Somewhat embarrassed, I moved swiftly on, and my host, it seemed, continued about her daily life as if oblivious to the time I had stolen from her. Until, that was, she tried to drive her car, which she crashed almost immediately into the side of a police truck, and was taken shrieking first to hospital, later to court.

Remarkable, the habits people will justify as normal.

I drive north as the rain thickens until it is a shimmering sheet sloshed across my windscreen, until the road is a grey fuzz of rebounding water, until the skies are black and the mountains vanish beneath the frozen skies, and I think of Galileo.

Chapter 70

Saint-Guillaume.

I had never been there before; doubt I’ll go again.

The lights in their iron brackets along the steeply climbing streets were bubbles of pink hanging in the pouring air.

A single shop was open at the bottom of the hill, its back balcony overhanging a rocky river in full roar. The streets were empty save for the occasional outline of a smoker framed in an open door. Parking was difficult, finding my way through the downpour up the tight-spun stairways and byways near impossible. I cowered beneath the arch of a church and peered into the gloom for rue de la Garde. Eventually an old woman, her umbrella abandoned as useless against the slicing deluge, pointed me back down the hill and round the side of a bakery, its shutters barred and delivery van tucked up on the pavement for the night. I slipped and scrambled, my coat over my head, looking for number 53, warm lights behind the open shutters and closed window panes; hammered on the door, waited to be let in.

“It’s open!”

A man’s voice, calling from inside. Tried the handle and the door scraped open, heavy wood scratching along the granite floor. A log fire burned within, the ceiling was low, the smell of onion heavy on the air. I looked for a restaurant sign and saw none; rather, a dining-room table neatly laid, lace tablecloth starched white, candle burning in an empty bottle in the middle. An open door, twisted trapezoid in its crooked frame, led to the smell of cooking and wine, and from within that hot glow came the man’s voice again: “That you?”

“Greta?” I asked.

“I left her behind. Hope you don’t mind.”

I shook my dripping coat out by the fire and took in the neat plates displayed in a cabinet on one wall, the crucifix by the bookshelf, the picture of family children and family pets on the round table beneath the windows. “Janus,” I called. “What’s going on?”

“Dinner!” he replied. “I came here for a holiday a few months ago and suddenly remembered this little place–perfect, I thought, absolutely perfect! The perfect hideout!”

I pulled my shoes off, felt water seep from my socks as I wriggled my toes on the flagstones before the fire. From the kitchen came a sudden burst of sizzling, a gout of steam. I sidled towards it, ducking beneath the door frame, and beheld Janus.

He was tall, a habitual stoop having curved his shoulders and neck. A long-sleeved black shirt was buttoned tight around his wrists; long black trousers descended into a pair of mighty fur slippers. He tossed wine-soaked pork in a pan and as potatoes frothed beside him exclaimed, “Can you pass that?”

A hand flickered out towards an open bottle of wine. I passed it over without a word. The fingers which took it were red and yellow. Red beneath, yellow on top, where the scar tissue had healed in rivulets and pools. “Thanks.” He poured wine into the hissing pan, then helped himself to a slurp. “Don’t you love this place? I always thought I’d like to retire to a little village in the mountains.”

“Retire from what?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Actually I tried retiring a couple of times but I got bored. Politics politics politics. You know how hard it is to organise a village bake?”

“Not really.”

“Nightmare!” he exclaimed. “Everyone’s always got to be a leader.”

I took the bottle of wine, smelt its fragrance, murmured, “Mind if…?”

“Help yourself.”

My hand shook as I poured, though I couldn’t conceive of any satisfactory physiological reason why.

Glass in hand, I turned and looked him in the eye. There was only one eye to look in; the other had long since been removed or sealed over with the zigzag tissue that covered his face and neck, wriggling down beneath the collar of his shirt. It had possibly been a beautiful eye, sky-blue, now lost beneath the flesh-sunk savagery that was Janus’ face. Feeling my stare, he glanced up briefly from the pan, smiled and kept on cooking.

I rolled the stem of the glass backwards and forwards between my fingertips.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Pork, paprika, red wine, white beans, soft potatoes, black cabbage and a surprise dessert.”

“I’m not sure if I can cope with many more surprises.”

“You’re strong, Kepler. You’ll be just fine.”

On the thin warped glass of the windows the rain tap-danced, noisy in the night.

“Where did you leave Greta?” I asked.

“On the train to Narbonne.”

“Good call.”

“I thought you’d approve. Took me a while to get back to where I wanted to be, but I came clean. Where’d you leave… whoever-he-was?”

“Hospital.”

“What are you, some sort of…”

“Nurse. And you?”

“Marcel… something. Bit of a recluse.”

“I see. Chemical or physical?”

“Gas fire,” he replied with a shrug. “I’m having skin grafts; there are expanders, if you’ve heard of them, implanted in my back. They’re filled with saline and over the course of several months the skin stretches and grows around them until there’s enough surplus to cut away and graft to somewhere more interesting. Fascinating stuff, really.”

“You know this… how?”

“Spent time in hospitals.” The sharp double-strike of metal on metal as Janus tapped a spoon on the edge of a pan. “Stir this, will you?”

I stirred. “So,” I said, “if we’re still at the graft stage, I’m guessing the burns are fairly new?”

“Fairly.”

“You in much pain?”

“There’s morphine in the bedroom.”

“You taken any?”

“No.”

“Want me to get you some?”

“No.”

“Want me to get you someone?”

“No.”

Potatoes rose, potatoes fell, and I stirred the pot.

Janus’ two scarred hands clapped together in command. The little finger on his right hand had been removed. So had the thumb. Now three fingers remained, over-long, over-stretched, against the stubbiness of their neighbours. “Dinner is served!”

I carried dishes into the dining room. Janus had over-catered. The pork was tender, the potatoes were soft, the cabbage tasted of pepper and the sauce was good enough to lick from the plate. I said, where’d you learn to cook like that?

He said, my wife.

Your wife?

Yes, he replied. My wife. Paula. The woman I married.

By the fireplace an old clock ticked away the seconds and Janus scraped sauce and potato fluff from the edge of his plate with the end of one half-dissolved fingertip.

Have you seen her since? I asked. Have you seen Paula Morgan, the woman you married?

Dead.

Dead?

Dead. Michael Morgan lived, Paula Morgan died. Perhaps she couldn’t bear the loss of the man she loved and his replacement by a twenty-one-year-old child screaming in his old man’s shell. Perhaps the arthritis was more than just arthritis. Perhaps she was tired. Perhaps she simply had enough. Who can say, in the lives of little people?

Janus’ fingertip swept around the plate, scooping up another dribble of juice. His tongue, when it flicked out to collect the liquid, was shockingly whole, pink and unscathed. His bottom lip drooped, one side thicker than the other, as if a rat had gnawed it while Marcel slept.