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would love him in this same, fierce way? He’d asked for a daughter. So often. Oh, one of these days, Larry. One of these days . . . But all the days passed. Now, all there will ever be is Thomas. That raspy voice he’s inherited from the Ackermans. And grey already. Thomas is grey . He’ll be bald next. Old years and years before his time, making excruciating furniture. But there should have been someone else to replace him, a daughter. Except it’s too late. For Miriam. Not for him. For him and Miriam, but not for him. Why not a baby somewhere else? Start again. Yet the baby could be a son. Grow up like Thomas, looking ancient before he’s hardly alive. No point in that. Unless . . . Unless it was to stop the coming loneliness, this confrontation between his round face and the dark. He closes his eyes. His thoughts revolve. The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-slidin’ away  . . .
    Inside Gervaise’s house, Mallélou and Klaus are reverently watching their favourite weekly serial on a black and white television, so many times superceded by the year-in year-out production of newer models, it’s as if the celluloid ghosts of the old programmes still palely turn beneath the programmes showing now. Thus, during this latest episode of Devil or Man? ( Homme ou Diable? ), Mallélou for a split second sees American canyons and tumbleweed, hears a dry wind. He nudges Klaus. “What’s that?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œSomething peculiar there.”
    The picture’s streaking, dividing. Bodies are pinched sideways. Klaus gets up and thumps the set. The sound grows in volume, but the people are still pulled.
    â€œOh leave it. Leave it, Klaus.”
    Klaus returns to his chair. Robert X, hero of the programme, this week masquerading as a surgeon, is about to insert an amplifier the size of a pinhead into the voice box of a beautiful singer, thus assuring her a rich and starry career and a scene in which he will go to bed with her. What appeals most to Mallélou about this programme is the way the hero is able to become, at will, numberless things. One week he was a tennis star. Mallélou didn’t know how they’d filmed the climax to this scene, at the French Open Championships. Mallélou would like to write to the TV channel suggesting an episode in which Robert X was chief signalman at an important metropolitan junction. He has the germ of a story. A beautiful provincial girl is on one of the trains. On another is a beautiful Parisian girl. At the terminus, a stranger waits. Which train will arrive first? Aloft in his box, Robert X, the signalman, controls the destinies of these people. Stories. It makes Mallélou tremble to think he could escape his life inventing stories.
    Gervaise comes in. She hates the harsh, sad light the television gives. And the quivering, growling pictures, they seem remote to her, meant for city people in apartment houses with their hearts boxed up in street names. They remind her of the years when she was a signalman’s wife in that no-man’s-land where the city hurls its debris of worn tyres, broken glass, rusting crates, and the countryside flings its poorest seeds, willowherb and ragwort and dock. In her head, she knew where, not far down the line, the city began and where, not far up the line, it ended absolutely and silence started and the earth was deep and rich. It seemed wrong that anyone should live in that in-between place. Leave it to the trains, she thought, and the dumped cars and the sodium lights. When her children were born, she was shamed by the world she showed them, just as these days it embarrasses and shames her to watch television. The stories they tell her, Mallélou and Klaus, after the Friday evening hour of Homme ou Diable? , stories of a person so “advanced” he can alter in seconds the lives of ordinary people, they seem stupid to her, pathetic, sad.