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imbecile.
    ‘You shouldn’t have said “Since I ask you particularly”,’ Parsons told him that evening. ‘That will have turned her head.’
    ‘It can’t have done,’ said Hackett.
    ‘Did you call her “my dear”?’
    ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so.’
    ‘I’ve noticed you say “particularly” with a peculiar intonation, which may well have become a matter of habit,’ said Parsons, nodding sagely.
    This is driving me crazy, thought Hackett. He began to feel a division which he had never so much as dreamed of in Paris between himself and his fellow students. They had been working all day, having managed to rent a disused and indeed almost unusable shed on the quay. It had once been part of the market where the fishermen’s wives did the triage, sorting out the catch by size. Hackett, as before, had done the interpreting. He had plenty of time, since Anny could only be spared for such short intervals. But at least he had been true to his principles. Holland, Parsons, Charrington and Dubois weren’t working in the open air at all. Difficulties about modelsforgotten, they were sketching each other in the shed. The background of Palourde’s not very picturesque jetty could be dashed in later.
    Anny appeared promptly for the next three days to stand, with her crochet, on the back steps. Hackett didn’t mind her blank expression, having accepted from the first that she was never likely to smile. The red shawl, though – that hadn’t appeared. He could, perhaps, buy one in St Malo. He ached for the contrast between the copper-coloured hair and the scarlet shawl. But he felt it wrong to introduce something from outside Palourde.
    ‘Anny, I have to tell you that you’ve disappointed me.’
    ‘I told you I had no red shawl.’
    ‘You could have borrowed one.’
    Charrington, who was supposed to understand women, and even to have had a great quarrel with Parsons about some woman or other, only said: ‘She can’t borrow what isn’t there. I’ve been trying ever since we came here to borrow a decent tin-opener. I’ve tried to make it clear that I’d give it back.’
    Best to leave the subject alone. But the moment Anny turned up next day he found himself saying: ‘You could borrow one from a friend, that was what I meant.’
    ‘I haven’t any friends,’ said Anny.
    Hackett paused in the business of lighting his pipe. ‘An empty life for you, then, Anny.’
    ‘You don’t know what I want,’ she said, very low.
    ‘Oh, everybody wants the same things. The only difference is what they will do to get them.’
    ‘You don’t know what I want, and you don’t know what I feel,’ she said, still in the same mutter. There was, however, a faint note of something more than the contradiction that came so naturally to her, and Hackett was a good-natured man.
    ‘I’m sorry I said you disappointed me, Anny. The truth is I find it rather a taxing business, standing here drawing in the street.’
    ‘I don’t know why you came here in the first place. There’s nothing here, nothing at all. If it’s oysters you want, they’re better at Cancale. There’s nothing here to tell one morning from another, except to see if it’s raining … Once they brought in three drowned bodies, two men and a boy, a whole boat’s crew, and laid them out on the tables in the fish market, and you could see blood and water running out of their mouths … You can spend your whole life here, wash, pray, do your work, and all the time you might just as well not have been born.’
    She was still speaking so that she could scarcely be heard. The passers-by went un-noticing down Palourde’s badly paved street. Hackett felt disturbed. It had never occurred to him that she would speak, without prompting, at such length.
    ‘I’ve received a telegram from Paris,’ said Parsons, who was standing at the shed door. ‘It’s taken its time about getting here. They gave it me at the post office.’
    ‘What does it say?’ asked