Girl at the Lion d'OR

Her fantasy was unstoppable

she would bare its inner rooms to her scanning eye, and reshape, recolour and repeople them until they contained what she wanted.

Roland was loyal to her charms.

The first thing he saw was a girlish undergarment of whose exact name or purpose he was unaware.

It had lace trimmings and hung over a wooden towel horse, irritatingly close to his line of vision.

he saw the fall of her breasts, a movement of surprising weight given the slightness of her frame.

it ran like the outline of the fashion drawings he sometimes saw in newspapers – just a casual sweep that seemed to hint, by slenderness, at unforetold curves.

When she looked at her ankles and feet, so soft they seemed almost unused, or gazed in the mirror at her dark eyes, which were unlined and full of light, she wondered where she carried her experiences.

Roland almost made the mistake of closing his eyes in ecstasy.

Anne’s dreams weren’t really fantasies or exotic figurations. They were prosaic, repetitive and based on fact.

waved and motioned her to a green bench beneath the tendrils of a willow.

Anne no longer made her eyes desist, but scanned the man’s body,

she found herself seeing through his manly self-possession to the ghost of his vulnerable boyhood.

with a bunch of dried flowers in her hands.

when a peculiar feeling came over me. I felt this desperate sense of pity for him.’

morning-room

Her eyes were blue and knowing.

She watched her husband with a caution that bordered on jealousy and was aware that slow changes were taking place in him.

punctiliousness

Christine made no effort to hide her distaste for the workmen, whom she regarded as idle, dirty and inefficient.

Hartmann must expect a decline in the standard of his meals.

Christine sewed, read, embroidered and knitted.

To curtail a spiritless argument,

He made a rapid and almost unconscious inventory of her physical features,

He tried to imagine what such a girl might aspire to, apart from a worthy marriage, and in what aspects of life she took her pleasure.

All her life she had been cursed with a face on which her thoughts were boldly printed,

He had gone before she could think of a reply.

forcing her to adopt a brittle enthusiasm and an insouciance she didn’t feel.

I play records on the gramophone to try to distract her.’

It’s silly, isn’t it? I sold the gramophone but I couldn’t bear to part with my records. And now they just sit in my drawer.’

as a small silence came between them.

the hair escaping from the scarlet ribbon.

inside she felt the bump and swell of elation.

When he disappeared into the darkness she felt the momentary vertigo of desertion.

Anne felt the anxiety of separation gradually replaced by the pleasures of anticipation.

there was a sound from the bath: the new maid appeared to be singing to herself.

repel intimacy

She allowed her eyes to linger on some papers on the desk. Some of the writing was angular and strong, some seemed rounder and less formed, but she recognised at once that they were different ages of the same hand.

Do you like reading, Anne?’ ‘Oh yes. It’s a wonderful way of escaping, isn’t it?’

There’s so much in one’s life over which one has no control – whether people will be kind to you, and so on.’

Anne’s answers were oblique.

she was giving him nothing but evasions.

No bond, she miserably told herself, can grow between two people when only one is telling the truth.

She wanted to grab Hartmann’s arm and pull him back so he would show her round these cavernous rooms

the grasp of his fingers enclose her wrist

The longing Anne felt was so powerful that she had to turn away from him for fear that she might throw herself into his arms and beg for his protection.

she was intoxicated by frustration.

He seemed to be almost touching her.

‘Do you promise?’ He looked up, surprised by her vehemence. She blushed. ‘I just –’ ‘I promise.’

Anne felt no more desire, no more happiness, but only the gradual loosening of control on her emotions which she dreaded because it meant she was going to cry.

Robust, she thought: that’s what he thinks I am. Perhaps, then, I had better be.

During her subsequent weekly visits to the Manor, Anne found herself devising little tricks to try to be alone with Hartmann.

there was surely no reason why she shouldn’t act on the impetus of such a natural and friendly emotion.

