GILL ALDERMAN

The Memory Palace

‘Each page a promise that all shall be well’

COPYRIGHT

Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

Copyright © Gill Alderman 1996

Gill Alderman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006497738

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008226947

Version: 2016-12-22

DEDICATION

For HbJ

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The history and geography in this novel are (mainly) fiction.

The quotations which head the four sections of the book are from The Haunter by Thomas Hardy; A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman; Proverbs of Hell by William Blake and The Crusader Returns From Captivity by G. K. Chesterton. The quotation on the title page is from Message Home by Seán Dunne and the verse on page 347 after For A Gentlewoman, by Humfrey Giffard (fl. 1580).

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Part One: Journey South

Part Two: Excursions in Purgatory

Part Three: Paradise Found

Part Four: Paradise Lost

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

PART ONE

JOURNEY SOUTH

How shall I let him know

That whither his fancy sets him wandering

I, too, alertly go?

THOMAS HARDY

His hands ached badly, as they often did at the end of a long keyboard session. He flexed his fingers while he looked out, beyond the screen, into the twilit garden of the old rectory. It was a little cooler; he thought the rosebushes trembled slightly. There might be a breeze, one zephyr only: just a breath of air to end the stifling day. The lawns merged with churchyard and field and, in Humfrey’s Close, the Norman castle mound looked bigger than it was, worn down by nine hundred years of weather, rabbits and grazing sheep. A mile or so away, Karemarn’s dark slopes were beginning to merge with the night sky.

The sun had set. The only light in the room came from the screen of the computer before the window, a luminescent shield which occulted the world outside as effectively as the steep hill hid the rising moon. It was covered with words, the conclusion of his newest novel and – as necessary an adjunct to his storytelling as the hallowed and familiar phrase ‘Once upon a time’ – with his authorial adieu to the reader, that essential phrase with which he always signed off at the finish of the task: ‘THE END’. Then, his last words, his hand upon the creation: ‘Guy Kester Parados, The Old Rectory, Maidford Halse, June 24th 1990’.

He stretched, reaching high, yawned wide. A grisaille light as glamorous as that cast by his mind-mirroring screen filled the garden and the small field beyond it. It was time to be gone. He clicked the mouse under his right hand and saw his work vanish into the machine. He would leave it now, to settle and sift out of his mind; when he returned after the break, he would come to it refreshed. Then, one or two readings, a little tweaking (especially of the unsatisfactory last chapter) and a punctuation check should suffice and he could be rid of it for ever, in the future seeing it only as an entity given public birth by others, separate from him, one more title on the shelf – He made a copy and, reaching up, hid the floppy disk in the customary place in the cracked mullion.

‘You may now switch off safely.’ He read the prompt and, reaching for the switch, said ‘I shall, I shall.’ It had been a long haul, this one, through the fifteenth. The landscape of the novels was so familiar that he no longer had to consciously invent it, only travel the road with his chosen company, as used to his fictional country of Malthassa as to the hedged and crop-marked fields of the rural Midlands outside his study window. It was an old picture, this place outside the house; he no longer needed to look at it to remember it, but only inwards, into his mind, where those more perilous places, the dangerous rocks, the wild steppes and untameable floods he had created called him persistently.

If I had gone in for the Church, he thought, would it have made me any happier? Would that honest life have felt more just, more true, than this of spinning the thread, weaving the cloth, cutting and stitching the garment of the storyteller? Would Helen have avoided me, or seen me as a greater challenge? I was a pushover for her after all, most eager to co-operate.

Maybe Dominic will prove to be my truest throw. I’d better take his card with me, and the letter.

He tucked them inside the road map of France and left his study with its confusion of books, papers and ideas; shut the door on it. In the bedroom, he rummaged, flinging socks, pants, shirts on the bed. Bliss it was to be alone, each member of his family far from home engaged in pursuits he could ignore, each task complete, all the bills paid with the monotony of forging sentence after sentence down the years: twelve volumes of his New Mythologies, the Koschei sequence; two other novels; three collections of short stories. And all the ghosts accounted for.

When he had packed his canvas grip he went downstairs. In the hall the ivy girl, the dryad his wife had carved a dozen years ago, bore her containment with grace. She was but half a girl, the remainder a contorted and leafy stem from which she stretched up, always reaching for the moon – his children called her, simply, ‘Ivy’ and hung their hats and coats upon her limbs. Just now, she wore a cricketer’s sunhat on her tangled head and a silky Indian scarf about her slender waist. He took the keys to the Audi from her outstretched hand.

‘Goodbye, Alice, I’ll soon be back,’ he said softly, speaking to the household ghost; but she did not answer him. Instead, the tawny owl called from his roost in the cedar tree, ‘Who-o-o-o?’

Dark now, enough for stars. He walked on the lawn and looked up at them. They used to shine more brightly; he had forgotten the names of their constellations. He looked at the fantastic bulk of the house with its turrets, machicolations and flying buttresses. A fancy place for a man of the cloth – but a good home for a writer of Fantasy. He had already paid off the mortgage.

The car was still on the drive – he hadn’t bothered to garage it the night before. He had paid for that too. Any top-of-the range car would have done but he had always had an Audi of one kind or another, since his first successes. He moaned about the cost of it, and enjoyed it.

The red car was his escape vehicle, deliverance from jail. He laid the map on the passenger seat and flung his grip into the back. Perhaps he would stop in Christminster, see Sandy; perhaps not – and, for once, decisions did not matter. Nothing mattered, except one fact: that he was now on holiday. On the road, he sat alert in his speeding chair, in control. The car filled the quiet, starlit lanes with noise and rushing lights but, within, cushioned from the world, he found and felt a new intensity, a rebirth of the spirit, free of its monetary and marital chains. That was the illusion. He cherished it.

On Ottermoor he turned aside from the A-road, braked gently and stopped the car beside a gateway. He stretched the ache from his hands, unbent himself and got out. The shire lay before him, silent, dark; it might have been a haven of hope, a place to nurse – what? Not ambition: he had had enough. Dreams? There were too many. Those big fields and the marshy thickets which were all that was left of the old moor were spoiled, despoiled: by today’s constellations, the clusters of orange lights above a roundabout; by the whisper of tyres which had replaced the song of the wind; by the small size of the modern world, forever shrinking, caving in upon itself. He could hardly see the moon for manufactured light. There were no otters.

The morning blazed upon him. Another scorcher. He adjusted the air conditioning and the sun visors, put his sunglasses on, flipped through the CDs, selected – ah, the old favourite, Layla. It flung him straight back, into 1973; and yet was just sound, a pop song; he felt none of the despair – no, the anguish with which he used to experience the song. ‘Darling! Won’t you, please?’ In those days he had not known what to expect of the next day, much less the future undefined and, while he wondered how (and where) he might seduce Helen Lacey, wailed internally with the music, wrote short stories, went to parties, danced with a variety of women, even with his wife – what was a party in the seventies if it was not a long dalliance to music, truly a series of sexual overtures? ‘You’ve got me on my knees.’ No more. He was mature, old to some, and he knew how the world wagged. He turned the volume up and felt return also, as he passed a string of company cars, the sense of adventure and urgency which had set him going; he forgot his painful hands. They, the suited men with order books and briefcases, must be thinking (for they had seen him coming up, a red dot in their mirrors), ‘There the bastard goes.’

Here on the motorway time and motion, art and science, were united. On the endless ribbon flowed, grey lanes merging and parting, pale bridge-arches springing nimbly, artfully, over the traffic, gone to be forgotten as the music played. He ought to slow down but the fast car’s marque was a logo and an advertisement of his abandonment to the luxury of speed. The four linked circles on the bonnet were symbols of the diverse worlds he had set out to pass through, but not linger in. He had become a gypsy with no goal but the next horizon.

Names and numbers flicked by. The names of the service stations were more relevant than those of places, directionally astray, for the new geography of the motorway had obscure rules where north, south, east and west were always left. The traffic moved frenetically, dancing down the shimmering lanes. He was a part of the cavalcade, held safely in the steel and upholstery of his car, passing from lane to lane, putting his foot down, overtaking with all the energy and dynamics of the vehicle at his command. Outside the ever-changing constant life of the road, the blue lamps glimpsed ahead and the smooth deceleration to a steady seventy; fellow-travellers gliding by, black, white or Indian, once a Dormobile full of red-necked Australians. Lorries were a species apart on high: Norbert Dentressangle, Christiaan Salvesen, Geest and Reem Lysaght. A transporter bore yet more, cars to fill the M25, a fleet of new Renault space wagons with the iridescent colours of beetles’ wings, metallic green, bronze, amaranth, blue.

‘Bloody caravans,’ he muttered as he passed a swaying line of them. Caravan of caravans? Caravans of dreams? Squat wagons, like him in going south pursuit of lost ideals; lightly and impossibly named: the Sprite, the Lapwing, the Pageant, the Corniche, their destinations uncorrupted birds, whispering salt marshes and the sea, the easy hedonism of topless beaches in the South of France, castles (in Spain perhaps) or moated chateaux lapped by vineyards where wine could be tasted and bought.

Helen’s painted caravan had been the gateway to ecstasy.

The aching sensation returned again on the M26. He flexed his hands against the wheel. Sod it. But he wasn’t going back. Some aspirin or paracetamol would settle it or that new stuff, what was it, Nurofen? Check with a doctor – in Dover maybe? No. He would leave all that behind him, with Sandy, Jilly and the family stuff, and the completed The Making of Koschei.

He pulled off the glaring tarmac into a service station. It was called The Clover Patch, and he laughed cynically. He felt tired and persecuted. A group of lorry drivers stared at him, and at the 20V: envy. He paid for his coffee, drank it quickly and, on the way out, bought a paper.

Ten minutes later, he stopped a second time to pick up a hitch-hiker, a young blonde. She did not appreciate his car nor the acceleration it was capable of; he could see one of her hands, tightly gripping the material of her loose, art student’s smock, and she sat silent, utterly without small talk. On the busy motorway he had no chance to turn his head and be polite, smile at her.

‘Going far? Dover?’ he asked.

‘I dunno,’ she returned and he, the writer, the man whose business was with language, was immediately struck by the earthiness of her accent. ‘I’ was almost ‘Oi’. He negotiated a way past a coach and glanced at her, about to ask: Was she born in his shire? She returned his look, a sprite of ancient mischief capering in her speedwell eyes; and yet there was a deadness on them, a dull glaze of the kind he had seen when he drowned the blue-eyed kittens. She could not be, she was – very like the hanged girl, Alice Naylor. It was luck, some whim of a guardian demon, that he did not steer into the crash barrier, and the girl lurched forward in her seat.

‘For God’s sake, do up your seat belt,’ he said, took one hand from the wheel and passed it over his face.

He overtook a pair of lorries, trembling with the effort, and had to tuck himself in smartly behind a minibus. The leading driver leaned on his horn. The fast lane was empty. He veered out to a chorus of horns, and accelerated. 85, 90, 100, 110 – what was the engine capable of? He glanced to his left: the girl had gone, vanished just as Alice Naylor used, without a goodbye or a smile, to leave him in turmoil, bereft and aching to touch her beautiful, insubstantial body. Could Alice have followed him? Was this an omen or merely a sign of his mental exhaustion? He could not answer his own questions and concentrated on the indisputable reality of his fast and powerful car.

He stopped at the next service station and, in the gents, dashed water across his face and drank huge quantities from his cupped hands. His face, in the mirror above the basin, looked perfectly normal. It was the weather; too much hard work, this last week, his imagination fired up and unable to rest. In France he would shake off these dangerous fancies; and the aching hands. The phantom hitch-hiker! People did not, of course, hitch-hike on motorways. He laughed, and bit off the sound immediately as the door opened and a half-unzipped hulk of a lorry captain walked in and casually showered the urinal with pungent golden rain.

In the car, he first switched on the radio: normality, sound bites of news and chat; next bathed his shattered ego in tacky Queen: amazing how they had kept on going, changing style and image, yet turning out the same old reliable performance. ‘Another one,’ they sang, ‘Another one BIT THE DUST’ He was in Dover, automatically had slowed to a sedate street pace. A woman with a buggy standing still to watch him, some boys on bikes. What a fool he’d been back there, driving so dangerously. Lucky no police. The player switched moods for him: Bach, clear and refreshing as water, a quality fugue; anyone could play Queen.

A long sleep somewhere south of Paris, he thought – in a small country hotel with a good restaurant. He handed his ticket to a taciturn collector and was given a boarding card. No need for the passport here, though despite the Community some officials were – officious; but I’ll need it for the bloody bank, in France. That poster: ‘Prelude’, the perfume Sandy wants. Does she see herself like that, stretched on a grand piano at dawn, waiting, naked under a dinner jacket, a conductor’s baton in her hand?

A man was waving him on. He drove across the tarmac acreages of the port into a moving queue, bumped up the ramp.

Once upon a time he had been a poor storyteller, one of those who lived in a figurative garret and strove away at his art. He no longer thought of it as Art, that was too presumptuous, too precious a name for his hacking; yet it was still an art and something he had always been guilty of practising, the telling of stories – since early childhood: ‘Mummy, Mummy! There’s a wolf in the wardrobe!’ ‘Muum! I saw three monkeys up the apple tree!’ Unaided, he had turned this facility for imagining the worst and the most bizarre into a career.

Guy settled into the reclining chair but did not open the newspaper he had bought on the road. His eyes ran with tiredness and his hands needed to be bent, stretched and massaged one upon the other. It was hard to break off, be free. He had left the two communications from his unknown son in the car, the postcard with the picture of the hairy Lascaux horse and the brief letter, and so must rely on memory to peruse – the letter, one in a pile from his fans, had dropped into the placid pool of his existence and stirred it up – he had known nothing of this child, Helen’s boy; heard nothing – she had left him in December ’73. He had not even known she was pregnant! Then, less than a fortnight ago: ‘Dear Father –’

Dominic skied and played rugby, ‘not cricket like you.’ He had been born in Lyon – born fully grown into his father’s consciousness, nearly seventeen, to take fourth place in the hierarchy of his children between Phoebe and Ellen. There was no photograph; he must imagine what a handsome lad (or bulky prop-forward) resulted from his union with Helen. Dominic was also a reader. The card referred to the alternative world of the New Mythologies: ‘This reminds me of the Red Horse of the Plains’ – and, indeed, the sturdy Neolithic animal, if it were caparisoned in catamount skins and bridled with leather cut from the hide of a forest ape, would pass for one of the Imandi’s herd, a durable mount for one of the Brothers of the Green Wolf.

A wave of guilt passed through him, winding the tension up: he exercised his taut hands once more. He had said nothing to Jilly. No need.

His son’s final sentences were the most arresting, the ones he had been fed: ‘I am to tell you that Mother knows you are a handsome and successful storyteller who has learned all the skills of life and loving. She longs to confirm in the flesh what she has read.’ Then, the clincher, the reiteration of the announcement which had driven him to finish his book and set off for the unknown: ‘Your son, Dominic’.

Yesterday. All was yesterday.

Yesterday, when the painters had at last gone home and left the stinging smell of gloss paint behind them, evening had enveloped the stuffy house, wrapping it in a pause, an interval of quiet. For a while no vehicle had passed on the road beyond the wide lawn with its twin cedars and monkey-puzzle. The heat was Capricornian, tropical: a bath in which he was immersed to be boiled gently, to be done to a turn. It summoned unlikely longings to lie with ice-maidens or with the cruel Snow Queen; to plunge into the eternal cold, there forever to die; to have no identity, to be himself no longer.

To be, he had thought, to be nothing, nil, no more man but flesh, dead meat decaying to the bone and then to earth, all one with what was and will be.

The smell of paint and turps had been pervasive and perhaps accounted for the light-headedness he had felt; he was mildly poisoned, a middle-aged solvent-sniffer. He had sat by the open study window and watched the shadows gather beneath the rose bushes. The house remembered, its garden a notebook on whose pages many had sketched their designs. The gold and white pillar-rose marked the place where he had first seen Alice Naylor, knowing who she was, and the memory of it to this day lingered with him, a corrupt but sweet odour which counterpointed his memories of her whose brief life had been brought abruptly to a premature close by the hangman’s noose. He had lost count of the times he had seen Alice as she walked about the Old Rectory, or sat quietly on an invisible stool in the very heart of her enemy, the Church Victorious’s camp. Her face – which death had drained of all colour – always wore an expression of profound terror and about her neck was a purple scar, where the hangman’s rope had bitten her.

He had turned quickly from these painful memories to the other story, the fiction on the computer screen. One or two paragraphs were needed before the final lines he had already composed. He had forced his hands to type.

The frenetic mood, which had overtaken him at the start of the summer and remained with him, had subsided. He leaned back in the chair and took deep lungfuls of the hot and stale air. The ship vibrated as her engines turned; she stirred and trembled as no car ever could, almost alive, wanting to be under way – this most ordinary cross-Channel ferry. Sunlight slanted into his eyes and he masked them with his sunglasses.

How is it that I let myself be troubled by the past? He sank once more into yesterday, physically conscious of his hands. He remembered his initial panic at the intermittent ache: Is it a symptom of the advancing years? Must I learn to live with this neural gnawing, toothache of the tendons; appreciate it for what it is, my particular and personal infirmity, my own mnemonic for mortality – a pocket vanitas or portable skull-surmounted tomb. The escapement shudders, the sands run faster through the glass isthmus – Is it arthritis? Something worse? Incurable? The shadow that stalks us all.

Sandy’s explanation was small comfort. Three initials, RSI, encompassed and explained his ills.

In the car last night his hands had kept troubling him. He had tried to forget the pain on the motorway; to lose it in speed – always being ready for the police in their unmarked cars. It was a short stretch before ‘Christminster’ flashed up its exit number and he fled around the intersection roundabouts and drove more sedately along the Badbury Road.

That way, you missed the dreaming spires. Unless? God damn his habit of turning every thought inside out to discover its psychic symbolism. But fucking Sandy was easy: she gave as good as she got; and he had been in need. He parked the Audi behind her Escort and opened the garden gate. There were shadows on the kitchen blind and he was about to put his key in the lock when a peal of female laughter from the open window made him cautious. He rang the bell: Dr A.F. Mayhew – my literate sex therapist, my sensual D Litt, he thought, and smiled.

His mistress, merry and flushed, opened the door.

‘Guy! Good heavens!’ she said. ‘It isn’t Tuesday is it?’

‘Jesus Christ, Sandy,’ he said, irritably. ‘I’m not a dental appointment. And it’s Monday.’

‘Well, what do you want to do? I’ve a kitchen full of summer students – my American ladies. We’ve just opened a few bottles.’

‘I want to come in,’ he said, and did so. ‘Next, I want –’ He kissed her.

‘I don’t suppose they’ll miss me for a while,’ she said. ‘Mary’s showing them the video.’

‘Not blue movies in the suburbs!’

‘Really, Guy. It’s a record of their stay. They leave tomorrow.’

Sandy’s waspish mood began to fail her. Guy was stroking as much of her as he could reach, in the narrow hall.

They went up to the bedroom. The worn teddy which Sandy kept on her pillow annoyed him: a dumb and idiotic rival – which had been in bed with her many more times than he. He shoved it and it fell on the floor.

‘You brute,’ said Sandy. ‘Aah, mmm.’ Afterwards, he told her he was on his way to Dover, to the ferry. ‘“Prelude”,’ she said, ‘That’s what I like – as if you didn’t know.’ She got up and he slept. In the morning, she was there again beside him, ready to hit the button of the alarm before it shrilled.

