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Chabrier waltzes, dashing them off too quickly, turning our backs on other eventualities, side by side on Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu’s stool. I would like to appear less tentative, less receptive of the ruler and the rules. I would love to splash music around me, while A. is determined to control my least impulse for extravagance. His hands. His wrist-watch. His veins. Chabrier’s oxydised streamers stream out behind us, in my case never freeing themselves because knotted to my wrists, and because the old bastard won’t allow me the freedom of music.
    All desire for music had left me. I knew I was giving a brazen performance, but saw it through. Blew a raspberry at the end. Overtaken by contrition, I forced an embrace on him. Normally we would have joined also in laughter. Not now. He began what was a visible gnashing: a guard dog’s teeth, flared nostrils, not a dog’s, those of a frightened man, the gristle in an aristocratic nose rising out of transparency, thickening at a bridge still delicate. There have been times when I could have bitten off this nose.
    As he gnashes, he warns, ‘I think she has come again, E.!’
    Not so soon. It wasn’t possible.
    â€˜Comme hier soir … Ti zeetahiy afti then xeroh …’
    I jump up and look out. There she is, sure enough, against the wall, under the olive which till now was my best protection. Her surroundings and her body make her Paris clothes look ridiculous, giving a couturier’s model the stamp of Golson’s Emporium Sydney Australia. Whatever the label, Paquin or Golson, it is Eadie’s Joanie.
    I latch the shutters.
    This evening we didn’t eat. Neither of us had appetite, thirst only. And as he quenches himself in brandy, the Pantocrator rises, like the phoenix strewing his golden plumage on the head of the one faithful—his hetaira.
    He says, ‘They shut her in a tower. My wife Anna. Or was it my mother? Or my concubine? Or the Empress Eudoxia?’
    â€˜Oh, come off it, darling! My Australian arse won’t take any more!’
    I try dousing the two of us. My eyelids will only half-open. I am a bundle of sticks and rag, an old battered umbrella.
    My darling’s skin is turning black.
    â€˜They shut her in a tower at Pera.’
    â€˜Yesss!’
    The ivy alive with Australian sparrows.
    I know, I know the smells the feel of a monk’s clammy hands candle-wax sweat verdigris cold slimy kritkarakia in the tower in which I am in-carc-er-ated the cancerous tower of a dying human relationship.
    He breaks up. Laying his head on the keys of the piano. To which we have returned inevitably, to be played out.
    I ignore my lover and unlatch the shutter. Outside, the past is spread, in pools of blue, in black limbs, in felted voices. I lean against the sash. If only to be drawn back into what I could not endure, but long for …
    Â 
    By now she knew the narrow streets by heart. She knew the abridged biographies of the girls who worked for the pharmacist, every fly which crawled on the chicken livers and rabbits at the poulterer’s, the almost petrified heap of excrement (human, she suspected) on the paving at the south-west corner of St Sauveur. She had read every novel in the catalogue at the English Tea-room and Library, excepting those withheld from her by conspiracy. At the Grand Hotel Splendide des Ligures, ces Anglais Monsieur et Madame Golson were on the verge of acquiring the status of permanent guests.
    Or so it seemed to Curly.
    â€˜Don’t know what’s got into you, Joanie. Why do we have to stay, treasure?’
    â€˜But you love it,’ she replied. ‘And Lady Tewkes would be so offended if she thought we didn’t appreciate St Mayeul.’
    Curly grunted. He was happy enough eating through the menu, then sleeping it off. He enjoyed paying his respects at the races at Nice, and in the rooms at Monte, where Teakle drove him when Joanie didn’t need the car.
    She