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punctiliousness therefore only a mask; but it was one that he had never lowered.
    As well as a ready sense of the absurd, he seemed to have a reserve of anger inside him which he hardly ever turned on the world, almost, it sometimes seemed, out of politeness. Although he was quite willing to offer his opinions on any topic, he would never test his feelings on anyone except himself, and this perplexed Christine.
    They had married when she discovered herself to be pregnant, but she had miscarried and, as a result, was unable to have children. Hartmann was adamant that it made no difference and that he loved her for herself alone; Christine, however, sometimes feared that he stayed with her only from an innate sense of duty.
    I shan’t stray far, she repeated to herself as she went out into the garden with her secateurs.

5
    T HE NEXT MORNING Roussel began building a cellar beneath the Manor. He had discovered a trap-door in the kitchen which led down some steps into what had once been used as a store for wood and coal. His plan was to enlarge the area, install stone steps and an electric light and line the walls with bottle racks. He assured Hartmann that this would involve no major structural alteration to the house and could be finished in less than a month.
    What it did involve was a large amount of dust. Roussel’s workforce consisted of a very fat man in blue overalls and a youth in a beret with a bad cough. The fat man was of the opinion that the whole project was a mistake. Although he had two pickaxes and a number of spades and sledgehammers, which he carried nonchalantly under one arm, he spent much of his time smoking maize-coloured cigarettes and issuing doleful orders to the young man, such as: ‘You might as well give it a try, son.’ The youth would then wheezily aim his pickaxe at a partition in the store beneath the kitchen, causing puffs of old and evil-smelling dust to rise up on to the kitchen floor above. Roussel himself exercised a nervous supervision, occasionally removing his jacket to help, but more often taking the chance to bicycle back to town to pick up some vital tool that had been left behind.
    Christine made no effort to hide her distaste for the workmen, whom she regarded as idle, dirty and inefficient. She had had to set up a temporary kitchen in the small scullery at the foot of the south tower where she had had a small cooker installed. It was not quite the same as the big range in the proper kitchen, she pointed out, and Hartmann must expect a decline in the standard of his meals. The maid Marie, meanwhile, showed an alarming disregard for the properties of escaped gas, frequently leaving the taps open for hours on end, so that even Hartmann, who had taken refuge from the sounds of Roussel’s workmen in the attic, would occasionally look up from his papers and sniff suspiciously.
    While Hartmann took to the attic, Christine sewed, read, embroidered and knitted, muttering to anyone who could hear, usually Marie, about the wretchedness of the peasantry. Roussel bicycled ineffectually round and round the house, trying to decide where best to place his sign – a large coloured board with the words ‘Roussel Engineering’. He finally selected the top of the driveway where it joined the road into town.
    Hartmann soon discovered he was unable to concentrate on work and so decided to sort through the three tin trunks of papers he had brought with him from his flat in Paris. He enlisted the help of the fat workman in carrying them up to the attic where he took a hammer and prised the nails from the boards that blocked the window, so the light fell on to the great empty space. He thought it unlikely that he would be needing many of the papers that were in the trunks; the attic was as far as most of them would go.
    The most curious of the papers he came across was an ornithological notebook, begun when he was thirteen and the family had been living briefly in the countryside outside Vienna. He