‘Six fifteen, my God,’ she said, yawning. ‘I didn’t get rid of them until two. You’ve had a fine sleep, anyway.’

‘I needed it. I’ve been working hard. Ow!’

He massaged his hands.

‘What is it?’

‘They ache. It’s worst when I wake.’

‘Poor chap! Have you been using your PC a lot?’

‘I don’t write in longhand!’

‘That’s what it is, then. RSI, Repetitive Strain Injury – like a sports injury. You’ve over-strained the tendons. The holiday will help – unless you start using the laptop.’

‘I didn’t bring it, just paper and pens. I might do some real writing, in my own hand.’

‘Instead of Times?’

‘New York actually. In the early days I did write everything in longhand. Then I typed it. It was the only way I could make sense of myself.’

‘Unbelievable,’ she said. She was a lot younger than he and knew him only as a best-selling phenomenon, comfortably placed, and comfortably off – once, he had driven her through Maidford Halse, the Hantonshire village he had lived in for nearly thirty years, and she had glimpsed his house, bulky and solid with accrued respectability, across shady lawns.

‘I won the Christminster Prize for my first novel, Jack’s Tank – the story of a National Service recruit. It’s out of print now –’

‘I didn’t know – never guessed. What happened? What turned you into a Fantasisr?’

‘Sex,’ he said, and she laughed, but with some puzzlement. ‘A mortgage and a growing family – as you’ll find out yourself one day, when I’m history – or experience.’

Telling this white lie was easier than attempting the convoluted tale of his past misdemeanours and haunting loves.

‘Couldn’t you have gone on with the serious stuff as well as the Mythologies?’

‘Authors of Eng Lit are supremely selfish,’ he told her. ‘Successful pulp novelists can afford to be generous to their families, and their mistresses into the bargain. Look at you: what paid for your abortion and the weekend at Le Manoir afterwards?’

‘Koschei’s Envy, I suppose. That was the last, wasn’t it?’

‘I finished The Making of Koschei before I drove here last night.’

Sandy looked into his face.

‘Does it matter what tale you tell,’ she said, ‘as long as you have the power to overwhelm your reader’s senses and hold him in your grip – for as long as the story lasts?’

‘In theory, no; in terms of monetary reward, yes. Tell me, Sandy, do you give your students in-bed tutorials? Must I write a dissertation before I get my oats?’

He embraced and fucked her vigorously, quite certain that he demonstrated much more ardour and skill than a younger man; lay relaxed and satisfied across her and played with wisps of her titian hair (the colour was natural, unlike his wife’s).

‘You should get some Chinese balls,’ she said, dreamily.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Her comment startled him. He was not sure if she was joking, or criticizing his performance in some obscure female way.

‘Chain of thought,’ said Sandy. ‘Like these, look.’ She leaned from the bed and took from the bookshelf a small, cloth-covered box which she opened to disclose two silver balls resting on red velvet. ‘They keep your fingers supple, a kind of physiotherapy. Like this: roll them about on the flats of your hands. Might help your aches. Avis Dane swears by them. She’s a pianist and she uses hers every day to exercise her hands.’

The balls rang softly as they travelled round her outstretched palms.

‘Bells too!’ said Guy. ‘Very dubious, one of these pseudo-scientific cures. I bet it has its origins in magic – or is an urban myth, like the Child Who Was Kidnapped At Disneyland, or the Phantom Hitch-hiker.’

He tried to imitate her, bending and tilting his hands so that the balls rotated. It was hopeless. One after the other they slid off and landed with dull chimes on the bed.

‘There’s a lot of alternative medicine about – it works, too,’ said Sandy doggedly. ‘I take evening primrose oil for PMT. I suppose it’s a New Age thing – but real enough, not gypsy stuff.’

‘I used to know a gypsy well,’ he said, half to himself.

‘Mm?’

Unwise to tell; and again, too complicated. Besides, he was sleepy.

‘Oh, nothing, thinking ahead,’ he said, pulling Sandy down beside him. She was warm; she was short and tucked neatly inside his embrace, like his wife – but was without Jilly’s middle-aged creases and sags, smooth, taut-limbed. Poor Jilly, away in the States being mauled by art-lovers. Her carvings were more exciting than she, these days – shouldn’t have had another child, so late. Could he remember Helen’s body? She had been – what? Years ago. Perfection, exact of proportion, well-endowed by Dame Nature or by one of those dead mother-goddesses she’d revered. He was on his way to see her. Possibly. And Dominic, their son. He slept and dreamed of a boy and a man, who both looked like himself; they fished in a bran tub and caught Christmas tree baubles and silver bells. Then he had to run: something huge and clanking rushed past him – he had to catch a train! He had to catch up with someone! ‘Helen! Wait for meeee!’ he cried, but his mouth was sewn shut with black thread. He jumped awake.

‘– time?’ he asked.

‘Seven.’

‘I’ll never catch that ferry now.’

‘Yes you will. You still have four hours.’

Sandy, in her dressing gown, made breakfast for them. It was her kind of breakfast with yoghurt, muesli and freshly squeezed juice; usually, he delighted in the differences between her way of life and his own. Today, they irritated him. That Garfield poster above the fridge. Why on earth? – she was a bright girl. They had said goodbye lightly, and left a great deal unsaid.

Coming to, he saw his fellow passengers about him, heard their incessant chatter and the magnified voices booming from the television overhead. He sat upright to massage his hands, imagining the strained tendons chafing in their narrow sockets. RSI. What a bugger, what a hollow laugh: he had a fashionable complaint. Last night he had needed sex; now he needed a drink.

Guy Kester Parados, author (BA Christminster, Caster Cathedral School and Fawley College, born Alfrick-on-Severn 1941, married Jillian Meddowes, sculptor, 1962, six legitimate children and four illegitimate excluding two abortions and one miscarriage), went to the Camargue Lounge. Under his left arm he carried a copy of the Independent and two books, A Year in Provence and the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu. He wore jeans and an Armani tee-shirt. A linen jacket was slung across his shoulder. He was about six feet tall, with thick grey hair, grey or blue eyes, and was clean-shaven. He might have been any age between forty and fifty, although he was two months short of his forty-ninth birthday. He had no peculiar distinguishing marks and kept himself fit by playing cricket and by taking long country walks; had, in any case, no hereditary tendency to fat.

He experienced some difficulty with the number of objects he carried and resolved his problem by stacking the books and paper on the bar while he removed his RayBan sunglasses. He ordered a pint of Theakston’s Ale. When it was served, he took it to a table by a window and nursed his glass. After putting on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a bookish air and made him look suddenly older, he opened the paper and read steadily, scanning the headlines first before turning back to peruse the articles in detail. Occasionally, he took a drink from his glass. He looked up once to stare at a blonde girl who sat at a nearby table, shook his head and read on; again looked up, at the mural on the opposite wall of ibis making piebald patterns against a landscape of fluid sky and marshland.

‘I began building the year the Sacred Ibis left the marsh. The foundations were soon dug and the footings laid. It was, after all, a small building. Many years passed before my spiritual troubles began, coinciding with the first extensions.

‘A new building for a new decade (my third). I was full of hope and my plans for the future excited me almost as much as the architectural drawings themselves; and far more than the white hands which, joined in prayer and resting on the sill of the confessional, were all I could see of Nemione Sophronia Baldwin, the youngest daughter of the reeve.

‘I had almost resolved to leave the Order. Strict observance of the Rule was very hard for a young man of twenty who could control neither himself nor his dreams, which were of an explicitly sexual nature. Yet Nemione’s self-sacrificing patience was an object lesson to me. Though I was tempted to abjure my vows and join myself to a battalion of the Brotherhood of the Green Wolf, I resolved to remain at Espmoss for two more years of study and then take what came. My courage was not of a high order. My disordered infancy followed by a childhood spent learning the Rule had made fear a close companion. I had often been whipped, at school by the proctor, Baptist Olburn, and in the cloister by Brother Fox, the Disciplinarian. The contemplation of freedom seemed sin enough.

‘We were free in all other respects. That I was allowed to begin this building (now such a remarkable edifice, as you see!) demonstrates how liberal was the Rule toward ambition. I had successfully completed my years as altar boy and novice: my building and the beautiful drawings of it were a kind of reward. The lodge (it was too small in those days to be called a palace) would contain both past and present, that much was obvious but, before I laid one stone, I had a tantalizing decision to make: should I now commence to erect the walls – they were to be of the finest white marble – or should I forsake the dark footings while I designed and planted the gardens?

‘The reeve’s daughter wore a gold chain about her slender neck. A small gold cross hung from it, one of the symbols of our faith. The four arms of the cross represent the points of the compass, north, south, east and west, and thus, our world, both material and spiritual. The device also represents the many cross-roads which we will find ourselves paused at, during life, while we ponder a vital decision: which direction to take now?

‘I had come to such a node myself or, if the metaphor may be laboured a little more, stood simultaneously at two. I had chosen to ignore the one; the dilemma of the other, smaller problem, lodge or garden, I solved in an ingenious way: I would attempt both tasks at once, devoting the cool mornings to the garden and the afternoons, which the sun made warm and pleasant, to the building. I determined to plant the equivalent of Nemione’s cross, our life, in my garden, and make it the basis of my design. This was difficult. Perhaps if I sited the building at the centre of the cross … but that precluded all additions. I might construct the cross-design in one’ quarter of the whole – such exquisite and nice considerations! The extensive gardens should both begin and complete my pleasure. The forbidden word again; it haunted me. A Green Wolf has every opportunity – is master of himself and of all the worldly delights I forbade myself. A Wolf would not linger in the cloister, hoping to catch a glimpse of Nemione. He would stride out to look for her.

‘I wanted to make nothing less than a shrine in which every object, animate or not, made spiritual sense. This is the reason for the incompleteness of the “wilderness” walks. They should be creations of artifice but I could not exclude such intruders as the wild rose and the coconut-scented gorse, nor these fine thistles and docks – and why waste genuine sports? I am even now too ambitious; and still too lazy to achieve all my ambitions.

‘Notwithstanding these outside imperfections, the interior of the building is, as you will see, in perfect order. We will climb the staircase (genuine porphyry – but mind the broken step!) and enter by the brazen doors which, yes, resemble more than a little the Gates of Paradise.’

The old man took a key from the leather wallet he wore on his sword belt, fitted it to the lock and turned it.

‘I love to entertain my visitors (few enough) with such speeches,’ he said. ‘They are props to the ailing structures of my mind. As for the palace – here it is. I cannot escape from it. It has swallowed me whole, mind and body, hates and loves, possessions, beliefs, gold – that which glisters and is my fool’s reward and grail attained.

‘Since I am the one you never forget, it will be easier if I show you round. I’ll make you regret your memories of me! The grand tour I think, the one that takes in all the sights, leaves not a stone unturned. I do not have the resilience of some, not now. I lack the boldness of those outside.

‘Here we are. I’ll close the door – it lets in too much light, and also dirt, from outside. This is the chamber in which I was born. You must begin at the beginning, you see, if you are to make sense of my memory palace.’

His guest craned his head forward as he tried to distinguish from the general gloom the heavy pieces of furniture with which the room was furnished.

‘Could we have a little light?’ he asked.

‘A glimmer!’ His guide struck a match and lit a small bull’s-eye lantern. But even with this it was hard to make anything out – the furniture seemed very big and also far away, the sort of dim and massive wooden giants he remembered from early childhood, of bottomless chests, cavernous wardrobes and tables as big as houses. He stepped gingerly forward.

There was a bed. The covers were partly thrown back, white sheets, blue blankets and a patchwork quilt. He might just about manage to climb up. His teddy bear lay on the quilt; the smell was right – Castile soap and eau de Cologne, a faint overlay of sweat.

‘Mummy?’ he said and heard the dry laugh of the old man with the lantern.

‘Sorry, young man. I cannot preserve your memories.’

‘But this is my mother’s bed; where I was born, not you.’

The old man laughed again.

‘That remains to be seen,’ he said. ‘The case as yet is unproven.’

Guy read the book review in the centre pages of his newspaper. It spoke highly of a new biography of the Jesuit priest and scholar of Chinese, Matteo Ricci, who in the sixteenth century had invented a mnemonic system which used an imaginary building, such as a palace, and its furnishings as an aid to memorizing (for example) tenets of the Catholic faith. When published for his Chinese patron, Ricci’s method attracted many converts: the memory palace was open to guests, who used its courts and statuary to understand the new faith. Guy shivered. This kind of thing happened all too often: he devised a fictional description or idea and, a few days later, read of it in the newspaper or heard someone describe it on the radio.

He re-read the article, his imagination caught and held by his parallel idea of a building full of memories, a cenotaph of reality as phantom-like as memory itself, and then, remembering he was on holiday, he turned to the sports pages. He read the breakdown of the cricket scores and forgot them immediately. The last lines of an old story came to mind: ‘“Damn you,’” she scrawled across the parchment, “you sucking incubus, you salivating fiend from the abyss, you who have stolen my voice and left me with shadows; left me nothing but a dark palace peopled with ghosts and my fantasies.’”

The words sank beneath the troubled surface of his mind. He looked out of the windows: these huge sheets of glass could not be described as portholes, nor anything nautical, and belonged to the holiday fantasy. The sea was calm and sunlit; the busy Channel, on which the traffic moved as steadily as on the motorway, had a peaceful, purposeful air. He enjoyed being at sea and let his gaze wander over the other holidaymakers in the room. The girl had gone, it was mostly families – someone had left a hat on a nearby chair, a familiar, frayed straw with a wide brim and a loose band of white chiffon. He remembered where he had seen it: by the Congo, the Amazon, the Nile, the Ganges – all on TV; and by the Thames when its owner, Etta Travis, had leaned on the Embankment wall beside him. After somebody’s party. They had talked about the river below them; what treasures, such as the Battersea Shield, it had given up; what might remain concealed beneath the succulent mud. Then Etta had run suddenly after a taxi, hailing it with her hat; and she and the famous hat had been whisked away into the summer night.

Etta was approaching him from the bar, a glass of wine in her hand.

‘Guy!’ She had a pleasant voice, was pleasant altogether and feminine, always dressed in skirts, never trousers, even in the remotest outback, jungle or prairie, her habitat so much more than the streets of London. They were long skirts of gauzy Indian material; indigenous peoples respected her because of them, she maintained. Yet, if her style had not been so well-known, such dress would have been anachronistic here amongst the garish shorts and jingoistic tee-shirts of the other passengers.

She retrieved her hat and sat down beside him.

‘This is a prosaic way to begin an adventure,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘I’m on holiday – on my way to a cousin in Tuscany. Yourself?’

‘Likewise. Just drifting. Jilly’s in New York – exhibition.’

‘I saw it in The Times. What beautiful work! I must buy some for myself before it all disappears into the mansions of the seriously rich!’

They continued to make small talk. He was disappointed in her: an anthropologist who travelled the world as she did should be incapable of such chit-chat. He wanted her to tell him tales of centaurs, mermen and sirens, long yarns of her perils amongst the anthropophagi; to fulfil the fantasies he, and her viewing and reading public, had of her wading through crocodile-infested rivers, smoking with head-hunters, chewing coca high in the Andes – and always commentating, telling everyone what, why and wherefore. In exchange he wanted to tell her of the places he knew well, those way beyond her wide experience, those she – however determined she was, however much she desired to explore them – might only visit by proxy in his storyteller’s magic shoes: the eternal forests, endless plains and everlasting cities of Malthassa. She met extraordinary characters, he created them; he explored an internal world, but hers was external and bounded by space and time, by the present and only time she could experience: this crowded bar, these inane, sentimental, holiday-making Brits.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, this is a slow old way to reach Italy,’ he remarked. ‘I should fly.’

‘My car’s down below. I shall take a few days over it, drive south, maybe east into Switzerland, drop down Europe that way –’

‘No undiscovered peoples?’

‘Europe gave up her secrets long ago. Excuse me now –’ She drained her glass. ‘Or will you join me for lunch?’

‘I’ll wait until I can get some French cooking.’

‘It’s habit with me: eat what’s available in case there isn’t any more. Goodbye, Guy – nice to see you again. Bonne chance!’

‘Bonne route!’

The interlude with Etta Travis had made him restless. He gathered his books together: perhaps he should buy something for his son – but what kind of boy was Dominic? What were his tastes? Should he buy some small gift for Helen? He made his way through the crowds, towards the duty-free shop.

The reception area near the shop was thronged; he had not realized before how busy the ship was. Lots of people, mostly young backpackers, sitting on the floor; some seasickness cases lying flat. Someone should clear a passage: what if there was an emergency? He was stepping over and amongst the bodies when his gaze, always quick to interpret the printed word, was arrested. One of the poor sailors had fallen asleep with a book open in her hand. He could just about make out five words at the page-heads: Lèni la Soie and Evil Life. He knew something of Lèni, Silk Lèni, poor French silk worker, prostitute and accomplice of a psychopathic priest beheaded (for that, call it what you will, ‘guillotined’ or, dully, ‘executed’, was what had been done to him) in Lyon in 1884. Helen Lacey had kept the original of Lèni’s diary in her gaudy gypsy van; presumably had it still, unless it had been consumed in the fire. The acrid smell had filled his lungs and filtered into every one of his garments, remaining there for weeks, a distillation which evoked the heap of smouldering ash which was all that remained of the van and its ornate fittings.

The sleeper stirred. Now he must notice her whom he, on holiday to escape his personal Furies, had tried to ignore: the blonde girl in baggy-kneed leggings and loose shirt; the girl, of no more than sixteen or seventeen years, who was so naively beautiful.

The book – the god-forsaken book! It had slithered to the floor and closed. He could read the words, printed over the drawing of a guillotine blade, on the cover:

THE EVIL LIFE OF SILK LENI CURSED BY HER BEAUTY, CONDEMNED BY HER APPETITES, LENI WAS DAMNED

There was a conspiracy. Some devilish conjunction of memories and events was following after him, was there before he had time to think or act. This girl, whom he had noticed drinking lager in the bar, was like the one he’d given a lift to, or thought he had: the mute (for she still slept) expression of some kind of prevision or hallucination, a being he had brought into life by thinking. She looked like ghostly Alice Naylor.

Nonsense! A daydream, a girl, a book he should have known about. These added up to nothing more sinister than coincidence – and perhaps it was stupid to try to combine a restful holiday with a visit to his one-time lover and their son.

A little regretful because he wanted to steal the girl’s book and read it at once, he made a mental note to buy a copy when he got home, stepped clear and paused to look back. The girl was stretching, her regular Quattrecento angel’s lips drawn back, her mouth open in a wide yawn. He reached into his pocket and extracted his sunglasses; put them on. Now invisible in his disguise as an older but fashion-conscious and confident man he entered the duty-free perfumery, where he was again confronted by the id-Sandy, black jacket open, scarlet, lacquered nails closed eloquently about her conductor’s baton: a symbolic prelude indeed! Now Helen’s favourite perfume – would he find that here? He remembered its name perfectly: ‘Sortilège’ – Spell.

The car ferry Spirit of Adventure passed easily through the crowded waters of English Channel. Her wide decks were dazzling in the sunlight, her red, white and blue logo and liveries placed and labelled her; she came to Calais, if not precisely in peace, at least in the certainty of commerce.

Most of the vehicles that clanged off her car decks were family conveyances, big, new, shiny – but crammed with luggage, children and their toys. Henrietta Travis drove a small Peugot and was alone. She glimpsed Guy’s flash red car behind her and smiled. He would be taking the autoroute, eating up kilometres and fuel while she, on routes nationales and by-ways, headed for Alsace – or the Franche-Comté. She would take the road for Reims, make no firm decision yet. The sun still shone, hours before dark – but now, there was a delay, one of those inexplicable stoppages common to all traffic queues. After ten or fifteen minutes, they began to move again and soon were rolling past the barriers. No one stopped Etta.