She felt some slight misgivings towards Mme Hartmann, but it would have been presumptuous to elevate them to the status of guilt.

a married man of once bohemian habits,

If he was occasionally more intimate or more indiscreet than one might expect, that merely proved his disregard for bourgeois prescriptions of behaviour.

He was philosophical in his pursuit of women.

spun sugar

Mattlin sometimes felt too bloated to follow the widow through the double doors of her bedroom to fulfil the function of his visit,

And then there was Jacqueline, the postman’s daughter,

She was certainly an energetic girl.

it took little persuasion from Mattlin to allow him to deflower her one evening on the sofa of his sitting-room after she had come round to deliver a telegram.

of her willing, freckled body.

There was also his sister-in-law, though she lived far enough away for their couplings to be both irregular and taken at full speed in the brief interludes of his brother’s excursions into the garden.

a passion for collecting porcelain.

with Jacqueline nearing twenty and starting to lose her allure,

just a mannerism he had cultivated in the belief that it added refinement to his appearance.

You know nothing about food. All you think about is girls.

It was a melancholy job,

He put his arms around her and wondered what sadness could have provoked that awful sound.

AS ANNE TOLD him the story of the evening, she could feel Hartmann’s body grow tense with indignation.

she seemed to feel the force of his anger strengthen her.

‘Listen. I will telephone this wretched dentist and put the fear of God into him.

‘We’ll go to the Café Gare. The telephone’s quite secluded there.’

It’s not that you’re haughty or impolite, it’s just that you seem too self-possessed.

quite practised at changing the subject when it suited her,

‘I’m sorry. I was being facetious.

It’s probably that boy who looks like a medieval villain

dipping some bread into a bowl of coffee.

‘Why do you do it, Bruno? You know it only makes you feel ill.’

you and your Parisian manners.’

dormant eczema.

That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s.

She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on their ability to remove her from her material surroundings.

All his life he had felt the implacable nagging of desire. The feeling was more of a frustration than a pleasure,

He had been affected by a mood of frivolity that had been widespread in people of his class after the war.

The sustained feeling of euphoria

there had seemed no reason for self-restraint. The free embrace of womanhood, the touch and scent of femininity, were tokens of the peace.

there was also a parallel life of passion and sexual encounter.

For Mattlin the solution lay in numbers: by increasing the aggregate of women he slept with he felt he could eliminate the potential sources of frustration.

For Hartmann the answer always seemed to lie in the next encounter.

He knew he would never find a woman to end all desire,

men to see women through a veil of make-believe allure.

for a weekend of shooting and ‘other country pursuits’.

‘Bring yourself a companion. All is discretion here!

He kept seeing her face and the movement of her body. She was always demurely dressed, but it couldn’t quite conceal a rather womanly heaviness about the bust which was charmingly at odds with the girlishly quality of her face.

Anne barely knew what to expect, but was prepared to rush to any destination prescribed by that handwriting.

‘You are just as he said.’

A door opened on a broad wooden bed with lacework and broderie anglaise covers and a mahogany dressing-table with a vase of freesias.

sipped at it suspiciously.

‘Nothing, monsieur, nothing. It’s wonderful, these rooms, this little courtyard . . . But I don’t like the feeling of secrecy.

I adore these rooms. It’s the prettiest, most perfect little apartment,

talk away, perhaps even the horrors that visited her in the night.

the more he said it was her own free choice, the more likely she was to do what he wanted.

IT WAS HIGH summer and the sun shone full on to the small courtyard overlooked by Anne’s sitting-room.

On her first Sunday morning there she sat in the window-seat barefoot with her arms around her legs, her hands clasped together in front of her, and looked down.

as he dreamed another impossible dream of his daring.

She had intended to go that morning, since church was a good place to meet people, and when one was alone one had to risk such irreligious thoughts.

immutable blue.

Perhaps it was well known that going to work at the Manor was merely a pretext for something else.

On the other hand, she had decided to trust him; she had to trust someone in her life.

watched the pull of her skirt around her hips as she worked.

