[49] They eddy before the gate of the barons

After lunch, which doesn’t last long because Gus is a slave to his work though he never looks like he’s working, Paul asks me if I have the afternoon. That’s the only question he’ll ask all day. I tell him I do, though I don’t. Then he tells me to follow him. I should have gone back to Emilie’s, do you have to ask why not? He’s a stranger who just saw me naked, what else was I going to do? He looks at me with mesmerizing certainty, and I want to know what he’s so sure he sees. We walk away from the city. Beyond Gus’s studio the city crouches and spreads and the hills begin to pour down to it. The street turns into a broadway and then a road through one village, another, the vine country. This is picnicking country, every child knows it but no one I know has left the road. A half-hour later, he takes me down a path. My shoes are pinching, my dress is too thin for this wilder breeze. After an hour, we’re walking in the fir tree shade up the side of a steep valley, rocks poking into the path. I sit down on a boulder.

‘Tell me if you’re giving up.’ His first words for an hour.

He’s waiting to hear me ask, ‘Where are you taking me?’ But he’s not going to make me say it. How do people catch you like this? A moment has come, a turning of something. If this walk takes me to night, I’ll see stars up there. I’ll see how they’re aligned, maybe. I’ve wanted something to happen, without knowing what the next unknown will look like, and it’s taken this shape – me walking into a forest with a man I don’t know, going deeper into somewhere without wondering where. To a place where my life will be different. That’s all I’m waiting for from him.

I can tell he knows where he is. The sun is beginning to set on countryside I’ve never seen. The forest isn’t tame any more. We’re walking along an ancient stone wall, cut from the same pale limestone as the river valley, along a path broken with horses’ hooves. He grips my long, pale hand in his painted one and begins to pull me up a hill over broken ground, the tree branches brushing our faces. His painted hand almost burns – I’d lost track I was this cold. No seasons this high in the hills. Sometimes there’s snow and sometimes not, but the air, I’ll soon learn, will always taste the same – cool and dry, with the breath of dark trees and their shadows. An ancient place, where you can forget time for as long as you want. But this is the first time I’ve felt nature on my skin like this.

We come to a ridge top and I see a hut at the base of the farther slope. We zigzag down an iron-hard path that no one has followed for years toward a long-abandoned hut. He doesn’t try to open the door – just kicks it with his left boot until the lock gives way and the latch with it. Inside is an empty room, beyond it another with a stack of fungus-covered cordwood beside a woodstove and a pile of old blankets.

He hands me three blankets. ‘Shake these out.’

He gets a fire going in the stove. While I’m snapping the blankets outside the door, he comes out and tries a well pump behind the hut. Water begins to cough from the spigot. He turns and nods goodbye.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ll be back when it’s darker, actually,’ he says.

The way he says that last word – that drawl, the taste of the four syllables in his mouth, his offhand look in my eye when he says them – I can hear the entitlement in it, the moneyed past he’ll never wash from his skin. Just the sound of it that first time and I know that word’s going to be irritating me for years, the way he pronounces it. What it says about what he runs from and what he hides, about the memories he won’t deny himself and the choices he’s made since.

Let’s get on with it, Emma. Fate? Is this all there is to it?

It must be an hour by the time he returns with the fading light, with four ears of maize and four potatoes with dirt clinging to them. The moon’s up, the stars out. I see no other lights, only the sparks flying out of the stove while we stare.