At the ferryport gate the usual cluster of hitch-hikers waited. Etta stopped her car beside a pale-faced girl whose choker of black velvet only emphasised her pallor. She looked sick and bewildered.

‘Are you all right?’

‘It’s just the sea: I travel better by air.’

‘Want a lift?’

‘Paris? The AI?’

‘I’m going to Reims, but I can drop you near Cambrai. There’s an intersection: you ought to get a lift south there.’

‘OK.’

The girl got into the car. She was very slim and very young, Etta noticed; but clearly an experienced traveller. Etta had started travelling in such a way herself, made no judgements and asked no questions. They talked about holidays and clothes.

Guy was relieved to be back in the Audi. While he waited in the queue, he re-read Dominic’s letter to verify his destination: ‘Coeurville, Burgundy’, that was all. When he reached the town – or village – he would have to ask. He hoped it was a small place.

The official at the passport control barrier, who had been busily waving cars on, signalled him to stop. He took a cursory glance at both versions of Guy’s face, grinned and said,

‘My wife reads your books, Monsieur Parados, the translations. There is money in books? I shall tell her you come to France in your beautiful Audi – “Vorsprung durch Technik”, Monsieur! Good holidays!’

Guy smiled vaguely, and drove on. Even the grey bypasses of Calais looked welcoming in the sun, which shone as fiercely as it had on the English side of the Channel; but he did not linger. Calais must always be a place to leave.

The car went faster in kilometres, 180; reading this speed and its mph equivalent on the dial, he had to remind himself that both were illegal. At three o’clock he pulled into a service station and bought coffee and pain au chocolat – a childish pleasure this. Though you could buy the stuff at home these days it was a quintessentially French delight. Who else would think of enfolding dark chocolate in flaky yeast pastry and serving it as a snack?

He walked back to the parking area. He was clear-headed now and relaxed, the pain had left his hands: it had been a result of tension, nothing more – and damn Sandy’s theories and her odd Chinese therapy. After a bad start, the holiday had begun. Before he started the car, he made sure of his route, AI, Périphérique, A6, and chose a CD to begin with. Phaedra was suggestive of continuous speed and a longed-for destination.

He turned the key, signalled, glanced in the right-hand mirror, began to drive away and glanced again: a girl, the girl, was there, a little way behind him, walking on the grassed reservation in the centre of the car park. Ghosts did not behave like that. He stopped the car and touched a button: the window beside him glided down and he looked out.

She was exquisite, striding out; untouched like a painted icon or a very young child. An orange backpack hung from her right shoulder. He, to her, was old; but he would presume, confident now that he was sure of his priorities and certain that the holiday had begun.

‘Do you need a lift?’ he called.

That was all he was offering, for God’s sake.

She looked up, located him. Her voice came clearly to him.

‘Please!’

She was running, her breasts lifting her shirt as she moved, her backpack bumping against her shoulder; she was beside him. Her face, as she looked at him, was innocent and he was relieved to see that it differed from that other in his memory, the sly and shy face of the dead witch, Alice Naylor; and disturbed again to see that she wore a black velvet choker fastened tight around her long, white neck.

‘Get in, then,’ he said, committed. ‘Here, let me take that.’

She was there, in his car; seated beside him. Her leggings were marked with dust and her shirt had a coffee stain on it, but she had recently combed out her hair and smelled of the soap in the restaurant toilets.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hello. Which way do you want to go?’

‘Oh, quickly, quickly: what a lovely car. Are you famous or something? It’s called “GUY 5”’

‘I am Guy. It’s my fifth Audi. I am going past Paris and down the A6 toward Auxerre. Is that any good?’

‘Who cares? – yes. I have to be in Lyon by Friday: Dad’s picking me up.’

‘He’s already on holiday?’

‘He lives in France. He and Mum are divorced – she’s in Eilat with her toy boy.’

‘I see.’ A prematurely old, wise child; and made so by the behaviour of her parents, he thought.

He drove, and she talked. She made this journey several times a year, she said, from her Kent school to her father’s house near Lyon. Of course, she was meant to fly (Dad sent the air fare every time) but she, although hopeless on a ship, preferred to take the ferry and hitch. No one ever checked, neither the school nor her father – and it would be easy to invent a likely story. She spent the money on clothes and CDs.

‘What CDs have you got?’ she asked. ‘Here?’ and rummaged through the stack.

‘You’re an old hippy, like Dad,’ she remarked. ‘Did you know that Phaedra hanged herself?’

‘Yes,’ he said, but he was thinking, the association no doubt triggered by the music and her remark, that she was about the age of his eldest daughter, Phoebe.

‘She fell in love with her stepson, who rejected her. Then she hanged herself,’ he said.

‘Do you have any children?’ the girl asked.

‘Yes.’ He thought, Gregory is twenty-two and married, with a baby daughter; Daniel is seventeen; Phoebe sixteen; Ellen fourteen; Grace eleven; Ben six. ‘They’re on holiday.’

‘They?’

‘’Fraid so.’

Dominic was sixteen too.

‘I’m going to visit one of them,’ he offered.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said and suddenly and lightly touched his knee. ‘I have – um – four half-brothers. One of them is black.’

‘Oh?’ She had removed her hand but left a sweet and subtle disturbance with him, of both body and mind.

‘Who are you, then?’ she enquired. ‘Guy –?’

‘I write,’ he told her. ‘I expect you’ve seen my books – the Malthassa series, the New Mythologies.’

‘Really? You’re Guy Parados. We did Malthassa for GCSE.’

‘Jesus Christ! That’s recommended reading? I’d no idea.’

‘You should be pleased: all those teenagers reading about sex and magic, though they cut most of the sex out of the school version. I bought my own copy and read the whole thing.’

He felt his past experience propelling him, as surely as the car. His right foot, sympathetic, bore down and the car’s acceleration blurred the green fields of France. The girl drew in her breath and, expelling it gustily in the word, exclaimed ‘Wow!’

‘And your name?’ he asked, lightly holding the car on course. ‘Alice, Alice Tyler.’

He misheard her, wilfully or by that psychic trick which turns what is heard into what is desired. Distant memories called him with soft and echoing voices.

‘Alice,’ he said, ‘Alice Naylor?’

‘Not “Naylor”: “Tyler” – T for Tommy. And I’m usually Allie.’

The bright world of the autoroute, its unfolding, motionless ribbon and his speed held him in their turn.

‘Oh, no,’ he said, and grimaced; then smiled. ‘You are not an Allie, you are most definitely an Alice.’

‘Who’s Alice Naylor? Your girlfriend?’

‘Alice,’ he told her, ‘is someone I read about.’ (He could not say ‘know’) ‘She died a long time ago, in 1705. She is buried in my village.’

He drove on through the Vallée de I’Oise while the girl chattered. Sometimes he had the illusion that he was driving his eldest daughter; Phoebe had picked up the same vapid talk and culture from her friends. He watched the road, as he must, and noticed the traffic on it which, lighter than that of England though it was, had still a good variety of vehicles. There were obvious differences, more Mercedes and Renaults, no Vauxhalls, and, while he wondered what had become of the motorists from the ferry, they passed a little clutch of British cars. No salaried holidaymakers in these, a Rolls and a new Jag, two big Rovers. Then came three British lorries, giant kith and kin of the European trucks he had passed on the M25. The road signs looked international. How long, he wondered, before the cultures merge? This is Europe, not France. Individuality is disappearing.

Alice spoke,

‘The secret places have gone – the deep tree-filled coigns, the lazy rivers and grassy banks, the unexpected flower-studded meadows,’ she said. ‘This is all there is – motorway, bridge after bridge after bridge. Europe has shrunk.’

‘What?’ He was annoyed – no, just mildly disturbed – to hear her speaking in such an adult and authoritative voice.

‘You were thinking how much things have changed, weren’t you?’ she replied. ‘Don’t worry. The perilous places still exist – they’ve just moved over a bit. In a sense, they are even further from ordinary people than they were before, they are so hard to reach. But a storyteller can find them.’

He glanced at her and while he thought, so briefly, that her mix of semi-adult profundity and teenage chat would be odd if it were not so engaging, noticed only that her expression was demure and that her hands were folded, not in her lap as they would be if she wore a skirt, but because of the encasing leggings, against her groin.

Rain surprised them as they passed through a national park. He read its name aloud, from the sign: ‘Pare Jean-Jacques Rousseau.’

‘I wonder where the noble savages live now,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Perhaps Etta knows.’

‘There?’ he wondered, as Alice waved to a group of bikers.

‘They’re giving us the V-sign,’ she said.

‘We’re going faster than they can.’

‘No. Like Churchill not “up yours” – aren’t there noble savages in Malthassa?’

He frowned. The world he had created in his mind had grown so vast, he sometimes had trouble remembering all of it. It had got away from him, he felt, and was trying to live on its own. The frown helped him grasp and hold it.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There are only the Ima and they are neither noble nor savage.’

Then they were entering the choked sprawl that is outer Paris and were caught in a crowd of traffic as dense and wild as any London jam. It moved erratically but always at high speed and he had neither time nor attention for Rousseau’s philosophy.

‘Look out for the signs which say “Lyon”,’ he snapped. ‘No, don’t talk.’

‘OK, OK.’

His hands involuntarily tightened on the wheel and a painful spasm passed through them. He felt a waterfall of sweat run down his back, despite the air conditioning. No wonder: the heat. The signs above the road shimmered with it and he read the ambient temperature on one, 28C; checked it against the readout in the car. As he looked at it, the 8 became a 9. Alice had found the bottle of water he kept in the car and she undid and passed it him without comment.

Nemione Baldwin knelt to dip water from the river. She lowered the brass cup into the current and held it steady there, so that the water which filled it flowed with the stream.

‘Thank you, nivasha,’ she said, and spilled a few drops of water on the ground. I leaned forward anxiously to look into the water but could see nothing there except the stones of the river bed. Should I have seen the nivasha lying on her underwater bed of green weed or, worse, swimming towards me, I would have been mortally afraid – and eternally curious, filled with the same desire for change and danger that makes men climb mountains or trek into the forest’s infinity. Nemione handed me the brimming cup and I drank gratefully.

She had changed a great deal; but no more, I suppose, than I. Her loose, maiden tresses were gone. The fair, almost white hair was braided and looped about her ears and pinned in elaborate merlons high on her head – that was how it looked to a military man. She wore a long gown of green stuff, open from the waist down to show white petticoats. There were rings on her fingers and jewels at her throat and in her ears.

But in all this elaborate show there was no hint of seduction or carnality. The gold cross of our Order hung chastely amongst her trinkets.

As for myself, the reflection in the slower water at the riverbank showed a dark and travel-weary face above a dented cuirass from which the embossed wolf’s head had all but worn away.

‘So you became a licensed outlaw,’ said Nemione.

‘And you a lovely and fashionable lady!’

She laughed – the sound was richer than it had been when it echoed in the cloister – but it suggested wit and a keen mind, rather than woman’s art.

‘What gallantry! Who would have thought that silent Koschei Corbillion would grow into such a cavalier?’

She drew a fan from her pocket and flicked it open; put it to her face and looked at me over its rim. Her eyes were the colour of male sapphires, or the Septrential Ocean, and they matched the blue eyes painted on the fan. She flicked the fan which subtly and rapidly was changed, becoming a thing of grey estridge feathers, then a froth of rose and white blossom; again, and it was as green as her skirts, a simple chusan leaf.

‘Perhaps not “My Lady”, but Prestidigitator,’ I said.

Nemione shook her head.

‘That is for gypsies and mountebanks.’

‘Then … Sorceress?’

‘For the time being let us agree on Prentice.’

She touched the leaf and folded it away like a fan.

‘You, Sir Koschei, Wolf’s Brother,’ she continued, teasing me. ‘Are you in search of your fortune, or a pretty wife perhaps?’

‘I have left one war to journey to another,’ I told her. ‘That’s the truth of it. My apprenticeship will be as long and as hard as yours.’

‘But fighting only lays waste to the body!’

‘Not true. It saps the spirit just as well.’

‘But you are young, and strong enough for it. How long is it since you left our Order?’

‘Two years this day week.’

‘Then I left it only days after you.’

A breeze came rustling through the forest and stirred her fortress of hair and her finery. She sighed and tapped one foot on the stones by the river.

‘I would travel more simply,’ she said, ‘but I thought this frippery a good disguise – the peasants will do anything for a high-born lady. Did you see my dwarf as you came along the track?’

‘I saw nothing but the birch trees and the birds in them – and a hind in the shadows.’

‘He is an idle knave! I sent him forward to spy out the way.’

‘Surely it is dangerous to be here, alone. What if I were more Wolf than Brother? What if I were the Duschma with her sharp nails full of poison and her ulcers festering with the pox?’

Nemione stood up straight. ‘I am in no danger,’ she said, with more than a hint of pride. ‘I may be an apprentice but –’ With a dextrous twist of her fingers she made the folded fan disappear and, in its place, a narrow tongue of flame grow. She held out her hand and invited me to touch the flame which, notwithstanding my fears, I did. It was cold.

‘Now watch!’

She tipped her hand and the flame slid down it, dropped to the ground and burned there. Soon it was licking through the grass and leaves, rapidly growing into a hazard.

‘Stop!’ I cried.

‘You are afraid, Koschei. Of a little fire? See!’

The fire collected itself together in one place and Nemione, gathering her yards of silk about her, sat down beside it and held both hands up to the blaze. At that moment also, a short and stalwart figure stepped forward out of the bushes.

‘Bravo, Mistress,’ the dwarf said, applauding her. She smiled a welcome. I realized that her abuse of him was, like her costume, an affectation, and that they were as fond of each other as mistress and servant may be.

The little fellow looked somewhat like an eft or newt in the breeding season, or like a scorpion perhaps, with a sting in his rapier. He wore a breastplate and cuisses of silvery scales, and his skin had a silvery cast too. I remembered what my mother had told me when I was a child at her knee: that a dwarf of the Altaish, though he leave his mountain home for ever, must always retain this ingrained livery, tincture of the metal he had dug and abandoned.

‘This is Erchon,’ said Nemione.

The dwarf bowed low.

‘And you, sir,’ he said, ‘do not need your armour to be recognized as a Brother.’

‘Good day, Master Scantling,’ I returned, and he bowed again, with a flourish, and walked on down the little stony beach and into the river, where he waded thigh-deep.

‘Take care!’ I shouted.

‘Peace, Wolf’s Head,’ said Erchon. ‘The nivashi cannot smell a dwarf.’ From close beneath the riverbank he lifted a fish-trap which he opened and emptied on to the bank. A mass of writhing fish, as scaly and argent as himself, fell out and the dwarf in his turn fell on them, banging their heads against a stone. Soon he had spitted them and was roasting them at the fire.

‘The trouble with this pretence,’ said Nemione, as her dwarf offered her a portion of the fish, ‘is that silks are not practical for the wayfaring life. I had better give up being a lady and turn myself into a gypsy. It will be easier that way.

‘Eat your fish, Erchon, Koschei. Do not look at me.’

The dwarf obediently turned his back on her and began to devour his fish, not bothering to separate them, flesh from bone, but eating them whole, heads, bones, tails: all. I bowed my head and used my knife on my fish, trying hard to concentrate on the food.

Yet I could not help peeping at Nemione. I saw her prepare herself for conjury with a whispered charm. Then she closed her eyes and started to strip off her jewellery. I do not mean that she unclasped and unpinned the many pieces she wore but that she touched each one and, at her touch, it vanished. I had to bite hard on a piece of fish to stop myself exclaiming. She stroked her embattled hair. At once it began to writhe, twisting about her head like a nest of vipers as it freed itself from its confinement and settled about her shoulders like some errant and lusty cloud. I had to bite my hand to stop myself crying out in fear.

Next, she began on her garments.

Perhaps the spell was a primitive one; or, more likely, she did not know enough to transform her dress with one pass. Her garments melted successively from her and left her sitting there in nothing more than a thin, white shift.

I thought, I am a Brother and I should take what is offered me. I moved my hands, putting down the fish.

‘Cheat!’ cried Nemione, opening her eyes. She glared at me.

‘You are very lucky, Brother Koschei, that I did not slay you where you sit!’

Judgement had the upper hand. I was quiet. If she could not make the unclothing spell more elegantly, I reasoned, she was unlikely to have the powers of life and death. After a moment or two had passed, when we were both calm, ‘Forgive me, Mistress Baldwin,’ I said, and bowed my head.

So I did not see what Nemione did to clothe herself again but only that, when I was allowed to look at her, she wore the red and orange garb of a Rom and a burden of brassy necklaces around her neck.

‘No more lady,’ she said.

‘You look as well in this gallimaufry,’ I said.

‘Oh, empty compliment! Now I am a dirty hedge-drab.’

‘You have the same angel’s hair.’

‘I can’t change that,’ she confessed. ‘Help me, Koschei, for old times’ sake; help me to darken my hair.’

By good fortune I had with me a bottle of the dye with which we Green Wolves used to darken our faces on moonlit nights. I took the stuff from my wallet and showed it her.

‘This may help. You must dilute it in water. Then rub it on.’

‘Perhaps if I use my comb – oh, fie! It is gone with the gown.’

It was my turn to laugh; but I only smiled gently.

‘I have a comb.’

We worked together, Erchon and I, he fetching water from the river in the brass cup, which fortunately had been left on the bank and so had not packed itself away in whatever ethereal trunk or closet the fine clothes were laid; I mixing a proportion of the dye into each cupful and combing it into Nemione’s hair with my soldier’s comb of steel. It was hard to do – not the dyeing, which worked admirably – but the combing of her gossamer hair. Never before had I stood so close to her. The only women I had touched were rough camp followers and country girls who, knowing their business with men, were greedy and sharp-tongued. Nor did their skins smell sweet as a damask rose and feel like one petal of that rose, fallen in the dewy morn.

‘Spare me,’ I whispered in her ear, so that the dwarf would not hear. ‘I am a man.’

‘Pretend we are sister and brother,’ she said. ‘As once we were, in the Cloister.’

So I finished the task. Nemione, looking into the dye-bottle exclaimed,

‘It is all gone!’

‘I shall easily get more,’ I lied. I knew that the penalty for losing any part of my kit was three month’s duty without leave and possibly a flogging at the end of a rope.

The stuff was drying in her hair, turning it as black as a night-crow’s wing. She looked as bewitching as the Queen of Spades.

‘You will soon get a gypsy lover, Mistress,’ said Erchon the dwarf.

‘Look in the river,’ I said. ‘You will see yourself how much you look the part.’

She stood there a long time, on the river’s edge, gazing at the rippling simulacrum of herself.

‘I shall journey safer when I have found a band of Rom,’ she said. She turned and looked at me.

‘What can I give you Koschei, for your patience and your dye?’

‘A little piece of yourself – to meditate on and to love.’

‘I will give you some strands of this counterfeit hair. But that is not enough. I have a long and perilous journey ahead – but I do not need Erchon any more. What gypsy lass has her own dwarf? I will lend him to you and, when I send, you must discharge him from your service.’

‘Very well.’

She pulled some long hairs from her head and gave them to me; I coiled them up and put them, wrapped in my neckcloth, in my wallet. Then she gave me Erchon, telling him to march smartly to my side and there remain, until she called.

‘Goodbye,’ she said, and turned and walked away along the track, her brave gypsy clothing bright in the shadows of the overhanging trees. She did not look back but Erchon and I watched until we could see her no more. Then, facing each other, we exchanged smart salutes before we shook hands.