Anne blushed, then, feeling ashamed at herself for showing guilt where there was none, blushed even more,

Hartmann, to Mattlin’s relief, had ceased to be a competitor for the affections of the women they knew,

As she changed, Anne reflected that she had spent all the day preparing and waiting. Hartmann, no doubt, had had other things to do.

All day Hartmann would have been occupied with these things while she had had nothing to do but think about him.

They forgot the problems of Hartmann’s lust and conscience

a bunch of flowers he had gathered on his walk through the woods and stored furtively in the boot before re-entering the house.

He gave her the flowers he had gathered in the woods and she went to find a vase for them,

as he was unable to find words delicate enough to express his meaning.

I wouldn’t want you to do anything unless you felt whole-hearted about it.

In her imagination she saw a country mansion and smart evening parties and herself unsure of the etiquette and being talked about by other women behind her back.

But she also saw herself being protected by Hartmann, walking at his side, and borne above all the difficulties of the occasion by his sublime self-confidence. Her decision was immediate, and depended on the simplest of things: it was a chance to be with him.

and not even Anne at her most timorous could doubt the sincerity of his pleasure.

Undo another button of your blouse, hitch your skirt up a bit. Perhaps that’ll help persuade him.’ ‘Is he like that?’ ‘Any man likes to see a bit of young flesh, that’s obvious.’

Have you seen the war memorial in the town? Most of my friends are on that slab of stone.

CHRISTINE HARTMANN SAID nothing. That, she sometimes thought, would be her epitaph.

‘Here lies Christine Hartmann, who said nothing: 1902–19 . .

she had somewhere read,

She noticed a change in Hartmann’s behaviour and in his response to her, but she merely watched and waited.

The outward forcefulness of her character was balanced by a sense of delicacy and Catholic shyness which restrained her.

In matters of the flesh she felt guilty towards Hartmann and always feared the loss of his attentions.

Why had he not offered to take her with him on either occasion? And why did he seem so elated by the prospect of the trip when only a short while ago he had said he had no desire at all to return to the city?

Hartmann had initially felt some misgivings about telling Christine he was going to Paris, but his guilt didn’t last for long.

He felt he had already passed a point from which he could not turn back – with the hiring of the rooms, the flowers, the wine, the letter back to Etienne confirming the weekend.

The complaints of his conscience were soothed by two reflections

She had gone with her head bowed, nevertheless, and her face concealed by a headscarf.

Where she had imagined herself sitting elegantly in the corner of a train compartment

lit by an inner radiance,

comically countrified clothes

as long as she was polite, then she didn’t mind if she made some social error.

Isabelle, a dark, austere-looking woman whose handshake crunched Anne’s fingers,

How was it possible, she wondered, to be awed by someone and yet to feel protective towards him too?

In any reckless undertaking, such as she considered the whole weekend to be, there was likely to be a mixture of anxiety and adventure.

In her dream that night she saw a man die. She screamed and ran home, where Hartmann angrily berated her for making such a fuss.

Everything at Merlaut would be perfect, unimaginable, beautiful

the way Hartmann had behaved towards her in her dream.

‘Too young, eh? Too religious? You’ll soon talk her out of that.’

You have given her presents, haven’t you?’

‘She’s not like that. She’s very innocent.’ ‘She looks innocent, I admit, but you know what women are like.’

caught unawares by her radiance.

‘I wonder too. But I don’t care.’

‘Do you like Mattlin?’ said Anne. ‘Yes, up to a point. Why?’

‘That’s all right. It’s quite a normal question. You weren’t to know the answer would be . . . sad.’

His peace of mind was troubled only by her physical proximity.

Already taut with delight, Anne thought she might snap.

She pulled away the paper to discover a gramophone, not unlike the one she had had to sell before she left Paris.

He handed her the parcel and watched the emotions passing over her face.

‘Can we dance?’ she said. ‘Now?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘What, in here?’ ‘No, no, out on the terrace.’ ‘But it’s dark and I can’t dance.’ ‘Come on.’

