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castle.’ She made a great effort to wrench herself up to the normal plane. ‘Castle, my beautiful. Two francs. All the way up to the castle, two francs.’ She held out her hand to pull him to his feet.
    â€˜I’ll come,’ he said, ‘if we can stop at the estaminet and have a drink.’
    â€˜We’ll stop when we come down,’ she said.
    â€˜Now.’
    â€˜When we come down.’
    â€˜Now. I’m so thirsty. It was the olives.’
    Not speaking, she held out her hand. Instinctively, he put out his left.
    â€˜You see,’ she said, ‘you don’t know what’s what or which’s which or anything. You don’t know when you’re left-handed or right.’
    He laughed. She felt suddenly like laughing too, and they began to walk down the hill. The fierce heat seemed itself to force them down the slope, and she felt driven by it past the blistered white tables of the estaminet with the fowls asleep underneath them, and then up the hill on the far side, into the sparse shade of small wind-levelled oaks and, at one place, a group of fruitless fig trees. It was some place like this, she thought, just about as hot and arid, where the Gadarene swine had stampeded down. What made her think of that? Her mind had some urge towards inconsequence, some inexplicable desire towards irresponsibility that she could not restrain or control, and she was glad to see thechâteau at last, shining with sea-blue jalousies through a break in the mass of metallic summer-hard leaves of acacia and bay that surrounded it. She felt it to be something concrete, a barrier against which all the crazy irresponsibilities of the mind could hurl themselves and split.
    At the corner, a hundred yards before the entrance gates, a notice, of which one end had been cracked off by a passing lorry, pointed upwards like a tilted telescope. They read the word ‘château’, the rest of the name gone.
    â€˜You see,’ she said, ‘château.’
    â€˜What château?’
    â€˜Just château.’
    â€˜You think we’ll have to pay to go in?’
    â€˜I’ll pay,’ she said.
    She walked on in silence, far away from him. The little insistences on money had become, in five days, like the action of many iron files on the soft tissues of her mind: first small and fine, then larger, then still larger, now large and coarse, brutal as stone. He kept a small note-book and in it, with painful system, entered up the expenditure of every centime.
    At the entrance gates stood a lodge, very muchdelapidated, the paintwork of the walls grey and sea-eroded like the sides of a derelict battleship. A small notice was nailed to the fence by the gate, and the girl stopped to read it.
    â€˜What does it say?’ he said. ‘Do we pay to go in?’
    â€˜Just says it’s an eighteenth-century château,’ she said. ‘Admission a franc. Shall we go in?’
    â€˜A franc?’
    â€˜One franc,’ she said. ‘Each.’
    â€˜You go,’ he said. ‘I don’t know that I’m keen. I’ll stop outside.’
    She did not answer, but went to the gate and pulled the porter’s bell. From the lodge door a woman without a blouse on put her head out, there was a smell of onions, and the woman turned on the machine of her French like a high pressure steam-pipe, scrawny neck dilating.
    The girl pushed open the gate and paid the woman the two francs admission fee, holding a brief conversation with her. The high pressure pipe finally cut itself off and withdrew, and the girl came back to the gates and said: ‘She’s supposed to show us round but she’s just washing. She says nobody else ever comes up at this hour of the afternoon, and we must show ourselves round.’
    They walked up the gravel road between sea-stunted trees towards the château. In the sun, against the blue sky above the Atlantic, the stone and slate of it was