‘Will she soon find company?’ I asked the dwarf. ‘Do gypsies travel in this locality?’

‘Yes, Master – and many of them at this time of the year. There is a horse fair in Vonta, fine trotters, proud pacers, sumpter horses, palfreys, vanners, destriers, barbs – what you will. And the mountain men bring their cast-off slaves to sell.’

‘Yet there is danger for Nemione.’

‘She will survive it, more than half nivasha as she is,’ the dwarf said.

‘She is the daughter of the reeve at Espmoss.’

‘But who was his mother? And who is her mother?’

‘Why does she journey?’

‘Ours not to ask, Master; nor to reason why.’ As he talked, Erchon busied himself in tidying our temporary caravanserai, and trod upon the ashes of the fire. He heard the rumble before I did, and the jingle of harness.

‘Hark!’

‘Into the trees!’

‘Too late, Brother Wolf. There is the caravan-master and he has seen us. Smile as they pass and pray they will soon overtake my lady.’

We stood aside to watch the procession of gypsies pass.

‘Look, gypsies!’ Alice exclaimed.

‘I can’t. Tell me.’

‘You can see the ripe corn. They are camped on the edge of the field. The chrome on their vans glitters in the sunlight and they have a lorry – two – and a car; there’s some washing on a line – gone now. Out of sight. What a pity gypsies gave up horses and painted vans.’

‘I knew one who lived in a vardo black as coal, and every line and carved curlicue upon it was picked out in gold and red – and a great hairy-heeled mare pulled it.’

‘Dominic’s mother?’

She must have guessed it.

‘How do you know?’

‘I read your letter when you went for a pee.’

It was the sort of thing Helen herself would have done; that this Alice had pried in his guilt did not make him angry, but irrationally fearful. She was cheeky and unpredictable, that was all, he reasoned, the child of a broken home; and he had left the letter and the postcard on the dashboard.

‘Why did Dominic send you the picture of a horse?’ Alice continued.

‘Thought you’d read my books.’

‘Not all. I suppose there is a horse like that in one of them.’

‘Right! The Ima, who live in the Plains of Malthassa, herd horses – we were talking about them earlier, when we passed the sign that said “J-J Rousseau”. The best ones belong to the Imandi, their leader, and the best one of all is the Red Horse.’

‘What colour was Helen’s horse? I can’t remember.’

Again he was disturbed. He was sure he had not revealed Helen’s name; and Dominic had not written it down. He had not told her what colour the horse was either: he was certain of that.

‘I didn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘She was brown and white – skewbald, or “coloured” in gypsy parlance. They prize pied animals highly.’

‘Half and half, like good and evil; neither one thing or another, like me,’ Alice said and then, before he could respond to this new slant upon her puzzling character, reached forward and reinforced his unsettled mood with a fresh CD.

‘You don’t have to do that each time,’ he said. ‘Put in a stack.’

‘I want this one.’

Clapton again; and the album was called Backtrackin’ – what he was at, to drive half way down France on this fool’s errand; doubly a fool for picking up this precocious waif? Well, it wasn’t so far to Auxerre, where he would drop her. She would easily find another lift there, or a room if she intended to stay overnight. He listened to the music and felt the morass of nostalgia stir and individual memories rise up like wraiths.

They had reached Burgundy and were passing a sign to Sens. The landscape was rich and rolling: you could see how lords and princes had prospered here, he thought, and built their chateaux forts and later on, when there was a kind of peace, their tree-embowered, swan-encircled chateaux set like still islands in a motionless sea, so formal were the pleasure gardens. As if to echo these thoughts, a brown road sign with a formalized chateau, turreted and neat, came into view and, beyond it, the edge of the forest which covered the hills on either side of the road. Other signs warned of deer, though a high deer fence marched with the margins of the wood.

‘They used to hunt all the time here,’ he said. ‘In the Middle Ages. In fact, Saint Thibaud loved the hunt so much that in his church, ahead of us in Joigny, he is shown on horseback, off to the chase with his dog. And Archbishop Sanglier was of course known only as “The Boar”. I wonder, was he a thickset, muscular man, a grasping priest who loved the riches which gave him the freedom to hunt? – the riches of Mother Church. There is a famous Treasury in the abbey at Sens.’

‘Wasn’t it in Sens,’ the girl said, ‘that Abélard was condemned?’

How could she know that – a history lesson at school?

‘Not for loving Héloise,’ he said, ‘but for an intellectual sin: for refusing to set limits to the activity of human reason.’

‘Reason? Peter Abélard?’

‘He was a great churchman as well as a lover. A formidable intellect! Though, it is remarkable that he did not lose his reason after he was set upon.’

‘Thinking was all he had left,’ she said. ‘Thinking of Héloise and praying.’

‘Excuse me – but you’ve studied the period in class?’

‘Oh, no. They don’t tell us young wenches about castration. ‘Taint a fit subject for a liddle gal.’

Phoebe spoke like this sometimes, putting on the accents of a yokel.

‘Oh, ah,’ he replied in kind, looked full at her and caught her watching him. He knew then he had won that joust – this time she had not fooled him into a delusion – and continued casually,

‘Burgundy is famous for happier things as well.’

‘I bet you wouldn’t say that if you lived in the Middle Ages!’

‘I don’t suppose I would. But look, here’s another reminder of hunting: a service station called L’Aire de la Biche – the Hind’s Place. Would you like a coffee?’

‘Please!’

They sat opposite each other at the table. She drank her black coffee and eagerly devoured a large slice of gâteau. This is the first time she has eaten today, he thought and asked her ‘Would you like a proper meal?’

‘Later?’ she said, the question mark riding high in her voice.

A woman was watching them with unconcealed curiosity; he had seen several men glance and he leaned back and looked at the girl as if to confirm that he saw what the others saw. She had the kind of beauty many men divorced good wives to gain, that unknown and conjectured many who would envy him, escorting her – if that was the correct term for his role in this surreal interlude.

‘Later?’ she had said. Although an interval of time had passed, he decided to reply.

‘OK. Later on.’

He saw the shape of her clearly now, both intellectual and physical, and in that moment knew that he would try to seduce her, though his conscience would attempt to save them from this pleasurable and questionable conclusion. Sandy was well into her thirties; this girl was little more than a child. He calculated. Thirty-two years separated them, at least.; but he wouldn’t be the first – there was that Stone. OK. And several Country singers. He opened the sun-roof when they were back in the car and again drove fast, breaking the speed limit. He knew, without looking, that Alice was smiling with pleasure, heard her laugh as she held down her slip-streaming hair. It was about fifty miles to Auxerre. Soon the town rose up in the hills on their right-hand side and ‘There’s the cathedral,’ Alice said.

He remembered Saint Edward’s, where he had been choirboy and chorister; another time, another country, almost another religion, his, pared down from the excesses of Catholicism. His conscience gave a feeble flutter. Polanski, it said.

‘I’ll drop you in Auxerre,’ he offered.

‘I’d rather come with you!’

She had said it, condemning him. He felt his lust recognized and justified.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you are absolutely sure.’

‘Oh, absolutely!’

A little later, when they were paused at the tollbooth, the girl laughed softly and said, ‘My father is always telling me not to accept lifts from strangers.’ He gave his daughters the same advice.

‘What can I say to that,’ he asked her, ‘without being totally flippant?’

‘You could say – “Soon, I won’t be a stranger”!’ She laughed again.

They left the autoroute and took a lesser road which followed the course of the Yonne. The signposts said ‘Avallon’. While intelligence and education told him that the name must be derived from that of a long-dead Celt, the chieftain in these wooded lands, an older and intuitive sense recalled Avalon, the island vale Arthur was carried to in death. Dusk inhabited the roadsides and waited in the trees. They passed through Lucy-le-bois. He felt heavy with fatigue and unwanted symbolism.

In Avallon, he was pleased to see, the houses were tall with open shutters laid back against stone walls; trees in the squares, flowers in troughs. A civilized place. The town was quiet, as if its citizens had already retired to bed. No one about to witness the betrayal of his conscience. Yet he drove past the big Hotel d’Etoile and parked in a narrow street. The silence of the town invaded the car. He sat still and the girl beside him did not move.

While the car, as its expanded metals cooled, made the only noises to be heard, he unfastened his seat belt and twisted in his seat until he faced her. He felt that he should make some overture or heartfelt confession which would sanctify what he proposed.

But Alice’s unfathomed sensibilities moved faster.

‘Avallon,’ she said, pronouncing the word in the English fashion.

‘Av-eye-yon.’

‘I know.’

‘Or Arcadia?’ he asked her. ‘Paradise?’

‘Paradise? Not yet – look, there’s a hotel. At the end of the street.’

He held her face in both hands and kissed her, at once wanting all of her – but ‘wait’ his noisy conscience said and he released her. She laughed loudly and, putting on a new accent, said,

‘’Ow romantic!’ She laid her head against his chest and laughed again. They both laughed, rocking in their seats, releasing their tension into the stuffy air.

‘Come on, Miss Essex,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

The dusty footpath was only wide enough for one. They walked in the road, hand-in-hand. He looked at his watch.

‘We’ll eat. First,’ he said.

The hotel restaurant was papered in red, and shabby. He read the menu quickly and, while Alice studied it, looked about him, embarrassed. He had erred. It looked the kind of place to which commercial travellers brought their pick-ups. The red paper made him think of hell, not paradise (though, conceptually, what was the difference, both asylums for different breeds of ecstatics?). The fires burned low for want of heretics and adulterers to incinerate. He peered into the gloom and made out a waitress lingering by the kitchen door. Near her, a bizarre group sat at dinner – French, a family – and he recognized the hotel proprietor who had booked them in. Perhaps the waitress was his wife? Who, then was the other middle-aged woman; who were the other women? Two sons and an idiot – correction, a boy with learning difficulties: three sons?

The waitress saw him staring and began ferociously to cut bread. She laid a long loaf on the board and brought down the guillotine blade, bang! bang! bang! He winced. She brought the bread to them and he watched it reforming its squashed self while he gave the order. Alice was mute. He chose a salad for her, lamb, pommes Lyonnaises; the wine. How bad would it be?

‘Monsieur,’ the waitress said, in mangled English. “As good flavour.’

‘“Taste”, Madame,’ he corrected stiffly.

Alice yelped and stuffed her table napkin in her mouth – but the food, despite the odd family, the wallpaper, the dust he could see griming the dado rail, after all was good. He poured a young Beaujolais. It waited in his glass, a toast to Fortune, Life and Youth. He lifted the glass. She was waiting, too, red-blooded adolescence, reciprocal sensation imprisoned in her pretty cage of flesh. She smiled at him and, from the tail of his eye, he saw the family file silently from the room.

‘Now we’re alone,’ said Alice.

‘Near enough.’

She drank.

‘Hello,’ she said.

The time came. They mounted the stairs. The same red wallpaper enhanced the gloom. A low-wattage bulb lighted the turning of the stair; they went higher and there, nearly opposite the lavatory, was their room: 18. The age of reason and responsibility.

‘How old are you?’ he said abruptly as he opened the door.

She affected not to hear. It was not a question he could repeat – not without seeming a total fool – and they passed into the room. The stark central light was on. Her rucksack stood beside his grip on a little luggage stand. The bed was turned down.

Alice spoke: ‘What a place! Wow!’ and ran to open the window.

‘It’s all right. The linen’s clean,’ he said, while realizing he had misinterpreted her words and actions. She was leaning out of the window. The light curtains billowed about her and a hot breeze shoved the musty air of the room aside.

‘We’re in the roof! It’s miles down to the street – I can see your car dozing there as if it was in its own comfy garage, not forced to spend the night outside the police station.’

‘At least no one will try to nick it.’

He too crossed the room; stood behind her. So close, he did not know what to make – of himself, nor her who continued to lean out and report on what she saw with the enthusiasm and fresh vision of minority. Questions marshalled in his mind: Why? Shall I leave – before it’s too late? Is this a legitimate adventure? A sordid romp? While he pondered, he caressed her shoulder, at last permitting his hand to journey down her supple back and gently touch her clefted buttocks in their absurdly thick tights – leggings. No pants. No bra. She must have removed those two surplus (for their purposes) garments when she went to the loo. Her breasts. Against the windowsill.

He could not think. He was entranced. But the girl left the window, brushing past him as if he was already old news. He watched her explore the room, the wardrobe with its extra blanket and pillows for those too soft to sleep comfortably on the French-style bolster, rolled in the end of the sheet; the curtained enclosure which hid the washbasin and eccentric plumbing; the two religious pictures. She undid her backpack; took out washbag, underclothes, a hairbrush, her book.

He hung his jacket on a chair and sat on the bed, his resolution fading; rolled over and looked in the bedside cabinet where, on a shelf above a chamber pot, he found a Gideon bible. That these expressions of human spirituality and grossness should be displayed in such close proximity amused him, and he laughed out loud.

‘What have you found?’

‘The bible and the pot de chambre.’

‘Is that funny?’

‘Only if we need either.’

‘I’m quite godless,’ she said, ‘and I bet you are too.’

‘I –’ he said, hesitating over the sentence (‘used to be a choirboy’? ‘was married in church’? ‘am married to a rather devout Christian’?) ‘I am undecided –’

It was an expression of his state, now, here. He stood up and switched off the light. At once, the context dissolved, the absurd conversation, the prevarication. Night was a better landscape for an amorous conjunction. There must be a moon. Her garments were luminous in the pallid light: her body would have the same lucent quality. He began to be excited: no more words. He approached her swiftly, conscious of the sweat and grime on him, the wine on his breath.

This was not what he’d imagined – champagne, a better room. Beside her he was a rampant giant and for an instant wondered: will she protest? The texture of her unshent skin made him delirious. He bent to take her offered kisses and, as he felt her warm, dry hands upon him, it occurred to him – a new horizon, a fresh Darien – that

the white beer I had consumed, following on the three ritual glasses of kumiz, was doubtless to blame – but there was no time to think further, blaming mere beverages. I had chosen carefully, deliberately; had won the only girl of the year to bear faint resemblance to Nemione Baldwin, a scrawny witch of a creature with a sweep of hair as yellow as the sheaved corn. The contest, to a renegade Wolf, had been simplicity, a matter of judgement rather than ability, some skill in aiming at the narrow target.

I waited, the corn stalks pricking my bare thighs. That I should sit here at all was accident. Tired of my journey and the prospect of more fighting, I had remained on the itinerant smith’s wagon; so, arrived in this village, a poor rat-haunted place on the very hem of the Plains, where a rash of small cornfields competed for bare unattractiveness with scorched pastures where grazed a few horses the Ima had outworn. I had known nothing of the summer festival I walked into, combined propitiation and celebration. Strangers were scarce. The old women had pounced on me and, in truth, they were like corn rats themselves, bright eyed and chattering, nipping at my arms and shoulders with little snatches and tugs. The young women had been driven (mirthful though they were) into a ruinous barn on the edge of the field. I contested with the village youths and one other unfortunate stray, a fat itinerant horse-butcher, upon a shooting-ground which resembled the Green Wolves’ butts as little as my prize did the fair novice-turned-thaumaturge.

Here she came, walking delicately in bare feet across the stubble, veiled in dirty white. As she drew nearer I saw that her bridal veil was an old flour sack.

Well, I had got myself into these curious circumstances.

It was a long time since I had had a woman.

I felt pity rather than desire; also an absurd shame which quickened when I thought that these ignoble deeds must, when they had become memories, be kept with the jewels in the memory palace. I moved the sacking aside and looked into her thin face, averting my eyes from the rest of her wasted body.

‘You need not, mistress, if I do not please you,’ I said. It was a poor attempt at the courtesies I had been taught in boyhood. But that, too, was past.

‘I must,’ she whispered. I had difficulty in understanding her dialect: ‘I want,’ was what she seemed to say.

‘Then where is our bed?’

‘Here, on the dry ground,’ she said; or was it: ‘On the fruitful earth’? – and, without more ado, she flung the sack from her and eagerly knelt upon it where it fell. I hastened to kneel with her; but I wondered, were we about to pray?

‘One thing,’ she said. ‘Before – why me?’

This, I understood, looking askance on my lower body which, independent of my intellect, had begun to prepare itself for the lovers’ contest. Was I to be kind, or cruel?

‘You remind me of the woman I love,’ I said.

‘That is a good omen,’ the girl said.

‘Is she a good woman?’ the girl said.

I lay down in a confusion of body and mind, the myriad facets of my existence dancing in the air and crowding close about me on the rough sacking. The girl also lay down. For ten beats of my heart nothing happened, but the sun beat down; then she was there, covering me, and I thought that Famine rode till she kissed me and I remembered the unsurpassed smoothness of the beer they had given me. After this, her breasts might make milk as sweet as the thick, fermented kumiz.

That was the meaning of it all: a harvest, a child.

Or a simple adventure.

Was this the real meaning behind my voluntary diversion from the journey?

Of course! A simple – and delightful – adventure of a common kind, Guy assured himself. The quarry and reward of men down the centuries. If unlike his affairs with Helen, Susan, Diana, Sandy –

Alice Naylor, her character uncovered by his researches and by her final, unremitting presence in his house, had ingenuity and invention, most alive and most alluring in his dreams where her miserable expression was transformed to laughter; where she always refused him, closed and cold at the last moment even as he tried in vain to enter her.

This other Alice had known very well what she did, where to touch and how, so that, at last expiring in her he came to the summit of the highest pass, the zenith of his ambition; after which her involuted, tender succulence was his.

He watched her sleeping with no sense of guilt. The warm night enfolded him. France herself cradled him. He hardly knew her either: a few jaunts here and there, some holidays in various situations – there was a vastness, and also an unpredictability, about her which England did not have. In a bed, in a house, in a street, in a town, in a green province, in a wide country, lies my love – He grinned to himself in the dark.

In all the building, no sound. He thought of the weary proprietor and his family; wondered where they slept. Close by? In a separate wing?

He lay and sweated, cooling as the fluids dried. A door banged. Someone passed the door – perhaps. A car, long way away. Suddenly he was in the car, driving furiously; and instantly awake. Christ, how his body ached; hard to know which bit to stretch. Must remember – more petrol, postcards, pay the bills – no, on holiday. Now he was wide awake. He stretched out and switched on the lamp beside the bed; rolled slowly back to look again at the marvellous girl.

She lay on her right side, facing away, all white, the blonde hair like straw in a sunny field or the thin filaments of flax Rumplestiltskin span into gold for the king’s daughter. Her legs and arms were graceful, long; everything, breasts, belly, buttocks, neat and under-used. He looked again at those small breasts with their pale pink nipples, touched her shoulder gently, lifted her hair. Her face in repose was delicate; did have, indeed, the features of one of Sassetta’s angels. She still wore her ribbon. The black band tight around so long and white a neck disturbed him; he was not sure if his unease was spiritual or sexual; but ‘I’m quite godless,’ she had said. Curse the inaccuracies of the English vernacular! Did she mean ‘moderately’ or ‘totally’?

He touched the velvet ribbon gently, noticing how its silken edge bit into her neck.

The curious book she’d been reading on the ferry lay there, with her bits and pieces on the chair. He got up softly to fetch it; lay down and opened its lurid cover.

‘The Evil Life of Lèni la Soie.’ Inside was a frontispiece taken from a contemporary sketch; it showed a dishevelled beauty kneeling in prayer before a crucifix. Curious, he thought, how ready we are to accuse every whore and make of her a repentant Magdalen at once attractive and repellent. He turned the pages and found a short introduction.