‘Last night, you know, last night I had this terrible dream. And it was all your fault.’ ‘My fault?’ ‘Yes, you were horrible in it.’ ‘What did I do?’

Again he found himself caught off balance by the intensity of her response.

He stroked her hair and felt the outline of her skull beneath it.

he wondered what was thought and what was feeling,

She clung to him with all her force

He could feel her breasts against him and the beating of her heart, and knew he must disentangle himself from her touch before it was too late.

dozen freckles, which seemed to him to have the colour and density of those in an opening lily.

Seeing them, he lost control at last.

He meant only to kiss away the wetness on her cheeks

Hartmann felt the material of some softer undergarment rip beneath his fingers and saw her breasts, patterned with freckles like those on her nose, fall forward, and he lowered his head to them.

He sensed in her touch a certain passivity, almost a remoteness, which he welcomed because it foretold submission.

He guided her backwards to the sofa against the wall, his lips not leaving hers.

He pushed and lifted at the frustrating tangle of her clothes until he saw a soft column of fine hair, like a puff of smoke or a feather, and when he touched her there, she gasped.

Very quickly he squeezed her with all the strength of his embrace and gasped in her ear as his body arched and emptied itself in her.

Later in the night he made love to her more calmly, taking slow pleasure in her submitted privacy,

Enough light came through the window for him to see the distant pleasure in her eyes.

He sat there, sated, guilty and amazed,

He showed Hartmann how to make coffee in the antiquated copper pot

pale from sleep;

Hartmann put the bread and some jam on the table and poured out some coffee.

He was impressed by her calm and was himself infected by it.

Anne decided to go for a walk on her own. He looked at her for a moment, to see if she was hiding some emotion,

a small cottage with geese enclosed in a wire pen.

a day in which everything around her seemed to be in harmony;

Anne looked around her and tried to score into her memory as many details of the place as she could.

Anne had now become almost hysterical with pleasure at the thought of the hours stolen back from nowhere.

Over dinner he told her more about his past life.

He chose his words with care, so that he should give an honest account of what it had been like.

He never seemed satisfied until he had selected the correct combination of words,

she had always trusted more to instinct than to reason.

Neither the time nor the place was perfect, but nor would they ever be.

‘My life in Paris seems to have been very different from yours,’ she said. ‘I think I missed the glamorous times of the twenties.

‘We lived too far from the centre of Paris to know about all the attractions and the nightlife. Though we used to read about it in the newspapers of course.’

She wanted to have brothers and sisters for me, but she said we would have to wait until after the war.

My mother said I must be nice to her, but I hated her.

just fairy tales and funny stories.

she was jealous of my mother because my father was still alive and she had lost everyone.

He said he was the luckiest man at Verdun, with his two pretty girls to come home to

When he came home again on leave – it was in winter, I think it was January – he had changed.

“I love you so much I can’t bear it,”

wounded in April and couldn’t write, but that he was fine and sent his love.

I was convinced he’d be all right because he seemed so powerful to me.

There was no plan, no plot.

I just had to try to remember the father I’d known.

She had taken my father’s shotgun and killed herself.

untraceable.

the following year we decided to move to Paris. Louvet said we could lose ourselves there.

His wife had left him years before and he was still disturbed by that.

Do you remember the riots, a couple of years ago, when they tried to storm the Chamber?

He got shot and trampled in the Tuileries gardens.

That night he had a fever and he raved in his sleep.

Delphine, one of the girls I worked with, said there was a spare room where she lived.

That’s when I got my gramophone, on my birthday. Delphine loved music too and we used to have dancing parties there.

Between the freckles

picking up her handbag and her shawl

on the train he found his thoughts elsewhere.

The story of Anne’s life had tapped a weakness in him he hadn’t known existed.

For the first time since it had ended he was forced to think about the war, an episode of such surreal horror that most people could only face it by ignoring it.

Some parts of her story had seemed a little vague,

He had never heard of murder behind the lines before.

