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she had cried. The Soldiers searched in the glowing debris of the lorry for bones and ashes of flesh and diligently investigated the road by the light of torches they brought with them but they found nothing. They must have decided, at last, that the fire had consumed the driver along with the lorry for they gathered together, consulted for a moment, then remounted their motorcycles and drove back in a convoy the way they had come. And that was the last Marianne saw of them.
    She did not know how they had described the situation to themselves, whether or not they thought it the act of a man unhinged by the day’s violence; no doubt, next morning, when they found her bed empty, her uncle would murmur how she had never adjusted to her father’s death, that she lacked discipline and he wished he had not taught her to drive. Then she realized with surprise that Jewel had organized an official suicide for her. He relaxed his grip. He had bruised her jaw. He was grinning; she saw his teeth flash.
    ‘I told you I was clever,’ he said. Then, as if overcome with weariness, he lay down in the grass beside her and was immediately asleep.
    It grew very cold and soon the moon went down. No sound broke the dark, enormous silence of the night. She stripped off Jewel’s fur and wrapped herself in it; it was the pelt of a red fox and, beneath it, he wore a rough coat of tanned hide with the pile on the inside. This coat smelled rank because the hide had been badly cured. He muttered something in his sleep and moved close to her until he slept with his head on her lap. She touched his beads and wondered whether to strangle him with them. He was very warm and very heavy; he appeared to trust her entirely and she let go of his necklace, for nobody hadtrusted her since her father died. They had hidden knives and scissors from her and talked to her in soft, conciliatory voices. After a while, she began to cry for her father. She could not stop crying until the day was about to begin.

2
    Twined in this fortuitous embrace, Jewel and Marianne lay among the curling ferns. At first, outlines but no colours appeared in the forest and all was blank forms of uniform and phantom grey but, after the sun penetrated the branches, the trees acquired flesh from the darkness and, as the sky grew light, she saw nothing that was not green or else covered with flowers. Plants she could not name thrust luscious spires towards her hands; great chestnuts fantastically turreted with greenish bloom arched above her head; the curded white blossom of hawthorn closed every surrounding perspective and a running tangle of little roses went in and out, this way and that way, through the leafy undergrowth. These roses opened flat as plates and from them drifted the faintest and most tremulous of scents, like that of apples. Though this scent was so fragile, still it seemed the real breath of a wholly new and vegetable world, a world as unknown and mysterious to Marianne as the depths of the sea; or the body of the young man who slept, it would seem, sweetly, in her lap. An awakened bird clattered upwards and she heard stirrings in the brambles. Without any fear, she waited for a red-eyed wolf or grinning bear who might come, as she had heard they did, to eat up hungrily both her and her companion. But nothing appeared. Only the trees moved and they infrequently.
    Meanwhile, in the village, they would be rising and making fires, smoke starting to drift from the chimneys. Women whose eyes were still thick with sleep stirred the porridge and cows lowed to be milked. Children were running to feed the chickens and the stentorian cocks didactically announced the beginning of a new day, though this new day was bound to be indistinguishable from all the rest. Except a Professor girl had gone crazy in the night and ended it by burning herselfalive. As the new day began, Jewel opened his eyes and stared at her. Trapped in his regard so closely and suddenly, she briefly experienced