‘France,’ it began, ‘called La Belle. Imagine two wide rivers and a city of tall stone houses, great squares where people walk, art galleries, churches, gardens, a ruined Gallo-Roman theatre high above the city. This is Lyon today.

‘Now let us imagine another scene. It is the latter half of the nineteenth century and the houses which cover the hilly quarter of Fourvière are falling down. This is the oldest quarter and those who live here, above the city but below the site of the new basilica, are also decaying from the harshness of life, from drink, from hunger. There is so little that even the rats have moved out, away to the Croix Rousse with the whores. Some of these evil-living women are thin, some fat; some even, to cater for all tastes, very old, wrinkled, dry; some are pregnant and some are as beautiful as Aphrodite. Lèni was such a one –’

Guy stopped reading, irritated by the present tense, drama-documentary style; plagued by recollections which streamed up as unstoppably as mist from wet ground in the sun. He had never known Lèni – how could he? She was dead – like the first Alice. He had not known Lèni, but he had read her diary, all the closely written confidential pages of it and could visualize her neat letters exactly and the brown limp-covered book itself, soft leather binding worn bald. It used to live, a landmark amongst the paperbacks, on the little shelf above the bed-place in the gypsy vardo and Helen, rising from him in her resplendent nakedness, had brought it down and shown it him, revealing at the same time her inmost thoughts, for she kept her own diary in it, and also in French. Somewhat bewildered he had read there that he, Guy Parados, was un trésor and also mon amant très fort et infatigable. Schoolgirl stuff on reflection, these days. He had grinned at her and said ‘Thanks! I hope I am,’ and had asked her why she wrote in French, not Romany.

‘It’s the language of lovers, isn’t it?’ she had replied.

He remembered some of Lèni’s entries. She had, he thought, compared her priestly lover to a stallion and herself she had personified as his breakfast. She had also implied that he was stupid: quel imbécile, quel désastre! Nothing else could be retrieved – except – yes, a homily as vapid as every cliché: ‘Fortune favours fools’, in Helen’s translation; but the French was Aux innocents les mains pleines which, translated literally, meant ‘To simpletons, filled hands’. The innocent, the idiot son of the family downstairs certainly had those, clasping tight his bread and biting into its crust. Guy leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes.

‘Pleine’ had another meaning, probably several, for sense in French was, as in English, governed by context. Ah! It meant ‘complete’ or ‘whole’.

Complete hands to fools. A good hand, a complete flush. No! Nonsense. He was dozing when there was work to do. He skimmed the short introduction, noting the facts: Lèni’s lover, Father Paon (absurd name! – but how it characterized him) was the nutter, a slave to every vice and luxury and deeply involved with other Satanists of the time, in particular Olivia des Mousseaux and a second priest, Henri Renard. They were famous at the time: the decadent novelist, Huysmans, had interviewed them and it was said that their erotic practices had inspired both the Marquis de Guaita and Aleister Crowley. Paon took Lèni to live with him and abused her – yet she remained with him, loyal as a spaniel, and more, she watched him bloodily murder the girls they lured to his Black Masses. Petites rosses insaissisables, Elusive little nags: that was what she had written about the girls! Guilt and revulsion kept Guy fascinated: that this obscure Lyon seamstress whose diary he had held … But the place to which they were brought, that had not sounded like a maniac’s lair. It had another, haunting, name, un paradis inconnu.

An unknown Paradise. Death, he supposed, and the Otherworld: Heaven, Hades, Hell, Avalon, Elysium and the Land of Youth. The Isles of the Blessed. It had many names, as many as man’s fears. He read the denouement of the extraordinary tale:

‘Their own over-confidence betrays Lèni and Paon. They kidnap the daughter of a consul, a dark Mexican lovely. Respectable Lyon and the demi-monde are equally horrified but, even so, it is necessary for the arresting civil guard officers to bribe the militant Canuts or silk workers and to have their protection in order to enter the district, find and arrest the couple, and discover the horrors they have perpetrated. This is what they found:

‘The door of the apartment wide open and Paon, dressed like a dandy in silks, reclining on his ornate bed of shame, his new telephone receiver in his hand and the noise from a disconnected call the only sound. He wore a blank look and offered no resistance. In the kitchen, Paloma Diaz del Castillo lay in a welter of blood on the scrubbed deal table, horribly maimed and quite dead.

‘Paon was guillotined in Lyon in 1884 but his mistress, the beautiful devil Lèni la Soie, was never brought to justice. Helped by her silk worker friends, she had fled into her native territory, the local warren of alleyways or traboules, and there disappeared.’

He wondered how Paon had defended himself at his trial. Historic Lyon was a depository of hatred, a place in which many had been brought to book. He had visited it three years ago with his wife: for a day and a night, time enough for Jilly to spend an afternoon in the Silk Museum, for him to find and choose the best restaurant. They had left the children in England with Thérèse and were trying hard to live harmoniously together. It wasn’t a second honeymoon but they had a good holiday and went on to the Alps. In Fourvière he had explored some of the alleys or traboules with a sense of trespass, for many were gated, others obscure and damp and all along them stairways and doors led to inhabited apartments. He had found a likely restaurant and was standing contentedly in the warm afternoon sun reading the menu when, further down the narrow street, there was a flurry of cars and heavy motorbikes ridden by helmeted men.

A wide façade, cramped up against the pavement, was the back of the Palais de Justice. He had witnessed the departure from it of Klaus Barbie whom the Lyonnais were trying for his crimes against Jews and gypsies in the War. They had even found a lawyer who would defend him.

Who would, or could, defend Lèni? He began to read the narrative which was couched in her words and taken from her journal intime:

‘You, man or woman of the future time, you my Reader and my Judge, will observe that my spirit, like the traboules of the Croix Rousse, goes in as many directions as the compass needle. As for my heart, that too has its yearnings, for my father, for my lover, but most of all for the unknown paradise. I liken it to the hills beyond Fourvière in whose long shadows we lived happily before these centuries of revolution

And I am in Arcadia, he thought suddenly. What have I to do with this miserable stuff? He looked at the girl asleep beside him. Et in Arcadia ego – where, in a perfect, sylvan paradise, Death intrudes. He would wake her and comfort himself with her body.

The black ribbon was tight. He wondered, fingering its soft surface, how she could bear such tightness and he felt under her hair for a fastening. There was a bow, which he untied, and the ribbon slipped off and fell upon the bed while he, recoiling, saw the mark it had concealed, a dark ring of blemishes about her neck. Ghostly Alice wore such an ineradicable necklace, her hangman’s keepsake.

Alice Tyler opened her eyes, blinked pale lids across the blue and put both hands up to her throat.

‘You beast,’ she said.

He was not able to respond. Alice sat up. She switched on the bedside light and retrieved the ribbon. With electric light to illuminate it, the mark diminished. It was not very big.

Alice tied the ribbon and covered the mark.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘What does it look like?’

‘Horrible – I’m sorry. It reminds me –’

‘Of something nasty in one of your books – in your imagination! It’s a birthmark, stupid. Usually I cover it with make-up, but sometimes I wear the choker instead.’

‘I see.’

The girl switched off the light and lay down.

‘Go to sleep,’ she said and then, more kindly, ‘Save your energy till I wake – properly.’

A blighted angel, child of Hell scarred by the woodcarver’s chisel – but he was asleep and dreaming, miraculously able to walk on air amid the wooden seraphim which held up the roof of St Edward’s Cathedral.

Guy stood at the mirror in the curtained enclosure which held the washbasin. He lathered his face. They had ‘made love’ again though it had felt like war. Alice had clawed and bitten him, arousing him to a brutal response. He had not tried to please her, only himself. When he had finished he had looked down at her and found her gritting her teeth.

‘Hell,’ she’d said.

He had apologized and found then that he had opened a door, the way which led to her. She had wriggled and twined herself about him. More sex followed and now it was eleven o’clock. He was exhausted. He was too old.

He looked into the reflection of his own blue eyes. There were shadows there, a dark cast in each eye; his eyelids had a cynical and oriental droop. The white lather made a substantial beard and the gloom behind the curtain had taken the English pallor from his face and replaced it with darkness. Christ, he almost looked like Satwinder staring balefully across the bridge table. He blinked rapidly and shaved away stubble and the foam. The familiar wide-open eyes gazed steadily back at him.

‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ Alice, beyond the curtain, asked.

‘Almost.’ He dried his face, came out.

‘You’ve read some of the Malthassa books,’ he said. ‘What does Koschei look like – the Mage, the chief male character?’

‘Well, if you don’t know –’ she began.

‘I do. I just want you to describe him for me.’

‘OK. Um – he is very dark, hair I mean and skin. A bit Arabian, I suppose. His eyelids droop, to make him look really sinister – and he has a big scratchy beard. Yuck!’

‘You wouldn’t like to be in bed with him?’

‘No way! He’s a nasty piece of work.’

‘Is he? Is that how you read him? He began as a noble man, although a questioner. At first, he was a simple adventurer.’

Pleased by the manner in which my adventure away from the route between Tanter and the battle at Myrah Pits had ended, I sat beside the horse-butcher on his flat cart. It was our raft of oblivion and good will, both conditions induced by our astonishing sojourn in the village and by the stupendous quantities of alcohol administered to us at the end of the midsummer fest.

The cart belonged to the butcher. It had been commandeered by the villagers and used to transport the summer brides in their procession about the fields. An arch of withies had been nailed to it and this, still hung with wilted grasses and small field flowers, remained. The butcher said he might fix a tarpaulin to it, to keep off the sun. He was a slack fellow. He had promised to buy me a meal, but we never stopped at an inn.

In addition to the withered garlands and we two men, the cart carried two dead horses. These, a red and a red roan, lay quiet but nodded their heads – which hung over the tail of the cart – to the jolt of the ruts. The live horse which pulled them snorted and tossed his head to keep the flies in motion.

‘You’re a good horse,’ the butcher said and wrenched on the reins. When the cart stopped he leaped from it through the gathering cloud of flies and into the ditch, where he pissed copiously and plucked a large bunch of herbs. These, he carried to the horse’s head where, standing with legs akimbo and shirt and breeches gaping, he tucked the leafy stems into and under the straps of the bridle. He made a noise, Waahorhorhor! to the horse or in relief, scratched his belly, fastened his buttons and mounted to the driver’s seat.

‘Perhaps they would also like to be decorated,’ I dryly said.

‘Naw.’ The butcher was emphatic. ‘One bunch should do for the lot of us, dead and alive. Strong stuff.’

The flies which had made a sortie to examine the effect of the herbs rejoined their companions and helped them annoy me. But the butcher seemed impervious and soon began to sing in time with the jolting of the cart,

When I _____ was a lad

I __________ loved a lass

But she loved another

MAN

Oh

When I ______

I took off my hat and beat the air with it. The flies rose up like a whirlwind, and descended again. I, too, sang.

In this manner, we travelled some eight or ten miles. The Plains and their mean margins were behind us and I was cheered; but the forest lay before and this knowledge was death to the brief springtime of my heart. I looked at the butcher, whose flushed face was covered in beads of sweat and flies.

‘Do you not fear the forest?’ I said.

‘It is but trees. I have trees in my garden. In the forest there are many more, but they are the same things of trunks and branches.’

‘Then, do you not fear the Beautiful Ones?’

‘I have never seen a puvush.’

‘Hush! There may be one nearby. I think you are a city man who knows the stone street better then the forest track.’

‘All but a few leagues of the forest is trackless, so I have heard. But you are correct. I am a man of Pargur.’

‘Pargur!’

‘It is not quite as marvellous as they say; perhaps only half as much – perhaps half equal to your wildest dreams.’

The forest closed in as we talked. It seemed to me that puvushi might well be hiding under the forest’s canopy, green and brown as the shadows and, beside, that each rill and boggy place was the home of a nivasha. As well as these spirits, I feared the Om Ren, the Wild Man, which might lie in ambush awaiting unwary travellers; and the Duschma, she of plague and agony. I had seen her twice, once in a sleepy village where she watched our column pass and smiled horribly and, again, stalking the battlefield in search of fresh young men to feed on. My sword was blunt against such and, from past and recent experience, I knew I would not be proof against the allure (false though it is) of the earth and water spirits. Soon, I must leave this gross but, nevertheless, human horse-butcher. Ahead, the dwarf Erchon had told me, the ways parted in a wide Y and the left-hand fork went towards the town of Myrah, while the right-hand veered across a tract of forest fringe. Somewhere beyond this, the battle raged. A mighty chestnut tree grew in the cleft of the Y and under this Erchon had promised me he would wait. I should not be alone in the forest; but a dwarf is not a man. They keep their own customs. Erchon, disregarding the duty Nemione had impressed upon him, had left me for three weeks to meet his fellows at one of these arbitrary gatherings.

The chestnut trailed its leafy skirt upon the ground. Erchon was nowhere to be seen; in hiding, no doubt. He fears the forest folk as much as I, despite his boast that the nivashi cannot scent dwarves, I thought. I said goodbye to the butcher, his raggedy, weed-bedizened cart, his dead horses and the flies.

‘Goodbye, Master Wolf,’ he replied, screwing one of his eyes into a hideous wink and confounding me with his words. I had been careful to reveal neither identity nor allegiances; I wore an old shirt and jacket over my cuirass and, further, had tied a dirty length of cloth I’d bought for a farthing in Tanter slantwise about my body to suggest to any bold jack that I was a brigand. My beard was growing fast.

‘I see it in your eyes,’ the butcher explained. ‘A look of confidence – nay, arrogance – under the dirt.’

‘I suppose it’s useless to ask you to hold your tongue,’ I said.

‘I’m not such a gossip as you suppose, not even in my cups. I leave that to my wife.’

I gave him more than he deserved, a silver threepenny bit, and wondered what kind of woman would allow him to bed her. The butcher tested the coin on his teeth.

‘A good one,’ he said. ‘Thank ye. I’ll keep it in case I meet a werewolf.’

I watched him drive off, watched him till he was out of sight. Then I called softly,

‘Erchon, Master Scantling.’ He liked his nickname and usually answered it at once; but there was no response. I called again and, pushing the pendant branches of the chestnut tree aside, crept into its shadow. All I found was a dappled green shade, empty. I circumnavigated the tree. Nothing.

I cursed Erchon. The universal reputation dwarves have for carousing is fully justified. I supposed the wretch lay drunk in some alley or fleet. I wished he would awake with the father and mother of sore heads and a sick stomach as well.

I did not know what to do. Soon, it would be dusk; then, dark. I had planned to set up temporary home with his help, a camp where we might rest safe by the light of a good fire with one to watch while the other slept. The track looked quiet enough, striking off amongst the trees, a band of late sunlight illuminating it and picking out the colours of the summer flowers which grew beside it. I resolved to walk along it until the sunlight gave out, or I reached a corner.

It was a pleasant walk. The birds sang and the shade under the trees tempered the heat. I could see a herd of deer a little way off, all of them lying calmly at rest. A family of rabbits grazed; I walked so softly I did not disturb them. I walked with such unwary joy, and a deeper feeling of peace, that I did not notice the corner till I had rounded it, nor that the light had fled and given the forest back to Night. I must hasten back to the chestnut tree. That stood by the road, at least. I might even chance upon a late-travelling waggoner who would carry me to Myrah. I turned in my tracks and was confronted by the terrible marriage of oncoming night and the forest’s own shadows. The tranquil animals were gone with the sun.

Soon I came to a parting of ways, one I did not remember. Surely I had walked along the only track? I took the left fork, certain that it led in the direction of the tree at the Y. I walked fast and held my head high. I did not look behind me nor to right or left. The track led me on but I never found the chestnut tree, only another division of roads. This time, in near-panic, I took the right-hand fork. And so continued, faster, left then right, alternately cursing myself for a fool and praying for my own safety

because soon there must be a junction at which the girl could safely be set down to continue her journey. Then, free of her, he would also be released from his unlovely desires. Men found themselves in court for less.

The road was sunlit and empty. It wound below steep vineyards and above a little stream buried in dusty summer boskage: he should be enjoying this, not behaving like a guilty fugitive. But she – he glanced – looked happy enough.

The morning, which was almost afternoon, had continued difficult. Leaving behind them the shabby hotel and the simpleton taking the air on its steps, he had explored Avallon with Alice. They came to a busy café, sat at a pavement table and ordered pastries and lemon tisanes. He did his duty, and bought a picture postcard of Avallon to send his wife.

‘What’s the date?’ he asked Alice.

‘June 25th – Wednesday, all day.’

‘Of course. Yesterday went on for ever.’

A red currant from the barquette she had eaten was stuck to Alice’s upper lip. It looked like a glistening drop of blood. He leaned across the table and wiped it away with his handkerchief.

‘I’ll go and ‘phone Dad.’

‘Do you know how – in French?’

‘I do, Guy. Yes,’ she said confidently. She left him and went into the café. In her absence he contemplated her, the little he knew: When he’d asked her the date a faint frown had appeared, and quickly cleared from her brow. He could imagine that frown in class as she worked at her lessons; he could visualize inky fingers, the rows of girls, the uniforms.

Quickly, untidily, he wrote bland platitudes on the postcard and addressed it.

He was startled from a second reverie when Alice swung out of the café. The first thing he noticed was the length of her legs, brown in the daylight against the white of her shorts. Perhaps she wore these briefest of coverings on the tennis courts at school?

She sat down opposite him and played with the packets of sugar in the bowl.

‘Have you finished your postcard?’

‘Yes – I’ll post it now, before I forget.’

‘Poor old man!’

‘Alice?’ Now he would ask the question. ‘Alice, how old, exactly, are you?’

She smiled, not innocently.

‘Fifteen,’ she said.

‘Come on! You must be seventeen – at least. Don’t tease.’

‘I was born on April the first, nineteen seventy-five.’

‘Come on!’ he’d said again, angrily.

So now they were driving, nearly parallel with the auto-route it was true, but seemingly deeper and further into the French countryside.

‘Where does this road go?’ he asked. ‘Look at the map.’

‘Yes, Mr Parados.’

It took her moments. She was very quick – both to start a hare or follow one up.

‘It goes to your village, the one you’re looking for – Coeurville.’

‘But I was going to drop you somewhere – where you could get another lift!’

‘It’s OK. It’s only Wednesday.’

‘I am going to visit an old friend.’

‘It’s OK, I said. I’ll stay in the car.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Yes, Mr Parados.’

He ignored her.

‘Fuck, my bloody hands are hurting like buggery.’

They were there, had arrived in Coeurville. Automatically, he had slowed the car when they passed the sign. He drove sedately into the square. His sudden blast of irritation was gone with the bad language, though the tendons still ached. He was purged and limp.

‘I’m sorry, Alice.’

‘’S all right. Temperamental writer!’

He parked. The place was deserted, the shops and the café shut, though a battered table, under which an old dog slept at full stretch, seemed to await visitors. Guy got out of the car and prowled the square, conscious that he was the anomaly; he and the red machine. Alice too had got out of it and was wandering on the far side of the square, peering into dark windows and the openings of shady passage-ways. She looked as though she belonged, a composed French girl dreaming out the heat. He sighed. Her hair shone in the sun, all the long length of it. She needs a boy, he thought, one of those tawny young lions one sees prowling at the sea-side, someone who won’t be irritated by her silliness.

In the centre of the square, a war memorial rose out of a bright bed of magenta and scarlet petunias. He went closer to it. It was unusual. Three figures, Victory, Hope and Liberty lay one upon the other, and Victory, who flourished a sword, pressed Hope (to death it seemed) beneath him, while the figure of Liberty, far from being the usual resplendent Marianne, lay at the bottom of the heap and was angular and distressed. He glanced again at Alice, paused now outside the shuttered café. He saw a blind fly up, and the glass door opening. Alice disappeared inside.