Anne, he thought, could only have been a child of great gentleness, big-eyed, excitable and trusting.

And her mother: she sounded a simple woman, dependent on others and presumably beautiful if it was from her that Anne had inherited the light femininity of her bearing.

He wondered at how quickly Anne had absorbed its elements to be able to make such a person of herself.

but what he felt for Anne was something more unsettling, a feeling which was complicated by his continuing desire for her, which one night at Merlaut had not dispelled.

he was now faced with the responsibility of her happiness;

that by playing with her feelings he had invited her to place her trust in him, and now it was his duty to redeem the horror of her childhood.

there were a number of extra jobs she was expected to perform as an unofficial penance for having been away.

While his train sped towards Paris, she went about her work

But then, when people came, the sense of isolation didn’t necessarily diminish.

Worse than the repetition were the long spells of idleness, with only the thoughts in her mind to keep her company.

her head was full of sound, and in her imagination she was dancing.

She passed her day, when she examined it honestly, in the hope of a communication from Hartmann.

She resented the way her life was so dependent on the whim of another person,

but the unforgivable thing was that he was not hers, and he was not there when she wanted him to be.

She wondered if he had any idea at all of the eagerness with which she waited once he had made an assignation to see her; of the obliterating importance of these meetings in her day.

a painful and rather ridiculous inequality of feeling between them.

Then, when she was on the point of despair, she received a telegram from Paris: ‘Delayed here. Returning Friday. Meet Saturday evening?’

She placed it on the table in her sitting-room next to the small vase of flowers and felt that the waiting had been worthwhile.

in their rush to beatify him

to realise an ambition he must have been consumed by all his life . . . And then to risk it all – for this?’

Christine was sitting in the morning-room with her embroidery.

It was two months since Hartmann had last made love to her.

She remembered the occasion because it was in itself unusual, having followed an earlier gap of five weeks.

she had loved but not trusted,

Although she had misgivings about making love with no possibility of procreation, she took his continued desire as proof of his true feeling towards her.

she found all her old fears returning.

She knew she was not beautiful, and she knew that, whatever Hartmann might have said to the contrary, he was disappointed that she was now sterile.

thinking of the trial that lay ahead of her and hoping she would have the strength for it.

Hartmannn had lost interest because he was making love to other women, because he no longer loved her, or whether all men went through periods of uninterest.

assiduous

half-mocking, half-bullying

your personal magnetism

He always made Anne feel apologetic, even before she had said anything.

He watched Anne move about the bar and briefly wondered what she would look like with no clothes on.

She had initially been proud and unwilling after the abrupt way Mattlin had earlier dismissed her, but she was quickly flattered into submission.

Anne, who had been evading questions all her life, did not find Mattlin’s prying difficult to handle.

She was a woman whose nerve-endings seemed close to the surface.

He had the pallid complexion of a man who has spent too much of his life indoors.

Although he was not yet forty, his flesh seemed to have died on him.

His eyes looked tired from too much reading, and although he could, had he lived differently, have been a handsome man, his untended body seemed to hang on him like a rebuke.

He felt corseted in his formal clothes,

They caught my eye. One thing the papers will never tell, one thing you cannot explain, is how these girls are not innocent. They have power.

you could see that some innocence was missing from their movements.

They’re not so innocent, and sometimes they don’t feel things at that age. Their emotions are not engaged,

ANNE, LIKE MOST people, cared little about politics.

as every day passed and he showed none of the cruelty or revulsion she had found in others, her trust in him grew.

As her trust in him grew firmer, the frustration of being separated from him became correspondingly more acute.

She wanted him to hold her and put his arms around her in a way that would take the world away from her, and would deliver her into his orbit of strength and security where the loneliness and pain and deceit which had made up so much of her life could no longer touch her.

after what he had heard and felt in Paris.

the pleasure of being home again was increased by the prospect of seeing Anne in the evening.

He thought of her slight figure with its hint of undisclosed fullness,

gentle girlish trust.

