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thing?’

Château Bougainvillaea
    The headland was like a dry purple island scorched by the flat heat of afternoon, cut off from the mainland by a sand-coloured tributary of road which went down past the estaminet and then, half a mile beyond, to the one-line, one-eyed railway station. Down below, on a small plateau between upper headland and sea, peasants were mowing white rectangles of corn. The tide was fully out, leaving many bare black rocks and then a great sun-phosphorescent pavement of sand, with the white teeth of small breakers slowly nibbling in. Far out, the Atlantic was waveless, a shade darker than the sky, which was the fierce blue seen on unbelievable posters. Farther out still, making a faint mist, sun and sea had completely washed out the line of sky.
    From time to time a puff of white steam, followed by a peeped whistle, struck comically at the dead silence inland. It was the small one-line train, half-tram, making one way or the other its hourly journey between town-terminus and coast. Bymeans of it the engaged couple measured out the afternoon.
    â€˜There goes the little train,’ he would say.
    â€˜Yes,’ she would say, ‘there goes the little train.’
    Each time she resolved not to say this stupid thing and then, dulled with sleepiness and the heat of earth and sky and the heather in which they lay, she forgot herself and said it, automatically. Her faint annoyance with herself at these times had gradually begun to make itself felt, as the expression of some much deeper discontent.
    â€˜Je parle Français un tout petit peu, m’sieu.’ In a voice which seemed somehow like velvet rubbed the wrong way, the man was talking. ‘I was all right as far as that. Then I said, “Mais, dites-moi, m’sieu, pourquoi are all the knives put left-handed dans ce restaurant?” By God it must have been awfully funny. And then he said – ’
    â€˜He said because, m’sieu, the people who use them are all left-handed.’
    â€˜And that’s really what he said? It wasn’t a mistake? All the people in that place were left-handed?’
    â€˜Apparently,’ she said, ‘they were all left-handed.’
    â€˜It’s the funniest thing I ever heard,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it.’
    Yes, she thought, perhaps it was a funny thing. Many left-handed people staying at one restaurant. A family, perhaps. But then there were many left-handed people in the world, and perhaps, for all you knew, their left was really right, and it was we, the right, who were wrong.
    She took her mind back to the restaurant down in the town. There was another restaurant there, set in a sort of alley-way under two fig-trees, where artisans filled most of the tables between noon and two o’clock, and where a fat white-smocked woman served all the dishes and still found time to try her three words of English on the engaged couple. From here they could see the lace-crowned Breton women clacking in the shade of the street trees and the small one-eyed train starting or ending its journey between the sea and the terminus that was simply the middle of the street. They liked this restaurant, but that day, wanting a change, they had climbed the steps into the upper town, to the level of the viaduct, and had found this small family restaurant where, at one table, all the knives were laid left-handed. For some reason she now sought to define,this left-handedness did not seem funny to her. Arthur had also eaten too many olives, picking them up with his fingers and gnawing them as she herself, as a child, would have gnawed an uncooked prune, and this did not seem very funny either. Somewhere between olives and left-handedness lay the source of her curious discontent. Perhaps she was left-handed herself? Left-handed people were, she had read somewhere, right-brained. Perhaps Arthur was left-handed?
    She turned over in the heather, small brown-eyed face to the sun.