel inside him at Curupaiti, or Tuiuti, or Curuzú, or in a dream he had right here in Humaitá, a dream of difficulty and kidney stones and something astonishingly beautiful, precious and hard, that was deep inside a man. Which was when he lurched awake to find Eliza still talking; the murmur of her husband's voice in the next room a hushed counterpoint. No time had passed at all.

'Why should I not sound ordinary, Doctor,' Eliza was saying. Ί am ordinary. I am ordinary as well.'

'As well as what?' he rudely asked. Well, she had woken him, after all.

'As well as a whore?' he might have said – but who cared these days? They were all meat. (Though could 'meat' be said to sleep, as he now needed to sleep, and was it not the blissful thing about Eliza, after all, that she was absolutely meat, and absolutely not meat at the same time, which is to say, a woman, as opposed to a potential corpse? This whirligig of philosophy taking no time at all in his head, or just exactly the time a man needed to shut his eyes and open them again, which is an eternity, or about as long as a blink.)

'As well as being the First Lady of Paraguay,' said Eliza, her voice a little hurt, and proud.

'Of course,' he said.

'But they would hate me anyway, I think. Honestly. You might as well be in Ireland. You might as well be in Mallow – where I grew up you know – a bitter town, it made my mother weep – but we all come from bitter towns, do we not, Doctor? Every unfortunate on the surface of this earth comes from some or other bitter little town.'

He could not but agree.

And as he slept and woke for the next while (sometimes while looking straight at her) she continued to speak. She was most eloquent, though she had the disconcerting habit of suddenly appearing in a different place in the room.

'My dear friend's greatness is a burden to him,' she might say.

Or, 'All I want is to be with my family at this terrible time.'

The surprising thing was that she meant it. Here in the middle of everything, she was talking about nothing at all.

'You know that I came to Humaitá to escape his brother's contempt, and the contempt of his mother and sisters in Asuncion. That is why I came to the field of battle, even though I was with child at the time. Because real bullets are as nothing to me when compared to the slights I suffer at the hands of those women. I came to tell him as much. I found him and flung myself at his feet.'

Stewart woke. He sensed a conclusion in the air.

'For every enemy that he has, I have two, because for every man that hates him there is another who says that whatever he does it is at my urging; because a woman's ambition is a fathomless thing – as though I was some witch who hexed him into my bed, and whispered, "You must, my darling, invade the Mato Grosso before the spring." And so we suffer, Doctor. A woman has no limits, because she may not act. She is all reputation, because she may not act. So, even as we do nothing, our reputations grow more impossible, and fragile, and large.'

This seemed to him partly true, though a little bit dull. To say that women were beside the point always struck him as being – well, beside the point, somehow.

'My dear Eliza,' he said.

She paused. She had let herself down. And feeling it keenly, she tried to make him hers again. Stewart was entirely awake as she turned to him with ardent, very female eyes.

'We have come a long way together, William Stewart -you and I. Sometimes I wonder how we got here, at all.'

There was a lot to disagree with in what she had said. He might start with the word 'we'. He might point out that, though they were together in this room, they had 'arrived', each of them, in very different places. And he had a huge yearning for the life he might have led – a life that was familiar with flowers and unfamiliar with Eliza Lynch. But as he tried to enter it, and imagine it, he found he could not. Whatever life he was living now, it was the only one he had got, and it was bound, however loosely, to this irritating woman. He could not conjure one without her.

'At least I have a friend, in you, Doctor. At least I have that.'

He stood rather smartly, and bowed and sat back down again. Perhaps she meant it. Their silence was so profound it drew Lopez at last – he snatched back the door hanging and put his mad face into the room. For a second, Stewart was afraid, but Lopez was not jealous in the least. Such was Stewart's smallness, in the scheme of things. And indeed, Eliza stood and walked towards him as a Great Woman might walk towards a Great Man. At which, Stewart's stomach notified him, of a sudden, that he had eaten more in the last few hours than in all the previous week.

On the way back to his hut, Stewart tried to remember that he was in love with this woman, in a dashing sort of way. He tried to relive the high, more spiritual love he felt when Eliza walked out on her big wheel, with a boy laying a plank in front of her, and another boy snatching one up from behind.

'All love is fuss,' he said, not for the first time, and perhaps out loud. He sought a sight of the moon. And it was there. The moon was white, and he loved Eliza Lynch. Of course, a spiritual love is a question of faith. You say Ί love' and it is as true as mutton. And so we survive.

At the edge of the compound he passed some of the mud-coloured women scrabbling under the door of a shed. It might have been a privy but, from the human whine that came from it, Stewart realised that it was some sort of lock-up or oubliette. The women – there were two of them – were scraping a hole under the door. It looked as though they were trying to feed the person inside. Such generosity, he thought. Such love.

'Goodnight,' he cheerfully said, to the cheerfully saluting sentry. Lopez had his own private prison; another hole where rumour might breed – that he locked up men for Eliza to eat, or that Eliza locked up women for Lopez to ravish, such was the love they had for each other – and with the genderless whine of the prisoner teasing his back, Stewart made his way back downhill and into his bed. And as he fell asleep in his broadcloth – even as he pulled away the rag at his throat – he thought that if he had his war again he would not tear up his last linen to save a dying man. If he had his war again he would treasure his linen -of which there was so little – and leave the dying, of which there were far too many.

A few weeks later, word came that the Ygureiwas sunk and the Tacuariscuttled by its own crew. Stewart escaped with Lopez across the river into the swamplands, leaving Paulino Álén with a small force to defend Humaitá. The boy had got his promotion. Eliza must have liked him, at dinner.