He didn’t see that Christine had other reasons for her anger.

when an argument was slipping away from her,

Hartmann knew of a café which stayed open late where they wouldn’t be seen.

She fell silent abruptly, ashamed of her girlishness. She said, ‘I missed you.’

I went to the pictures one evening with Mathilde. I’ve listened to my gramophone. I’ve read some more books.’

Hartmann liked listening to Anne talk, and kept asking her questions just for the pleasure of hearing her voice, indignant or excited, as she told him about her day.

They put down the cups and fell on each other, she moaning endearments to him which saved her from the embarrassment of her physical passion.

He hated it now when he had to leave her; he hated it in fact even if Anne left the room for some reason,

a cup of chocolate

Anne had learned that there was little to be gained from arguing with Mme Bouin.

‘Come on, you pus-ridden little wretch. What are you reading? Smut, I expect. That’s all you think about isn’t it?’

once a small bunch of flowers had arrived for her unaccountably in the kitchen.

Perhaps the passage of time would take away the physical pain of frustrated lust that moved like a slow mist through his waking hours.

he watched Anne closely, dredging the depths of his memory to recall what he had seen on those precious evenings looking through the bathroom wall.

He looked pale and vacant, yet also curiously relieved, as if he had taken some decision which was going to free him from responsibility.

She thought of the girl’s hands that held it, and how they must have run through her husband’s hair; how her fingers would have run down his back. Christine couldn’t imagine how the woman had the cheek to come to the Manor and wash and scrub as if nothing had happened.

Hartmann, she noted, had gone off for the day to see a client; presumably he no longer had any need of their stolen moments together in his study or wherever it had been – not now they were lovers.

Christine admired the way the girl had moved away from her question without actually lying,

She seemed practised at evasion.

Christine saw her discomfort and noted without pleasure that even this seemed to make her prettier,

From an afternoon of casual loneliness

‘The Arctic swans.’

‘I had an interesting conversation with whatshername, the servant girl, today.’

toying with Hartmann’s attention now that she had finally secured it.

trembling with an anger he couldn’t explain,

Christine’s eyes were sparkling as if the sight of Hartmann’s anger thrilled her.

Unable to confront him with his infidelity, she finished peevishly, ‘What does it matter? She’s just a waitress.

Christine leaned forward where she sat and held her face in her hands. She started to sob, thinking of the girl’s pretty eyes and of her own dry womb.

That night they lay on opposite sides of the bed, separated by a long expanse of linen and blankets.

her head aching with tears,

and now her pain ran through him as if it were his own.

fixed by fear and by a strange sense of guilt.

illuminating the dusty jumble of possessions.

she prepared to walk back to her rooms in the rain.

For some minutes she imagined what she would have done with this room and the whole house if she had been mistress of it.

with an old waterproof of Christine’s on her shoulders and with the imprint of Hartmann’s lips still on her own, set off for the town.

Just as Anne was about to let herself in by the side entrance she saw a woman with long hair sitting down beneath the light, framed by the window. She was wearing a white, frilled night-gown, and began to brush the waist-length hair with long, even strokes.

the long hair released from the prison of its bun,

When the hands of the clock signalled her release,

It was a frivolous story,

some illicit rendezvous.

He knew as if by telepathy exactly the effect that the sound of his footsteps was producing in the waiting girl.

On a low shelf by the fireside was a pallid doll which was all that remained of her rustic childhood.

Each object was charged with meaning; their combined significance made up her life.

these few things, each with its treasured reference, laid Anne naked.

Hartmann was growing entangled in the coils of his own conscience, without any prompting from her.

left her anguish quite unaltered,

Christine, against all her normal practice, poured herself a glass of wine.

Hartmann’s eloquence had stopped him from having to make a confession, it was true, but she was glad he had said nothing that would have been hard for her to live with afterwards.

He thought of the slow anguish of Christine in the face of his impotence and the rumours that had reached her.

He felt the passion of her love for him and he felt her anguish so surely that he thought it was his own.

