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trees, as if all had been struck a huge, soft blow. I glanced at the girl and found her inspecting me avidly, her eyes gleaming and her smiling lips compressed, as if I were something she had caught, and intended to keep. The house, glimpsed through the trees, with the sun in its windows, flashed out at me its impassive signal. We came to a cart track and she took up a stick and scratched her name in the stony clay. Sophie. She pointed to herself, trying to say it, the pale pulp of her tongue lolling between her teeth.
    We came to the house, and climbed the steps to the front door. Sophie produced a huge iron key from a pocket of her skirt. In the hall a rhomb of sunlight basked on the floor, like a reclining acrobat. The wallpaper hung down in strips, stirring now in the draught from the doorway like bleached palm-fronds. There was a dry, brownish smell, as of something that had finished rotting and turned to dust. On the threshold a barrier seemed to part before me, an invisible membrane. The air was cool and dry. There was no sign of life. Dust lay everywhere, a mouse-grey, flocculent stuff, like a layer of felt, cushioning our footfalls. We went into a large, darkened room. The shutters were drawn, bristling with slanted blades of sunlight. There was a skitter of tiny claws in a corner, then silence. Sophie opened the shutters. The room greeted the sudden glare with a soundless exclamation of surprise. An armchair leaned back, its armrests braced, in an attitude of startlement and awe. We stood looking about us for a moment, then abruptly Sophie took my hand and drew me after her out of the room and up the wide staircase. She ran ahead of me through the shuttered bedrooms, flinging them open to the radiant day. She laughed excitedly, making gagging noises, her chin up and jaw thrust out as if to prevent something in her mouth from spilling over. I could still feel, like a fragment of secret knowledge, the cool moist print of her hand in mine. I followed her from window to window. The hinged flap of a shutter came away in my grasp like a huge, grey, petrified wing, another collapsed in a soft explosion of rotted wood and paint flakes and the brittle husks of woodworm larvae. Higher and higher we went, the house becoming a stylised outdoors around us, with all that light flooding in, and the high, shadowy ceilings the colour of clouds, and the windows thronging with greenery and sky.
    The attic was a warren of little low rooms opening on to each other like an image repeating itself into the depths of a mirror. It was hot and airless up here under the roof. Outside, swifts were shooting like random arrows in and out of the eaves. In what had been a schoolroom I put my hand to a globe of the world, and immediately, as if it had been biding its time, the lacquered ball fell off its stand and rolled across the floor with a tinny clatter. Sophie showed me a narrow room with a sloped ceiling and one circular window, like a wide-open eye. There was a bed, and a bentwood chair, and a washstand with a pitcher and a chipped, enamelled basin. Under a bare lightbulb two flies were lazily weaving the air. This was her room. The window held a view of treetops and far fields. We went along a dim corridor. I glanced through a half-open doorway and saw Mr Kasperl reclining on a vast, disordered bed in his waistcoat and boots, smoking a cigar and studying what appeared to be a large chart or map. Appeared to be, I like that. He looked at me briefly, without surprise, then turned back to his work.
    Sophie led the way downstairs again. Little tremors of excitement still ran through her. Now and then a tiny, high-pitched flute-note, like a restless sleeper’s sigh, flew up of its own accord out of her throat. She showed me things she had found about the place, an elaborate doll’s house, a dressmaker’s dummy on a stand, stark as an exclamation mark, a box of marionettes with tangled strings and splayed limbs, like a heap of miniature hanged