Then he was alone in the silent square. He looked around him once more and willed the village to awake, but nothing stirred except the dog which got to its feet and also disappeared inside the café. The shop next to it was a general ironmonger’s and then came the bakery and patisserie. That was all, except for the butcher’s shop on his left, where a small horse’s head sign indicated that this particular butcher killed and cut up horses. He went to find Alice.

She was speaking in French to a woman, something about a gypsy, ‘la romanicelle’, the Romany woman: she was asking the way to Helen’s house. In Avallon, apart from one hesitant ‘Merci’, she had let him do all the talking and to hear her now, with laughter and complicity in her voice, fluently conversing, shocked him more than had her precocious sexuality. Of course she would, with a father resident in the country. A cup of black coffee stood on the counter in front of her and, as he came in, she turned to him and smiled and the French woman began to prepare another coffee.

‘You haven’t far to go,’ said Alice in English. ‘It’s the old presbytery and it’s just by the church.’

‘Helen’s house?’

‘Yes. The fortune-teller’s house. She is well-known here – ask Madame.’

He spoke to the woman: ‘Good day, Madame,’ he said in French. ‘She tells me you know Helen Lacey – la voyante?’

The woman, who had a broad, strong face, turned and looked him in the eye. ‘Hélène, Mme Dinard, yes,’ she said. ‘The girl is correct. Yes, the fortune-teller. A suitable profession for a gypsy, but – she owes everything to that man.’ She put his cup of coffee on the counter.

He lifted the cup and drank gratefully, feeling the warmth of the liquid flowing through him and the ache ebbing from his hands.

‘She is married?’

‘You can call it marriage.’

‘To Georges Dinard?’

‘Yes. The butcher, there – the horse butcher.’

Alice gently touched him. ‘You go,’ she said, ‘and I’ll wait here. It will be better.’

‘Wait in the car if you have to. It isn’t locked. Here –’ He gave her a two hundred franc note. She suddenly hugged him and kissed him on the lips.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And, by the way, I am seventeen – last April.’

He left her in the café and walked swiftly across the square and along the dappled street, where lime trees grew in dry beds between the pavement and the road, until he came to the church. That ‘Thank you’ of hers – it had been like a farewell, a kind of ‘Thanks for everything’. He had no idea if she were now telling the truth about her age.

The church looked abandoned. It was neglected and weeds grew on the roof. There was absolutely no sound, no notices, no indication that it was ever used. The door was shut and locked. He’d forgotten this was usual. The key would be lodged in some obscure house miles away. He thought of entering the church. Not to pray, God no, but as an interval, a break in the journey between Alice and Helen.

Beyond the church, a pair of scarred stone pillars marked the entrance to the Old Presbytery. He wondered where the priest lived now; perhaps, as in his own village, in a new house.

The gates were open; sagged, in fact, on lax hinges against dark evergreens. He walked up the short pathway to the front door and lifted his hand to the bell, noticing as he rang it how the paint lay flaked and twisted on the wood, weathered into many shades of green. He felt a hot quietude swell and billow towards him from inside the house, a silence made absolute by the noise of the bell. If, after all this, there was no one at home! He listened. He waited; glanced to right and left. Like those in the square, these tall windows were closely shuttered.

Treading carefully, like an animal which wishes to hide, he crept to the nearest pair of shutters and pulled on one of them. The window behind it was open and, as he peered in, the smell of the house came to meet him, a blend of dusty warmth, stale incense, roses and her perfume, ‘Sortilège’. The dusky room was crowded with large pieces of furniture and he felt a child’s dread: some other place that he remembered intervened between the room before him and his present intentions. His mother’s house had also been crammed with massive pieces of oak and mahogany; but here were also statues, two gilded and oddly decadent humaniform lamp-bearers, an Ethiopian dwarf and an Egyptian hawk-headed god; and a bronze nude who concealed her pudendum with a caressing hand. The rose-scent came from a bowl of spent and faded beauties whose petals lay scattered on the floor.

He withdrew; pushed the shutter to. Perhaps at the back of the house –

There was no one in the garden at the rear. A mulberry tree filled up most of the yellowed lawn; the flowers in the long beds drooped in the heat and roses scrambled, overtopping a wall. He saw that a part of the area he had first taken for scorched grass was a yellow towel, and walked up to it. Someone had been sunbathing there: a tube of sun cream lay by the towel and the towel itself was spotted with what at first he took for blood, the juice of the mulberries. For a moment he considered the pleasures of eating ripe mulberries in such an advantageous position – they might drop into a waiting mouth – then, looking up into the tree, saw that the mulberries were still green. The stains, then? He shrugged inwardly, turned and walked toward the house.

A porch with benches in it shaded the back door and on one of them stood a red-splashed mixing-bowl. The door itself was open; beyond it a shadowy hall with the inside of the front door at the far end, stairs, open doors to left and right. Guy raised his hand to knock.

He saw Daniel, his second son, walking towards him and was bewildered. Reality intervened; comprehension.

‘Dominic,’ he said. ‘You are Dominic?’

(What would he say, the tall fair-headed boy – Helen’s son – his son – the true love child?)

‘Hi, Dad!’

Guy was shocked: the accent was American. But now the boy was close. What should he have said: ‘My son, my son!’ with tears – of joy? He held his arms out in a gesture of welcome. This boy was taller than Daniel – already. And two years younger? His brain made frantic calculations and Dominic, smiling from Helen’s fathomless brown eyes, walked into his embrace. Kisses, one, two, three – he was almost French. Dominic smiled properly, his teeth virginal and even against his year-round skier’s tan.

‘Mom said you’d be here today,’ he said. ‘She was in the yard, in the garden.’

Guy, overcome at last and assailed by the lost legions of the past, spoke carefully.

‘I am very glad to see you.’

(He has my nose and build, he thought. The rest is Helen.)

‘Great. No problem.’ At least he sounded like a normal teenager. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Er, no. I don’t think so.’

‘Later then? You want to see Mom.’

‘I do want to see your mother. Very much.’

‘And you’re worried. I’m what you hoped for, but I’m not. I learned my spoken English from Georges. He was in Chicago for a while.’

‘Georges?’

‘Ma’s Lilo.’

‘What?’

‘Live-in-lover. You know.’

‘Oh. Yes. The butcher.’

‘That’s him, the horse-butcher. She’s in the vardo. You can go there if you like. It’s in the orchard, there’s a gate in the garden wall. See you later!’

A fleeting memory of Alice Tyler jumped at him, and was gone. He forgot her. He was wholly lost, as helpless as he had been years ago, when he had first seen Helen on a country bus and, dismounting at her stop, had followed her – home, as he thought, but actually down a long and winding lane which led eventually into the secretive valley of the little river Char. She had stopped on the pack-horse bridge and waited for him –

Soon afterwards the worst and best ten months of his life had begun.

Now, seventeen years later, he was walking to her through a sunlit afternoon garden in France.

He had wanted to fuck her there and then, in the February snows beside the river, but she, taking him by the hand, had led him to the black-painted vardo in the old cattle-drift, had made him her apprentice. Had made him her slave. It wasn’t till June –

He opened the door in the garden wall. A skewbald horse was grazing in the orchard. The sleeping van, the vardo, stood a little way away, close beside a cherry tree. Ripe fruit brushed its curving roof. It was identical with the original, the one which had burned; an exact copy, down to the golden suns and moons around the door. He panicked. The van was so much like.

Her face, as dark and perfect as it had been that first time, rose up in the doorway. She still had her incredible cataract of hair. It fell straight down from a centre parting and then curled upon her shoulders like water rebounding: the sign of a gypsy sorceress. She leaned upon the half-doors and watched him approach. She said nothing. He trembled in his expensive canvas shoes. She is still dressed, he thought, in that crazily beautiful mix of antique clothes: she is the epitome of a gypsy-woman.

Helen looked down at him.

‘You always come when I call,’ she said.

‘Don’t mock me. I came to see Dominic.’

‘Yes! You came to see the boy.’

Her voice had deepened a little, against his memory.

‘Come in,’ she said, and opened the doors. He stepped up into the van. The interior was dim and heavily perfumed. Her crystal ball and tarot cards lay on the folding table and her lucky chank shell stood on the shelf above the bed; the paperbacks were there as well and, incredibly, a soft leather-covered manuscript book which looked very like the diary of Lèni la Soie. He admired the turned and carved woodwork, the shiny stove and the patterned china; the lace edgings on the sheets and the crocheted bedspread.

‘It’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘It looks the same –’

‘It is the same.’ She gave no explanation but seated herself on the bed and waved a hand toward her chair. He sat down.

‘Now, welcome, Guy. The years between us have vanished today. Our son has brought us both here.’

‘He is a fine young man.’

‘He was born of a sorceress and fathered by a story-teller. Would he be ordinary?’

‘I suppose not.’

Helen stood up to light the oil lamp upon the cupboard. She lifted the lit lamp down and held it by its heavy base; the yellow light illuminated her dark skin and made it glow like burnished bronze. Guy could not see a mark or a line upon her face. Her lips were as softly full as they had been when she was only twenty-two.

‘I am thirty-nine, Guy. Am I still beautiful?’ she asked him.

He breathed in and held the breath a long moment.

‘Yes,’ he said, eventually, when he had studied her as if she were the Mona Lisa or one of Titian’s heavenly nudes. ‘Yes. The only thing which has changed is your voice. It has become melodious, a contralto holding your every experience.’

‘Good. Do you love me, Guy?’

He could not find a ready answer to this question, and hesitated. She intervened.

‘Oh, I know you have “loved” a lot of women.’

He still could not find an answer but, groping in his mind for words, found one he thought might do.

‘I certainly love my memory of you – but when the vardo was burned: at first, I thought you had died in it.’

‘The police did not discover my remains!’

‘But you had gone. I had to reconstruct my life. There was a void in it.’

‘I am glad you no longer love me, Guy, for I have lived with Georges Dinard for nearly ten years and it seems like eternity.’

‘You brought me all the way to France to tell me that?’

‘As you said, you have come to visit Dominic.’

Helen set the lamp on the table and sat close by him on the locker top. He stared at her face, and its shadow which the lamplight threw high up the wall. Her beauty was supernatural; he had never seen another woman close on forty with a face like that. There was no artifice about it, no cutting or stretching, no clever making-up. It was the face of a young woman, and as such puzzled him. She divined his thoughts.

‘If you had come to the house ten minutes earlier, you would have surprised me lying naked in the sun,’ she said, ‘and you would have seen that nothing has changed. You would also have embarrassed me. As you know, Romany women are modest and do not show themselves to strangers.’

‘Helen! You are cruel.’

‘And you are an old philanderer; but you are the father of my son. We will drink a toast to the past at dinner this evening. You’ll stay in the house.’

‘I must fetch my car from the square and I have a – er – companion.’

‘Of course you have. Think of the old days, Guy. You were an adulterer then. I made you one.’

He closed his eyes to avoid her, but could not avoid the things she spoke of and roamed the gallery of his mind, pausing now and then before portraits and pastoral scenes. He saw the dished summit of Karemarn Hill, the craggy circle of hawthorns extending their ragged shadows under the stars; snow, and himself cold, alone. He saw the same trees bright with blossom and a full Spring moon, the twelve naked witch-women dancing round him, backs turned, legs leaping, buttocks muscular, flat, rounded, heavy –

Helen spoke into his echoing mind. ‘Those were the days – of youthful adventures!’ she said. ‘But now you see clearer visions than I do. Why not show me your power? Tell me a story!’

‘Very well.’

His eyes remained closed. It was easier thus to invent, and it prevented him from seeing her burning beauty. He began to tell her a story:

‘Once upon a time, as they say in Malthassa and other unmapped countries of the mind – once, then, upon a fine midsummer’s evening, Koschei came upon Brother Fox perambulating the cloister. He was young and still without discipline and the Brother, whose profession was to instil self- and other disciplines in the novices, was of middle age; but both men felt the lightness and cheer which the warm evening induced. Brother Fox paused so that Koschei could come up with him.

‘“Look, Corbillion,” he said. “Even the moths are hungry – see the fat moon moth feeding on the honesty flowers in the garth, and the night-hawk on the woodbine.”

‘“I,” Koschei responded dreamily, “Do not hunger in that way. Neither marchpane nor sugar, not tender veal nor a bloody beefsteak would satisfy me. I am in love.”

‘The sly Brother held his long sleeve up against his mouth and laughed quietly into it. At length, recovering, he said,

‘“With whom, my Cavalier Corbillion – or am I bold to ask?”

‘“With Woman, with every She, with the Female and the Feminine – the Sex itself,” answered Koschei.

‘“And none of these in particular?”

‘“There is –” Koschei began and, stifling the sentence and the thought that provoked it before they were fully born, began again,

‘“Any,” he said, “would satisfy me tonight – young, old, fair or foul, in her prime or past it.”

‘Brother Fox looked sideways at the young novice and admired the white teeth which gently bit into the fleshy, lower lip, the dark, jutting nose and the black curling hair which, against every rule of the Order, had been teased into ringlets and dressed with perfumed oil. Indeed, the heavy perfume dizzied the monk.

‘“You are an agreeable sight yourself,” he murmured and, speaking more loudly, said,

‘“I know where to find a pretty something which will quench your fire and satisfy your pride. Return secretly to your cell and wait there. When I return with the prize, she shall knock three times.”

‘The newly risen moon shone into the cloister garth and Koschei marvelled as he looked at its unwavering light and at the pallor it lent the bright flowers. Everything, the stones, the plants, the arches of the cloister and their two faces, his and Brother Fox’s, had been turned silver or black. Brother Fox winked lewdly at him, half dispelling the magical mood, and padded off in the direction of the town. Koschei returned silently to his cell.

‘In Espmoss, at the sign of the Rampant Lion in Grope Lane, Brother Fox concluded his negotiations. The midsummer madness was full on him and the moon shone bright in the street outside; or else why did he spend his own coin and risk his reputation for sternness and severity to please his favourite Novice? He had chosen the woman as one might a peach, for colour and ripeness and for the complex odours which assailed his keen nose when he bent his head and applied that huge organ to her silk-shrouded bosom. He pinched Ysera carefully on the buttocks, paid over his silver to the bawd, and brought the wench home to the cloister.

‘Koschei sat quietly on his mattress of straw and thought about Woman, soft where he was hard, tender where he was vigorous, submissive where he was masterful. The moon shone on his windowsill and a narrow ray of its light penetrated the cell and lit a square of flagstones by the door. At length, that door was thrice tapped and a scented, warm and breathing bundle of silks propelled into the room by the plump hand of Brother Fox. The door closed. Koschei did not hear Brother Fox’s footsteps as he walked away; the monk might still be eaves- or, rather, hinge-dropping, peering through the crack with a hot and beady eye. Koschei did not care: Ysera stood before him, packed in her silks like a surprise parcel. She had on a veil, and a wrapper of silver, but her face was dark like his and her veilings shrouded her upper body only for her lower was encased in tight trousers which shimmered as she gently moved, eyeing him. He had never before seen a woman trousered. The sight was almost too much for him. Her curves, her differences, her fascinating sex, all were revealed as the garment writhed and glittered with her movements which, every second, became bolder and more seductive.

‘“I dance for you,” she whispered.

‘Koschei reached out and took her in his arms. He untied her first veil, and her second, and kissed her on the lips. Then, turning his head the better to kiss her tiny, right ear, he saw a shadow tremble and settle itself across the square of moonlight on the floor. The Fox! But wait – it was no man’s shadow, being female and at once sinuous and slender. For a moment he thought it must belong to Ysera but, no, her shadow and his were twined together at the edge of the room. His ardour faded, his desire fell away; he did not kiss the ear of the pretty whore in his embrace but pushed her from him and stared into the night beyond the window, where stood the owner of the intrusive shadow –

‘A woman, leaning casually against the tracery. She was naked and her long hair fell down her back in a great cascade and was as white and pallid as the moon’s light; she had her back to him and her hands were upraised to her head, one holding a brush and the other a comb. All Koschei’s passion and his firm resolve deserted him. He did not want Ysera nor any other woman, kind or cruel, but this one, this enigma who stood so carelessly outside his window, and he concentrated on the splendour of her hair. He wished to kneel down and worship this Unknown and felt his heart and soul dance merrily together in his chest.

‘“You must go,’ he told Ysera and threw her silks back at her. “Go!”

‘“But, lord,” she said entreatingly, “Oh new Beloved, Best of Men – Bright Youth, how can I leave such a one as you before I have seen the manner of your make?”

‘“Go to the Brother who brought you here. His appetite surely exceeds mine now; he will satisfy you lickerishness.”

‘“Very well.” Ysera bowed her head. “Yet – be blessed, young Novice, and enjoy whatever life brings henceforward – even your pain and your longing which, I see, is for the unattainable and not for common women like myself. Farewell.”

‘“Good bye,’ said Koschei, hardly aware of her going.

‘Now the door was shut and he alone again; but with this dream, this vision, at his window. Should he call out to it, approach it – touch it through the unglazed window-arch? He knelt on his mattress and held up his hands in prayer. The Unknown stirred and, as she turned toward him, let down her hair to cover her nakedness. He recognized her, his sister-neophyte, Nemione Sophronia, chaste star and lodestone of the novice-class, daughter of the town’s chief magistrate, Ninian Baldwin.

‘Koschei shivered on trembling knees and felt his whole body shake. For an instant she was there, solid, tangible – but he would never be able to prove that now – and then she was gone. No one was there in the cloister outside the window, nothing but the arabesques of stone and the empty roundels carved by chaste monks long ago; nothing but the moonlight setting the cloister garden ablaze with its consuming, dazzling white light. He looked down and saw that, although Nemione had disappeared, her shadow still lay on the floor of his cell. Marvelling, exhausted, he stretched himself out beside it, laid one hand on the shadow’s empty breast and slept the heavy, sweat-exuding sleep of the damned. But, in her own cell, the false Novice of the Order and true of the magic Arts woke still and –’

Guy faltered and stopped speaking. Opening his eyes, he saw the dimly lit interior of the vardo and the gypsy, Helen Lacey, who touched his lips with a cold forefinger and said,

‘Amen! But softly now; be still.’

His head swam. She, as enigmatic and beautiful as his creation, Nemione, smiled with a dozen curved and lovely sets of lips. The mirrorwork on her bodice reflected his myriad dazed faces.

‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ he said. ‘It’s nerves.’

‘You are all right now.’

He felt steady, back at the reins. She, he realized, had willed him calm.

‘Shall I go on?’

‘No. I have enough – it is old stuff, that.’

‘Yes, from Koschei’s First Pilgrimage.’

‘Old matter,’ Helen mused, ‘ancient and far-off, full of the magic of your fantasies, Nemione and Koschei compounded of my dreams and yours. Us. We, as we were but are no more. You and I as we might be if – if all the world were paper and every tree had golden leaves and every flower a pearl at its heart. If. But. To no purpose. Besides, Koschei is not in the Cloister. He is in the Forest.’

He did not understand and continued to stare at her, mesmerized by her dark eyes. He used to call them ‘snake’s eyes’. They were still that, bottomless pools in which he saw the tiny twin images of himself.

‘My Love,’ he whispered. ‘My one Truth.’

Helen’s breathing changed: the even gusts became deep snatching breaths.

‘Don’t!’ she cried. ‘Is it not enough to have possessed my body a hundred times, and my soul with your words?’