There was only his feeling for Anne with which he could comfort himself. There was no atom in him which did not wish for her happiness and release.

she could not be properly loved until she had disclosed the full story of her life; but by choosing him, at that moment in his own life, as the recipient of her trust, she had set in motion a slow but inevitable rejection.

Its pattern would duplicate in her the effects of that first abandonment which had so far shaped her existence, and thus ensure that evil would be triumphant,

When she took off her clothes and she saw his eyes on her she no longer rushed to hide;

what had once seemed almost paternal in his embrace had shifted imperceptibly into being something desirable.

It was not just that he took the world momentarily away; in their closer moments his dependability seemed almost to banish the past.

Christine had deliberately absented herself,

A button on her shirt had come loose and he could see one or two of the dark freckles at the top of her chest. Her hair was caught at the point of tumbling and held back, not quite successfully, from her neck and face.

He swallowed, his throat constricted by desire. ‘Three days.’

He could feel the touch of her hair against his face and her breasts pressing against the crook of his arm.

She hadn’t meant to precipitate anything so final.

I don’t mind living forever with a woman I barely love, I don’t mind if I die in the coming war – anything if I could continue to make love to you.’

Anne watched aghast.

As he took her in his arms she felt something neutral in his embrace as if it had become that of a protector, not a lover, and she realised with a rush that something she had thought a few moments before was imperishable was now lost.

‘My darling girl,’ he murmured, as he stroked her hair. He felt like a conductor of pain.

Oh God, how can I tell you what you’ve meant to me? You seemed so perfect in everything you did. And I was so frightened of making a fool of myself. You were the most perfect man I’d ever met. I thought you were flawless. So kind, so clever, so handsome. I – oh, but you must have known

it was as if there were some stranger within him.

‘I don’t want you to . . .’ she sobbed, ‘think of me. I want you to . . . be with – oh,’ and the words died away in another convulsion.

Hartmann’s face was ugly with the effort of self-control.

measured politeness,

she answered only in the briefest sentences,

He was someone; she was not alone.

She was overtaken by a fatigue so complete that even her will to resist was affected.

his whisper sounded like a shout and when he began to tell her the things he was doing and what further things he intended to do, it sounded like a threat.

The sentences seemed to sit meaninglessly in front of his eyes,

He began to smoke as he walked about the silent house, leaving a thin grey trail behind him.

In the course of the night he had been woken by her restlessness and had wondered if the past would ever leave her, even when she slept.

It was not through cruelty that he had turned her away, he thought now, as he tried to forgive himself for what he had done, but through an excess of sympathy.

the lover whose name had erased the memory of all others when he whispered it in her ear

had gone from his mind. In the slow rage of his imagination, he had subsumed her.

filled with a sorrow he could not bear.

the most joyous thing to her could also be the most regrettable.

she had no respect for Mattlin she determined not to waste her thoughts on him.

Luckily it was cold, and such people as were out had their chins buried in their coats and their gaze on the pavements in front of them.

He had told Christine at lunchtime that Anne would not be returning, and she had tactfully concealed her elation beneath some neutral talk about replacing her.

she would move swiftly to escape and start again,

She was saying to herself that it had not been so very wonderful in any case; that most of her time had been taken up in frustration and waiting.

those long-lashed eyes that had begun their slow undermining of his self-control.

the landscape of her childhood

Although Anne didn’t phrase her thoughts in such words, she felt her separation from the world.

try as she might, she could dredge no meaning from the fertile hedgerows, no comfort from the pointless loveliness of the swelling woods and hills.

After all, she had had to confront the loss of everything she most valued once before, and in a far more hurtful way than this.

That night she had no dreams at all, though she was troubled by a series of waking images.

half-remembered buildings,

she could see in human beings nothing more than she saw in the physical world. There was no reason and no trust in them.

people themselves were just unbiddable, skin and flesh and hair-gatherings of random matter.

she felt a strength fill her limbs as if she could have run across the whole of Paris,