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foreigners. He should not have been here. Ghislaine heaved a great shrug, her mouth turned down at the corners. No one asked him to come. Yet here he was.
    When Florette repeated the conversation to Thomas, he was unsympathetic. Ghislaine had done all right for herself while the old man was alive. She has no cause for complaint. It was true that Captain St. John Granger had a personal history that was not entirely comme il faut, but Ghislaine was in no position to judge. The Englishman was both more and less than he seemed. He had arrived in St. Michel du Valcabrère in 1919, evidently having done his service in the war. He was slender as a walking stick, with a thin mustache and a cap of fine yellow hair, dressed up in a blue blazer and flannel trousers, a regimental tie at his throat. Owing to his clothes and his bearing, people were certain he was a lord, perhaps a second son obliged to leave his homeland. Many veterans had migrated to the region, attracted by its privacy, its distance from the world, its wild beauty and extreme climate, its taciturnity. In the beginning, he was the only Englishman in the valley. When other English people arrived, he became yet more reclusive, growing vegetables, tending his flowers, rarely leaving his property. He had no visitors from the outside and gave the impression he was without family, an Englishman who had severed all ties to his native land. In any case, he seemed content living alone in a plain style, reading constantly. The Englishman had a beautiful library, books mostly of the nineteenth century, the century of invention, adventure, and capitalism. Once a month Thomas was invited to dinner, the meal cooked and served by Ghislaine. A companionable game of billiards finished the evening. Thomas always returned home tipsy and thoughtful and when Florette asked him what they had talked about, he replied that the Englishman was spare with words. He spent them as a miser spent money. He had a fine sense of humor but used it infrequently, being easy with silence. Despite his great age, the Englishman's mind had not lost its edge. He quoted Trollope and Dickens from memory and also Proust but with a Mayfair accent. He talked about books while Thomas retailed what village gossip he had—the schoolmaster's mysterious disappearance, the quarrel between the gendarme and the mayor—but the Englishman was more interested in books than he was in gossip. Gossip was interesting only if you knew the personalities involved and the Englishman had but a nodding acquaintance with the inhabitants of the village. However, he did have an intimate attachment to Ghislaine. Thomas was certain of this because one evening at table, pouring wine, she had straightened his shirt collar, in the circumstances a most private gesture. The nature of the intimate attachment could only be guessed at. But the Englishman pretended not to notice and continued the conversation as if nothing had occurred.
    Florette said, But Ghislaine is nearly seventy years old.
    And Granger is—over a hundred, Thomas said.
    So what manner of "intimate attachment" do you suppose it is?
    Billiards, Thomas said. They play billiards together.
    Very funny, Florette said.
    When Thomas's friends arrived on their visits he took them to the Englishman's for tea. Florette declined to go on grounds that it
was a masculine occasion and she would be in the way, by which she meant that the conversation would bore her. The Americans brought news of the outside world, NATO capitals and the Middle East, the famished nations of the equator and the awakening of the East, China and the Indian subcontinent. The Englishman was always attentive, leaning forward in his chair, his hand cupped at his ear. He liked stories of international fuckups, especially if they involved Americans, but rarely volunteered any of his own. But of course he had been disengaged from the world, having lived in Aquitaine for a very long time. He had no firsthand