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suspected himself of having copied it from a textbook, but the style was childish and full of mis-spellings and there were convincingly vivid journal entries. It seemed scarcely credible that the city man he thought himself to be could once have known all this country lore. Then he came to a trunk which contained letters, postcards and photographs that for varying reasons he had been unable to throw away. He took out one of the bundles of letters and began to read. They all seemed to be from women. There was one postcard from a male friend in Monte Carlo, but it was a rarity. More typical was a note from Françoise, a girl he had taken to dinner when she was hoping to find work in a lawyer’s office in Paris. It was a pretty card with flowers that thanked him for the dinner and hoped to see him very soon.
    There was a fragile determination in the word ‘very’ he had not noticed at the time.
    Each letter or card he pulled from its envelope seemed similarly to rebuke him. He wondered how he could have failed to see what they were really saying. Admittedly, their terms were restrained, but that only made their delicacy and his unfeeling response seem more bleakly contrasted.
    It had been an unreal world in Paris after the war. There seemed to be a conspiracy among those who had fought to forget what they had endured, perhaps because it was too large for them to understand. Hartmann had gone to the front at the beginning of 1917, having previously been too young to serve. What he saw there was not on the giant scale of Verdun the previous year, but its elements were the same – the ceaseless noise, the trenches built up from useless limbs as well as from sandbags, the sleeping and the eating with the week-long dead. Back in Paris no one spoke of these things. Hartmann often watched veterans of all four years to see if they would talk when the subject was raised, but they merely brushed it aside.
    In the fretful joy of peace they had thought about nothing. Looking now at the letters, cards and written mementoes of the time, Hartmann felt no connection with them. He had obviously not paused to consider the thoughts or feelings of those who wrote to him. Perhaps, he thought, his heart had not merely been hardened for the necessary duration of the war but universally brutalised, his imagination cauterised and closed.
    He didn’t have long to ponder these things before he heard Christine’s voice calling him down to lunch.
    ‘Roussel has been on to me again today asking for more money,’ she said as she ladled out the soup.
    ‘I think he’s due some more now,’ said Hartmann.
    ‘You know perfectly well he’s supposed to have completed the first stage of the work before he gets any more. You already agreed to give him far more in advance than he should have had.’
    To curtail a spiritless argument, Hartmann said, ‘Take the money from my desk this afternoon. Perhaps it’ll encourage him.’
    Christine waited till Marie had cleared the soup plates and brought the main course before saying, ‘And another thing. I need some more domestic help. Marie’s rushed off her feet with all this extra mess the workmen make.’
    ‘We still have Mme Monnier, don’t we?’
    ‘Yes, of course we do. But we need someone younger who can do all the rough work.’
    ‘Of course you can have some more help if you need it. I’ll ask Roussel if he knows of anyone.’
    ‘Thank you, my dear.’ Christine wiped the corners of her mouth on her napkin. ‘One day a week would be fine.’
    After lunch they went for a walk by the lake, over the dyke and out on to the beach beyond. Hartmann was still a stranger in the countryside. He couldn’t get used to the long, dense silence that was broken only by the sound of some wild animal in a way that was far more disturbing than the continuous rumble of city life in Paris or Rome. Nevertheless, he was beginning to feel at home in the rough tweed jacket he had bought in the town, even if it would