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one was fleshy, pink, swollen, resembling the glans of a tumescent penis stripped of its foreskin.

    The young woman secretly cherished a foolish, romantic idea that being French was more interesting than being Australian, but would never have admitted it.
    â€˜Where are your roots?’ Nasser asked her one night. ‘Mine are in Jordan.’
    She thought for a moment. She loved Australia but she also loved France. She wondered if she might be like a plant whose roots do not travel down but sideways.
    In France she was someone else. She was a girl whose limbs were free, with carte blanche to fill herself in. The words on her tongue were different and she felt her old self slipping away. For the first time she began to wonder how language built identity, how it had a magical ability to transform existence.
    She grew her hair and had it cut in an asymmetrical shape against her jaw, and powdered her eyes in shadow. She practised French and was amazed at the nuances of words. At a mutual acquaintance’s vernissage she met Horatia Craig, named for Admiral Lord Nelson because she was born on Trafalgar Day. An Englishwoman of Scottish descent, she lived in a large airy flat on the rue Saint-Jacques. There were fifty years between Horatia and the young woman but no gap.
    Horatia was rich, and happened to be a lesbian of the old school. She had known Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes and found the modern-day political lesbian, shorn of adornment, distasteful. ‘In life one should always seek the beautiful,’ she said. Horatia had good bones and dressed in exquisitely cut clothes, her silver hair a shining cap, her mouth carefully lipsticked. She lived platonically with a dour-looking Frenchwoman named Monique. As far as the young woman could tell, Monique served as a kind of lady’s maid to Horatia.
    â€˜I am not a lesbian,’ Horatia said. ‘I just loved dear lost Beth.’
    It was thrilling, knowing beautiful rich old lesbians in Paris. It was thrilling, sitting in Horatia’s richly furnished room, the windows open to the rue Saint-Jacques, being fed pastel macaroons from Ladurée, the palest pistachio green, the faintest rose, a jewellery box of colours.
    While Horatia did not actively flirt with the young woman, she admitted to a little frisson. ‘One must take love where one finds it,’ she said. She had lived long enough to see that each life had a shape, and liked to watch the way a young life unfurled, which parts blossomed and which parts atrophied, unwatered, unfed. Whenever Horatia said goodbye to the young woman, she kissed her on each cheek, once, twice, and then again, four kisses. ‘We are intimates now, my dear,’ she said.
    The young woman never left Horatia’s company without feeling that her understanding of life had previously been too small, and that the world was larger, and more promising, than she’d thought.
    But at night, in the cramped chambre de bonne , the young woman dreamed only of the shadow lover. She would return to him after she landed home again, because the compelling drive to repeat the past is encoded in the cells of certain young women, despite feminist and Marxist theory, despite the example of Miss Horatia Craig and history’s finest lessons.

FORTY

Words

    MY TONGUE LOVES TO CURL itself around a French word, to feel my lips push out into a sensual pout because French words sit forward in the mouth, well past the fat roll of tongue at the back of the throat and down and over the slippy pointed tip which meets the teeth.
    A word can be as delicious upon the tongue as dissolving chocolate. My tongue loves to roll and dip around words, exotic words and plain words, foreign words and English words, strange words and familiar. A word is a kingdom, a key, a clue, a word is a thing to savour and roll upon the tongue, and if we are lucky sometimes words are all that are left to us.
    At ninety-five, Nana Elsie still ruled over a realm of