He looked away, at her velvet skirt, her rings, her soft, mirrored breast to which, he noticed, was pinned a small, gold cross. It looked gimcrack and poor amongst the finery; but such, he thought, was once my talisman too. He should ask her why she wore it there, beside the pagan glories, but something else distracted him: a thin sliver of light had pierced the darkness of her bed beside him. It was moonlight, the moonlight he had conjured in his tale and so, since the curtains which covered the window over the bed were only half-drawn, it had crept into and enchanted the small, close room, touching the many crystals there, the looking glasses, the glossy china and Helen’s agonized face.

‘Leave my vardo now,’ she commanded. ‘Before it is too late.’

She folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head. He thought, I cannot bear to go; but I must. The intimacy of mind is over, she has some other task and does not want me here, a distraction – at least I am that. Should I return to Dominic? – and Alice. The remembrance of Alice’s youth flowed into and tantalized him. He had abandoned her in the afternoon; hours had passed.

He stood up, unfolding his body with care.

‘You feel your age,’ said Helen. ‘Never mind: those aches and pains will pass. She helps.’ Though he looked at her when she spoke, she kept her eyes downcast. Perhaps she was able to see him, all the same? And who did she mean by ‘she’? – herself, Nemione, or the bright moon?

‘Dominic will show you your room,’ she said.

She did not speak again nor seem inclined to speak, though he waited. He sighed and left her, descending the three wooden steps of the vardo into an orchard bewitched by night and by the scents of honeysuckle and tobacco flowers. The other perfume, ‘Sortilège’, the distillation of their vanished hours together was in his pocket. He took it out and left it on the top step. The house, too, was quiet and shadow-haunted. He found his way along the hall and opened the door on the left, the one which had first disgorged and brought him Dominic.

The bright light startled him. A nocturnal creature, an old badger caught in headlights, he stood still and blinked rapidly. Alice and Dominic were sitting side by side on a big sofa, cans of beer and Coke on a coffee table in front of them. The television was on. Dominic turned lazily and smiled at him; Alice was also smiling.

‘She kept you ages!’ Alice said. ‘There must have been a lot to talk about.’

‘Seventeen years’ worth,’ he said. He could not begin to tell what had really taken place.

‘And now you are tired?’ his son said. The innocent remark pressed a trigger in him, resentment at their sparkling, hopeful youth.

‘Where did you find her?’ he testily asked Dominic.

‘In the square. She was guarding your mean machine. You should have brought them both with you, up to the house, Dad –’ (Guy winced at the familiarity) ‘–You’d left the keys in her. It was too much: I drove her round for you – she’s on the drive.’ He rolled sideways in his seat and extracted Guy’s keys from his pocket. ‘There you go – Dad.’

‘Thank you.’ Guy took the keys and stowed them deep and safe, in his own pocket. ‘I suppose you can drive – surely you’re not old enough?’

‘Oh, I’m old enough. I’m not old enough to be on the road by myself, that’s all.’

Guy perceived that he was frowning. Alice looked up at him, such a melting look of pure azure tenderness. If she went on with it, he would be embarrassed in front of his own son.

‘I’ll go and see what damage you’ve done,’ he said. ‘I’ll take a walk before I crawl into my bed – you won’t mind amusing Alice for a little longer.’

‘Oui, Papa!’ The boy was still grinning. No one should have such perfect teeth, Guy thought. He could not help grinning back and so retreated, disturbed, abashed. He let himself out by the front door. How stupid to let his exuberance irritate me, he thought, and felt a new surge of annoyance when he saw the Audi, perfectly parked with all its windows closed and its doors locked. He peered through the windscreen. Nothing was damaged. He walked round the car gently kicking its tyres.

At least the absurd confrontation, if that was what it had been, had put his refreshed desire for Alice back to sleep.

– But he had forgotten to ask where he was to sleep. And she?

He walked past the church and on, beyond the confines of the village. The road led to St Just and the Burgundy Canal. Maybe he would go as far as the water, see what a French cut looked like by night. He was walking roughly north-east, away from the route nationale, away from the autoroute. He passed beneath some evergreens. Their clean scent was unavoidable and he inhaled it pleasurably. The trees hung low over the road and, looking at them against the dark backdrop of the sky, he puzzled at their shape and wondered were they cedars? cypresses? The moon must have set, already. Then what time was it? He consulted his watch, pulling back his sleeve and holding the small dial on his wrist close to his face. Without his glasses he was blind, in this respect. Yet this quiet was what he needed, an interval to stroll in, a period of time alone between Helen and Alice, before bed, before the question of Alice’s bed came up. He was still staring into the additional night of the trees when a soft noise behind him made him turn his head. The noise was scarcely audible, like someone trying to move silently and avoid breathing.

‘Hello!’ he said.

He could make out nothing certain, no animal or passer-by against the darkest shade; but he was sure he was no longer alone. Another man waited – there, where the branches dipped down; more, this man, whom he could barely see, wore a ragged beard. Guy walked toward him, one fist raised; walked through him: indeed, there was no other there beside the dark, the shadows and his imagination. He smiled to himself and shrugged, turning his pensive gaze once more upon the trees, for surely they did not deceive him. They were a pair of arbor vitae, one much taller than the other.

I thought: if I climb the biggest tree I shall be safe from the beasts of the night and can rest, if not sleep, till morning. I had a second thought: in Ayan I had heard one market woman tell another that every ring of earth round every tree has its guardian puvush, and I visualized a legion of them ranged out all over the world. I stood still in my fear and someone spoke,

‘Helloo! Master Corbillion.’

Erchon, the slippery truant, come into the forest on my trail to save me!

It was not Erchon. A creature greater and blacker than any nightmare or sea monster stood beside me. I tried to make it out in the darkness, but all my diminished senses could tell me was that it loomed, huge, and smelled rank as a sewer after a feast day.

‘What are you?’ I cried. ‘Why have you come to pester me in my trouble?’

‘You might strike a light; then, you could see me,’ the creature said.

At once, I began to fumble in my pockets for my tinder-box.

‘Not like that. Try Nemione’s way. I believe in you.’

I think it strange, to this day – a portentous action – that I obeyed this unknown of the forest and the night. I knew then neither incantation nor pass, but I tried (despite my fear of the unseen creature) to empty my mind of all distractions and concentrate on the idea of fire, of heat, of flame, of matter consumed by searing brands. I bent my consciousness inside myself and searched in all the far reaches of my being for the strength to make the first spark. I journeyed in the deep recesses of my mind and, when I had gathered hope, need and momentum and they threatened to burst from me and destroy everything before them, myself also, I enclosed these inchoate forces in the iron channel of my reason and sent them forth with a softly breathed ‘Go!’

A spark sprang out of the darkness at my feet and from it a tall yellow flame arose.

‘Excellent!’ said my companion, laid his hand upon my shoulder and gave it a clumsy pat which felt like the shaking a terrier gives a rat. My new-born light showed me that his hand was a mighty paw and that the rest of him matched the hairy appendage for strength and hideousness. The mouth from which his scholarly voice issued was a red maw, lipped with thick folds of leather, toothed like a tiger.

I cried his name fearfully, ‘Om Ren!’ and, losing all my new-found power, began to mutter a woman’s charm to placate and appease him.

‘Peace, master,’ the wild man said. ‘If you were a mere soldier, albeit a Green Wolf and one of the best – if, as I say, you were a common man, I would have let you continue your hopeless wandering. You would have died.

‘But I have stepped into your path because I wish to speak to you. Look upon my intervention as happy – but also as the beginning.’

Here, he paused to scratch his genitals, outdoing the butcher in lewdity and grossness. He gave me a terrible grin.

‘I am a beast in body,’ he said. ‘Filthy as any hermit, disgusting of habit as a pariah dog; and cursed with a mind as pure as snow-water. Listen to me:

‘You, Koschei Corbillion, have demonstrated your undiscovered powers to me. Will you continue on your way to join battle with the Myran forces and perhaps meet death as certainly as if I let you wander into the wilderness? You have twenty-five years only but you are an adept, of both praying and fighting; in your short life you have already been two men, a priest and a soldier, yet you are the same Koschei. Few are given the ability to pass through successive transformations and remain themselves.

‘Do I speak riddles?’ Here, the Om Ren smiled his ghastly smile again.

‘I follow you,’ I said.

‘Then, to continue: this chameleon quality of yours is one the Archmage himself would give a sight of his soul for. It is searched for and sought after; a man must be born with it, of course: it cannot be bestowed. You possess it. Will you waste it?’

‘Do you mean that I might practise magic?’

‘“Practise magic” indeed! Magic is not Medicine. You are Magic. It surrounds, inhabits and becomes you – you must learn its particular language, that is all.’

It was my turn to mock:

‘All?’ I said. ‘To learn that “language”, as you call it, takes a lifetime.’

‘Best begin!’

‘How do I know you are not a false spirit of the forest, a dissembling will o’the wisp or jack o’lantern sent to lead me astray?’

The great beast laughed, or howled rather.

‘Do I look like the ignis fatuus?’

‘Why should I believe your words?’ I countered.

‘It was you who made the fire.’

We both looked down at the flames, which burned in contained fashion between us.

‘And you also,’ said the Om Ren, ‘who has begun to build the Memory Palace by the cloister at Espmoss.’

‘That is just a small house, a hut, filled with certain objects which hold associations for me.’

‘Is it? When you walk in there, it fills with the ghosts of your past, does it not? – with the presences of your mother and father, the little dog you had when you were a boy. You have made love to Nemione Baldwin there, have you not?’

‘Alas, only to her doppelganger.’

‘But you remember doing so, do you not? Can you distinguish between memory, imagination and clairvoyance?’

‘Yes!’

‘We will make trial of that assertion. Look into your fire! What do you see there?’

I crouched over the fire involuntarily and looked into its red heart. I suppose the Om Ren made me, with his crystal, matchless mind.

For a moment or two, I saw nothing beside the glowing coals; but soon I saw them divide and fall away as if they were the stones of a breached city wall and I looked through the doorway thus made. I saw a tower, absolute in its loneliness. It stood, tall, grey, and topped by a small turret with a conical roof, on a promontory above the ocean. Its sole door was twenty feet up the wall, and there was no ladder or stair. High above that was a slit window. I looked into it. What I saw filled me with disquiet.

I saw Manderel Valdine, Prince of Pargur and Archmage of Malthassa, in all his solitary glory. Cloaked (against the cold) in furs and robed (against any suspicion that he might be an ordinary mortal) in cloth-of-gold studded with brilliants, he was conjuring before a great map stitched together from many parchments. The curve of the wall repeated itself in the curve of the map fixed to it. It seemed leagues across that wall of map.

Valdine made arcane gestures with his staff.

‘Show me!’ he cried. ‘Show me the place of safety!’ Sweat stood in dewdrops on his broad forehead. The bald dome of his scalp glistened. He groaned with the effort of his spell, like a man in torment, like a man in ecstasy.

‘Valdine casts a spell,’ I told the Om Ren. ‘A terrible spell, surely of plague or destruction, his face is so white and red.’

‘Then listen carefully!’

The Archmage in my fire bent down, slowly lowering himself to the floor. He abased himself before his magic map, making desperate plea to Urthamma: he, the blessed, cursed demon, is the god of magicians. A column of light arose from the body of the Archmage, a twisting column composed perhaps of his golden robe or of the very essence of his manhood. I saw Urthamma standing twined within it, great and glorious, glowing like a lighted brand above the crouched figure of Valdine.

‘You try me!’ said the god.

The man on the floor mumbled wordlessly.

‘I tell you, Valdine,’ the god said from a mouth like a broken crossbow. ‘Your desire for immortality is an embarrassment on Mount Cedros. I am a laughing stock.

‘However –’ Here, he yawned and clawed his fiery tresses into some sort of order. ‘Look at your map when I am gone. The fair province of SanZu is as good a place as many.’

The god yawned again and, turning widdershins gracefully, disentangled himself from the oriflamme of silken matter and disappeared. Valdine leapt to his feet and I peered hard through the insubstantial window, disappointed because I was too far away to see any detail of the map other than a wedge of lines which seemed to represent a rocky promontory as cruel and precipitous as that on which the Archmage’s spytower stood. I heard Valdine cry ‘Aah, salvation!!’

The vision faded and the magical fire dimmed as if I had exhausted it. I stood in a murky twilight with the hideous man of the forest, who tapped my chest with a horny forefinger.

‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘Valdine deserves his position as Archmage. A formidable show!’

‘But what did you see?’

‘He was using his powers to find a place of absolute safety. He summoned Urthamma!’

‘No such thing – as a place of absolute safety. But what was it that you saw?’

‘I told you. I told you everything I saw, as it happened.’

‘But did it happen? Was it an episode from your imagination, projected into the fire? Was it precognition? Was it memory? Was it mere prestidigitation?’

‘It was a vision.’

‘Ah! Most deceitful of mental processes; most desired. You saw them when you were a religious, did you not – and not always spiritual in content?’

‘They were invariably sacred. I saw the blessed Martyrs at Actinidion and the Saints in Glory; Nemione Baldwin undressed twice only – more holy and more lovely than any Martyr or Saint.’

‘You remember all these visitations, or visions?’

‘I think so.’

‘Then what is the difference between the original and its copy?’

I began to protest. My memories were surely most precious, most detailed, each nuance lovingly built up – embroidered – dwelt upon. I wasn’t sure. If the vision had been less than the memory, would I have remembered it at all? At last,

‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I’m not sure if I know the difference between memory and imagination. As for clairvoyance –’

‘Huzzah!’ the beast thundered. ‘Bravo! Now, as you have satisfactorily proved my point, I will take you to my house and there you will get a meal and a good night’s rest before I set you on the way you should have taken.’

The Wild Man led me by the hand through the dark forest. I was glad he held my hand in his huge paw, content as a child to be led by his nurse for all that my hand was the broad and sinewy gripping instrument of a swordsman. A puvush danced. Nivashi sang to me, leaning up from the streams and marshy places with sad and seductive expressions on their pale faces.

‘Look,’ said the Om Ren. ‘Look and learn from looking; but never touch one. She would burn you instantly to death with her icy touch or, if she felt playful, drag you down to her streambed, lie and let you mount her as you drowned. The puvushi are little better. Their toys are ivy stems and rotting wood. You would have one chance of escape rather than none – if you were lucky.’

He squeezed my hand until it ached.

The Om Ren’s house was a shambling affair as squalid and dishevelled as himself. It did not look like a house but like a great faggot of branches someone had thrown against a tree.

‘The puvush of this tree’s earth is saintly,’ he told me. ‘Peace now, Iron Glance, it is only myself.’

I heard something scratching in the earth. Inside the ramshackle house lay a heap of straw and a long coil of straw rope.

‘My bed and my weapon,’ said the Om Ren proudly. He showed me his larder, a hollow in the tree, and took seeds and nuts from it.

‘Eat!’

I managed to swallow a few dry walnuts and a handful of green wheat. Noticing a big red nut amongst the remaining grains, I stretched out my hand.

‘No!’ the Om Ren suddenly cried. ‘Not that one. It should not be amongst these wholesome fruits. Let me put it away.’ He picked the red nut up himself and tucked it away under the long hairs which covered his belly. ‘That nut could kill you.’

‘I have never seen its like before,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

‘It is called the Ripe Nut of Wisdom. It is nothing of the kind of course, but the peasants tell stories about it. It looks so appetizing.’

‘It does indeed. Is it a deadly poison?’

‘A good one would bring on an attack of the megrims. The one you saw is addled: it is full of the eggs of the black worm and they are fatal if consumed.’

‘It is fortunate that you saw it in time.’

‘Oh, I am a careless fellow. Cankers, toadstools and belladonna arc my daily companions. Have the rotten nut if you will. It may help you. It will bring catastrophic changes if you use it well.’ He retrieved the nut from his body hair. ‘There! Here’s to a fresh intelligence and new wisdom in the world – if you discover how to use the nut!’

I tried, of course, to question him further, but he would not respond and diverted all my queries with uproarious laughter or with his vile bodily habits of scratching his private parts (not at all private in him but hanging there for all to see), his belly and his armpits. His body was obviously a pasture to herds of fleas and lice; for my safety I had to remain with him while the darkness lasted and sleep in his musty bed, where he snored and scratched all night. Yet I thought him a kindly creature, more bark than bite. What use as a weapon was a rope of straw? – and his house was like an unlit bonfire. The wolf in the children’s tale could easily have blown it away and any wildfire which coursed through the forest after a storm would burn it down.

We woke at dawn and breakfasted on the last of the seeds. The Om Ren shambled out to relieve himself against his house and, after a decent interval, I followed him. He glanced in my direction as I urinated and, leavening his words with one of his fearful smiles, said,

‘If I may say so without offence, you Wise Men are poorly endowed. How do your women pleasure themselves on such a tiny thing?’

‘They are very inventive,’ I said.

He laughed and offered me a drink of rainwater from his cupped hands. It was good water, he told me, collected from another hollow in his tree. Treading carefully, that we did not disturb Iron Glance’s slumbers, we left his home. We walked for a while, not long, and soon came to a broad track, which we followed. Though it was lined with tall bents and foxgloves, I did not recognize it.

‘Are you sure this is the way?’ I said.

The Om Ren replied with a wave of his arm. He pointed to a tree in the middle distance and this, I recognized: the chestnut which spread its branches low to the ground, like a woman’s skirt.

‘The Silver Dwarf waits there,’ he said. ‘In hiding. His kind are happier when they cannot see the sky. Listen! A woodbird sings. It is a good omen. Go safe on your way.’

What should I say? Not feebly ‘thank you’ nor yet suggest some temporal reward.

‘I hope you never find yourself the master of the Red Horse,’ I said, intending, by this obscure and convoluted compliment, to wish him a long life.

He laughed, or roared, through his hand – I think he hoped to mute his voice.

‘You mean to say “I hope your skin is never made into a bridle for the mightiest stallion,” I think. It is an honour, Master Corbillion, and I will be already dead, you know. The Ima have access to the power of my kind, even when the wielder of that power is dead.’

‘Well, I hope they have all they need, for a long while yet.’

He gently thumped me. It felt like one of the well-aimed blows of my sparring partner. ‘You won’t get to the battle,’ he said confidently. I protested:

‘I will. You have put me on my road!’

‘You will go to Pargur. I think you have a desire to see the city and a greater desire to interview its prince, the Archmage Valdine.’

‘Have I? I must follow my duty first, wherever it leads me.’

The Wild Man took my hand in his and squeezed it, much harder than he had before.

‘Does that hurt?’

‘Aagh!’

He let me go.

‘You are a self-deceiver, Koschei,’ he said. ‘You are already more than half way to abandoning your life as a Green Wolf, just as you abandoned your life in the cloister.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Certainly. But the dwarf waits under the chestnut tree. He is anxious. You forget how sharp his hearing is.’

I set off along the path, intending to turn and wave. When I looked back, the Om Ren had gone, camouflaged by the forest greenery like a puvush or a deer. I pushed my way under the branches of the chestnut. Erchon was sitting there on the ground, his back against the trunk of the tree and his goods spread out around him, rapier on top.

‘Who were you talking to, Master?’ he asked. ‘A gypsy was it, or an apparition? The Om Ren himself!’

‘Hush, you fool! It was he.’

‘You don’t say?’

‘It was the Wild Man indeed. I was lost in the forest – I have a tale to tell.’

‘It will sound better over breakfast.’ The dwarf got up and rummaged in a woven basket. He fetched out a length of smoked sausage, bread, mustard and beer.

