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‘did that boat really run aground?’
    She did not seem to be listening. She was staring blankly at the floor again. Behind her an enormous, lead-blue cloud was edging its way stealthily into the window, humid and swollen, the very picture of his own muffled desires. She was so lovely it made him ache to look at her, with her slender, slightly turned-in feet and enormous eyes and faint hint of moustache. A memory stirred in his mind, the sense of something sleek and smooth and faintly, tenderly repulsive. Yes: the hare’s nest in the grass that he had found one day on the dunes when he was a child, the two baby hares in it lying folded around each other head to rump like an heraldic emblem. He had brought them home under his coatbut his mother would not let him keep them. How tinily their hearts had ticked against his own suddenly heavy heart! That was him all over, always on the look-out for something to love that would love him in return and never finding it. Or hardly ever. Poor mama. When he went back to look for the nest he could not find it and had to leave the leverets under the shelter of a rock, with leaves to lie on and grass and dandelion stalks to eat. Next day they were gone. Not a trace. The stalks untouched. Gone. And yet how little he had cared, standing there in the grey of morning contemplating that absence, while the sea beyond the dunes muttered and the wind polished the dark grass around him. Now he sighed, baffled at himself, as always.
    ‘I think I want to lie down,’ Flora said.
    ‘Of course, of course.’
    ‘Just for a little while.’
    ‘Of course.’
    He was torn between staying there, leaning sleepless on his shield, and rushing downstairs again to reassure himself that the others had not disappeared. Instead, when she had stretched herself out on the bed, yawning and sighing, and he had shut the door behind him lingeringly, he found himself wandering in a sort of aimless, apprehensive rapture about the upper storeys, stopping now and then to listen, he was not sure for what: for the crackle of wing-cases, perhaps, for the sounds of the new life breaking out of its cocoon. From the stairs he caught a glimpse through the half-closed lavatory door of Sophie sitting straight-backed on the stool with her skirt hiked up and her pants around her knees, gazing before her with a dreamy, stern stare as her water tinkled freely into the bowl beneath her. He hurried past with eyes averted, red-faced, smiling madly in embarrassment, muttering to himself.
    Oh, agog, agog!

T HE SEAGULLS wake me early. I hear them up on the chimney-pots beating their wings and uttering strange, deep-throated cries. They sound like human babies. Perhaps it is the young I am hearing, not yet flown from the nest and still demanding food. I never was much of a naturalist. How lovely the summer light is at this time of morning, a seamless, soft grey shot through with water-glints. I lie for a long time thinking of nothing. I can do that, I can make my mind go blank. It is a knack I acquired in the days when the thought of what was to be endured before darkness and oblivion came again was hardly to be borne. And so, quite empty, weightless as a paper skiff, I make my voyage out, far, far out, to the very brim, where a disc of water shimmers like molten coin against a coin-coloured sky, and everything lifts, and sky and waters merge invisibly. That is where I seem to be most at ease now, on the far, pale margin of things. If I can call it ease. If I can call it being.
    An island, of course. The authorities when they were releasing me had asked in their suspicious way where I would go and I said at once, Oh, an island, where else? All I wanted, I assured them, was a place of seclusion and tranquillity where I could begin the long process of readjustment to the world and pursue my studies of a famous painter theyhad never heard of. It sounded surprisingly plausible to me. (Oh yes, guv, says the old lag, standing before the big