We sat down to eat, safe enough beneath the chestnut tree. I told him as much of my tale as I judged fit, gratified to impress him at last.

‘Perhaps we should go to Pargur before we turn toward the battle and possible death?’ I suggested finally.

‘Perhaps we ought, Sir Green Onetime-Wolf. I should like to see my Lady. She journeys to Pargur.’

‘I should also like to see Nemione!’

‘Then we are agreed?’ said Erchon, and I felt that he had taken hold of my uncertain scheme and made it into a reality.

‘To Pargur!’ I said. ‘But where were you, Erchon, till now? What delayed you on the road?’

‘Oh that is another tale – not so grand perhaps as yours. I was detained in Tanter by a – hold, master. Be still.’ He leaned forward quickly and pressed his ear against the ground.

‘Hooves, wheels,’ he whispered. ‘The Romanies – no, it is a timber waggon. Rest easy. I’ll continue my tale.’

Guy heard the lorry changing gear before he saw it, one of those continental juggernauts sensibly barred from his own country, which now with lights blazing and engine growling threatened to engulf and crush him under its wheels as comprehensively as might any Hindu god-waggon. He jumped back into the hedge, only there was none, and found himself floundering in a dry ditch, strands of barbed wire clutching at his clothes.

When the lorry had gone and he had extricated himself from his predicament – lucky it was a dry night! – he turned back towards the village, comforted by the few lights still showing there, small yellow, homely stars.

‘I bet the bugger never even saw me,’ he muttered, ‘– another careful French driver.’

One of the yellow stars shone out of the downstairs room at the Old Presbytery, the comfortable living-room in which he had left his son and Alice Tyler. The curtains had been drawn back, and the lamplight illuminated a stretch of gravel and his car. A second car, a big saloon, was parked beside it – Georges Dinard’s, he supposed. He heard Alice calling softly, ‘Guy! Guy?’ She was standing outside the open front door, her white shirt gleaming almost as much as her hair.

‘There you are! You missed dinner.’

He went swiftly up to her and put his arms round her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m always abandoning you. Where’s Dominic? Inside?’

‘He went to bed, ages ago. We are to sleep in that room.’ She pointed to a pair of open casements above the dining room into which he had peered in the afternoon; long ago in terms of new experiences: before he had met his son, before he had re-encountered Helen.

‘And Helen?’ he asked Alice. ‘Have you met her?’

‘Oh yes. She cooked for us and there was Bordeaux and a Pouilly Fumée. Georges came back from Lyon.’

They, he thought, are now in bed together. Jealousy crept up and snapped at his heels; he wanted to run into the house, upstairs, to throw the usurper out.

‘She left you some food,’ said Alice.

‘I’d rather go to bed!’

‘OK – this is the way.’ They walked, still joined in their embrace, up the staircase which turned near the top to repeat the layout of the wide passage below. The moonlight, he saw delightedly, had returned to light the passage and to coat Alice with its glamour. A crowd of statues stood elbow to elbow before him.

‘My God!’

‘They belong to Georges. Dominic showed me. There are others in the dining room,’ the girl said innocently. ‘Each one is connected with a death.’

‘That’s sick.’

‘Every artefact is connected with death, isn’t it? Everything passed on when someone dies.’

‘The gypsies burn all the possessions when one of them dies, even the sleeping-waggon.’

‘The vardo, yes. There’s a figure of the god Horus downstairs. Dominic told me it belonged to a man called Paon – who was guillotined for serial murder. In Lyon. In 1884–’

He touched the cold figure of a woodland nymph. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I looked at your book in Avallon, while you slept. Strange to find something of Paon’s here.’

The whispered conversation, or the moonlight, was affecting him with a nervous agitation. He thought Alice relished her revelations too much, though her shoulder felt pleasantly warm under his hand.

‘Just coincidence,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

Their room had bare, polished boards and a wide bed, its white linen inviting. There were no curtains.

‘I’ll close the shutters,’ he said.

Alice caught his arm. ‘Leave them. I want to see you.’ She unbuttoned her shirt. ‘Look! Wouldn’t you prefer her?’

The soft finger of the moonlight reached right across the room and touched the statue of a second nymph, surely the sister of the first. Instead of wild fruits and leaves, this one wore a garland of kingcups and water lilies. The white marble she was carved from had been so highly polished it seemed as though her skin was wet, and they both went up to her and laid exploring fingertips upon her, Guy upon her left breast and Alice upon her right thigh.

‘Magic!’ he whispered. ‘She is you.’

‘No, she isn’t me; not now. She’s a nivasha – like you put in your books.’

‘You know,’ he turned away from the statue to Alice. ‘I don’t think I have ever described one. I imagine them much more deadly, sinister attenuated creatures.’

When he turned to look at the statue again it seemed dead and prosaic, a heavy piece of Victorian sentimentality standing guard over a cupboard door. In the moment of conversation with Alice he had glimpsed her moonlit body under her open shirt. He picked her up and laid her on the bed.

‘We are fortunate,’ he said. ‘Two nights of love under the moon. I want to see you in daylight too, at midday when the sun is hottest.’

‘In a hayfield – in an orchard in the shade of an old tree.’

But moonlight, he thought, best becomes her. He knelt over her. ‘Wait,’ she said and sat up to unfasten the ribbon which concealed the blemish on her neck. The mark looked darker, almost livid. He touched it.

‘It doesn’t spoil you,’ he said.

‘No. How could it? It is a mark of courage.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Because I survived hanging. They imprisoned and tortured me, they tore off my nails one by one. They strung me up on the gibbet outside the town gates, but I did not die – not for another sixty years. I hung till evening and when they cut me down, I had not died.’ Her voice rose triumphantly.

‘You are Alice Naylor,’ he whispered.

‘I am Alice Naylor, Roszi, and Alice Tyler.’

‘Roszi?’

‘Ah, Roszi.’ She gave no further explanation, but held his fingers against the scar on her neck. He could feel slight ridges and troughs, the negative cast of the twisted hemp.

‘Your survival of the hanging has rewarded you, given you a kind of eternity?’ he said but, no doctor or mortician accustomed to horrors, he shivered involuntarily. In the old days, such reverential touching was reserved for ghastly relics, feet of dead saints, dirty bones, crucified hands – which still took place in some holy fanes like Mediterranean churches, temples of the Far East; and this, the guest bedroom of Helen Lacey’s house in Coeurville, the town where he had lost his senses to this odd schoolgirl. She moved his hand away from her neck and held it between her breasts.

‘You understand, Guy Parados,’ she said, ‘because you are yourself abnormal, a storyteller obsessed by his inventions – so much so that you write them down and get them made into books which obsess others. Yes, I am Alice and Roszi and Alice again.’

‘My Roszi?’

‘Go to the top of the class, Mister Author! – but the real nivasha, not the paper one!’ She laughed, almost maliciously. ‘She lives in me alongside the others – just as you are both Guy Kester Parados and Christopher Guy Young.’

It was true, what she said. In a way, he was possessed of many identities and these were only two, the ordinary self he had been born with and to and his hard-won, writer’s persona.

‘Yes, I’ve almost forgotten my real name,’ he admitted.

‘Christopher Guy is a law-abiding Christian husband and father.’

‘Who is Guy Kester?’

‘The writer, the storyteller. My lover!’

‘Winter to cover your Spring!’

‘Autumn perhaps, but hard as frost!’

‘Warm me! Soften me!’

Inside her – Arcadia? Paradise? – he moved slowly and deliberately. He was, as his son had intimated, a man learned in all the skills of life and loving. Alice accepted him now, whatever her first intentions had been, as he accepted her – whoever she was. One of his chief delights was to touch her softly, as if she were his precious, mortal soul, a living talisman which might easily break or melt in his hands.

They rested and slept a little, lightly, lying close. He woke, kissed her and rolled her over so that she fitted him exactly, tucked between his thighs and his chin. He began to kiss her neck, lifting her long skein of hair aside to reveal the skin. The mark of the rope went all the way round, a weird necklace.

‘We might almost be married, newly wed,’ she said drowsily.

‘We are, for tonight at least.’

‘I feel goodness in you, but deeply buried. You could be one of the kristniki, a Twelver – one of the twelve sons of Stanko who fight the witch-host on St John’s Eve.’

‘Christopher probably is. Guy is quite a different other. Once he played the black dog, cold Master Robin to a coven of witches.’

‘Many years ago.’

‘I am here because of it. And Dominic.’ He opened his eyes. They focused lazily, adjusting to the twilit distance between Alice’s neck and the marble nymph. Her sylvan sister stood beside her now, frozen in an attitude of suspense. He blinked and closed his eyes again, too involved with Alice’s body to make sense of what he saw, if it had any sense in this illogical night. Women in childbirth took notice of neither bombs nor portents; he, held more securely than a child deep in Alice’s birth-canal, had no interest in the world beyond it. He abandoned himself to the sensation their conjoined movement produced.

Lying still, exhausted; dead within her, he succumbed to the curiosity which awoke in his mind now that his body was satisfied. He opened his eyes wide. The second nymph, who still stood on tiptoe, surprised in her prurient, lustful eavesdropping, was Helen. The door behind her was open. He could make out the dark shapes of furniture in another room. Perhaps she wants to begin again, bring me another dozen lusty women to serve? he thought.

Helen knelt beside the bed and laid a hand on each of them, himself and Alice.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I knew you were still an adept. Roszi – Alice, you were always a sublime minx.’

‘It is better, far, far better,’ Alice murmured, ‘than my icy spring, or school, or imprisonment – oh far, far more than my golden torture.’

Guy, listening to them, half believed he dreamed; but, no, this body-warmed sheet was real, this golden hair, this small, aroused breast.

‘Love is close to torture, is it not?’ Helen inquired.

‘Ah – yes!’ he said, and Alice echoed him, ‘Yes – ah! – yes.’

To lie with them both, as once he thought he had, sometime, in the witches’ dreaming long ago: inwardly he rehearsed an invitation: Will you join us? – No – Helen, come a little closer – lie down on this side. As if she heard him, Helen drew back and stood by the statue of the nymph.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘But you must not touch!’ He studied her, marble-distant beyond Alice’s warmth and the smell of her pleasure, far away. The body was as perfect as the face. Dawn, which he suspected of trespass in the room, bringing parting, bringing day, made a goddess of her. Here was no slender woodland seducer; no maid of chill waters. She had heavy breasts, a small waist, swelling hips; all of these no older, no less alluring than they had been when she left him at the age of twenty-two. She had the dangerous look of Herodias, the cunning of Jezebel, the beckoning come-hither blatant sexuality of a Salome cast in metal, heated in the fire, poured into an unimpeachable mould.

The pain of desire, which Alice had likened to torture, returned to torment him as he lay looking at her untouchable nakedness, feeling Alice’s pliant flesh and will against him.

‘Why deny me?’ he said. ‘Georges must enjoy you!’

‘Georges. Ah Georges, who slumbers soundly! He understands my predicament – I must go back to him. Sleep!’ Swiftly, she turned away and passed through the doorway. He heard her turn the key. The door was made impregnable and Georges slept with her behind it, behind the thin shield of its panels. Guy lay quiet, entirely limp and relaxed, every part still except his mind. Alice slept. He rehearsed the unquiet night, going over and over its many and intimate details until his imagination was sated. He remembered Alice’s uncalloused feet, her straight toes and her tender earlobes, her waist, her lips, her tongue, her navel: all these asleep beside him. He remembered the bracelet Helen used to wear about her left ankle, her painted toe-nails, the many rings which pierced her neat ears, how he could almost span her waist with his two hands and how her tongue met his; the jewel he had removed with his lips from the deep pit of her navel: all these asleep beside his successor, Georges Dinard.

He remembered the serious young man he once had been and the insatiable rake who still woke in him; the Christian he was and the pagan, the husband and the philanderer. He remembered his books standing in a line at home, all with crimson covers and the distinctive lettering of the legend beneath each title: A Book in the Malthassa Series, by Guy Kester Parados – or Christopher Guy Young whose unremarkable name he had let drop as carelessly as a lost handkerchief. He signed everything now, books, contracts, cheques, with Parados’s name.

The early birds were waking. Words from the first line of The Making of Koschei haunted him: ‘I began building the year the …’ He chased the troublesome ghosts from his mind – he was on holiday, enjoying such a vacation! He fell asleep as the sun came up and turned the cold white statue gold.

Guy woke again because his left hand was aching. The struggle to come fully awake was aggravated by troublesome thoughts of typing and driving. Maybe Sandy’s Chinese balls! He grinned, half asleep. Of course, not Sandy. Alice. And it was Thursday, the third day in France. Alice was lying on his hand. He freed it. The ache continued and his right hand gave a sympathetic twinge.

‘Blast!’ he said. He would get up, walk for a while. Relax and forget it.

The sun was well up. He leaned out of the window, the sill covering his nakedness. Georges Dinard’s car, he was glad to see, was a plain four-door Citroën. It sat like a lumpen ox beside his shiny predator. Vineyards crowded the village and their bright uniformity stretched into the distance, over hill and through valley, meeting whatever tracts of forest stretched out to meet them in a blur of dull and biting greens. When he turned from the window and saw Alice sleeping under the watchful eye of her tutelary nymph he felt at least twenty-five and, simultaneously, as old as a biblical patriarch. David, wasn’t it, who needed a virgin to warm him in his dotage? Alice slept, but maybe Helen was awake, about. He stretched and massaged his hands before collecting the scattered garments which, when they were assembled to clothe him, made up the image the world perceived as Guy Parados.

In the kitchen a cooling pot of coffee was the only sign of life. Guy found a cup and drank some of it black. Outside, the garden was in shade and, suddenly needing the sunlight which had warmed him at the bedroom window, he went out and walked swiftly across the grass until the shadows were behind him. He opened the door which led into the orchard.

The black vardo was closed up. He glanced at and avoided it, striking out for the far side of the orchard where, instead of the vines he expected, a small stand of hazels and other scrubby trees hid a plantation of conifers. An indeterminate but regular noise drew him: it sounded for all the world like a giant drumming deep in the heart of the wood. There was no hedge or other boundary and he walked amongst the trees until he found a ride where tall grasses and a few foxgloves struggled upwards in the dim light. The ground was dry and strewn with old pine needles and cones. He followed the ride and the sound until he came upon a clearing. Here stood a group of ruinous wooden buildings that looked as if they had been old before the wood was planted. Some letters were chalked upon the nearest. When he was close enough to see them properly he made out the single word ‘Arcadie’ and the memories and associations it woke confused him. Someone had written it there as a joke, he supposed.

Ivy made the place picturesque and the early morning sun reached with long fingers into the clearing. The puzzling noise had resolved itself into a regular beat. He stood in the warmth and willed his seething mind blank for precious, restful moments. Relax! On holiday! Then he walked quickly to the barn and looked into it. A man was sawing wood at a small saw-bench powered by a compact little engine. The brassy shine of the engine and the smell of hot oil attracted him. He took a step forward and the man, who was turning to reach for a fresh branch, looked round and gave him Dominic’s insolent grin.

The shock of recognition and of disparity which coursed through Guy’s body made him shout,

‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Calm down, Dad. This is my place. My saw mill.’

‘Saw mill?’ Guy noticed spreading continents of oil stains on his son’s hands and clothing as he repeated the words in bewilderment.

‘Mine, Dad. Wake up! Attention! Where I cut up wood. Some of the trees are big enough for sale now – but I mostly deal with the dead stuff. We burn it in the winter – you must’ve noticed the wood-burners in the house.’

‘Why have you written “Arcadia” on the wall?’

‘It’s always been called that. It’s on the old maps, too. Want a go? That looks a likely branch.’

Guy was grateful for the boy’s invitation. It muted the dismay he felt at this young prodigy’s invasion of his life. He smiled at his son and picked up a sweet-smelling pine bough, heavier than it looked. They would work together at a task, for the first time – no matter that the land and probably the buildings belonged to the unseen, undefined Georges Dinard. He laid the branch across the saw bench.

‘Hold it steady!’ Dominic said. ‘The bench will bring it to the saw.’

Guy hung on, pressing against the branch and feeling the stroke of the engine throbbing through metal and timber. The blade spun on its mount, its teeth reduced by the rotation to a blur. In a moment it would slice into the yellow heart-wood and send fine sawdust flying. He would breathe the pungent scent of the cut. He felt the blade hit and bite. Dominic was staring at him with eyes as dark as Helen’s, the fascinating eyes of the gypsy, swallowing him, drawing him into a fathomless pit. Struggling with his son for mastery, he forgot to watch the wood. It was only when he had wrested his gaze from Dominic’s that he saw the blood on the saw-bench and the divided branch and realized it was his own; that the spinning blade had cut as neatly through his wrists. He saw his son’s shocked face. He saw his two hands lying on the floor and then there was an interval of utter quiet and total darkness. Someone was lifting him, carrying him towards the light. He blinked and closed his eyelids against the brightness. It was night again. The forest surrounded him. A deer fled before him into the silence.

Did Erchon also see the white hart, I wondered. It was a phantom deer, not one of the spotted kind I had seen near the last road. We journeyed separately again, the dwarf and I, not this time because of wayside adventures but because Erchon (so he claimed) had heard his mistress, Nemione, calling him.

‘In daylight?’ I had jestingly asked, ‘or in your dreams?’

‘In bold daylight, Master,’ he had answered. ‘I am only amazed that you cannot hear that lilting voice. It comes clearly to me through the trees.’

Next day he left me, riding high on the withers of a stray woodsman’s horse which he had waylaid. I laughed at him.

‘I shall get there faster,’ I called after him. ‘That runaway will take you to some remote logger’s camp.’

Erchon laughed at me: ‘Not it, Master!’ He clapped his heels against the neck of the horse which flung itself into a gallop and, so, they departed, the little man a flash of quicksilver, the horse shock-maned and wild.

I was tired of the forest, utterly weary of the infinite close ranks of the trees. There is no end to the forest in Malthassa just as the country itself – if that is what it is – has no boundaries. These exist far away, rumour tells, but certainly no one has dared draw them (even with dotted lines) on the map, or seen them – And so, in a sense, I was glad of the deer’s company for the little while it ran ahead of me. They are dire straits when a man is glad of the companionship of a ghost.

I came to Pargur. It appeared suddenly before me when I stepped out between the last of the trees. There is no road to it; each one must find his own way through the forest. True, I once heard that there was a road, a broad highway paved with mottled skarn, but it must have been another rumour or some tale begun in an inn; and if once there was a road, it disappeared under the forest long ago. One leaves the forest, and the city is there, immediate. Its towers of crystal and its quartz revetments dazzle the eye: the multiple refraction makes it hard to see exactly where they stand, sisters to the prismatic mists which cloak the city’s southern flank.

I came to Pargur. It was winter and fifty yards of virgin snow lay between me and the city walls. Behind me, the eternal forest spread its green without a trace of snow. I had been a long time on my journey and was still more travel-stained, as tattered as a beggar or one of those travelling mountebanks who carry a whole world of enchantment in their packs. I came exhausted to Pargur, the Mutable City, and struck out gladly across the carpet of snow. As I reached its narrow gates, which shone like a sea-breach in an iceberg, I looked up and saw above me the most amazing sight of my journey. Moving imperceptibly, as if it hung aloft in perpetual stasis, drifted a giant balloon of purest white. Ice-crystals glittered on its curving sides and red fire roared at its base, a little above a frail basket which hung down on ropes. There were people in the basket. I could see a tall head-dress of some kind and, more, folds of silver fox fur from which a hand reached out, and waved. A wan face appeared above it, glacial as the moon’s, and the lovely, lilting voice which had called Erchon floated down to me.

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