When later in the middle of the night I ease myself out of her arms, she whimpers but does not awaken. I dress in the dark, close the door behind me, grope my way down the stairs, hurry back home with snow crunching underfoot and an icy wind boring into my back.

I light a candle and bend over the form to which, it seems, I am in a measure enslaved. Lightly I trace the lines of her face with my fingertip: the clear jaw, the high cheekbones, the wide mouth. Lightly I touch her eyelids. I am sure she is awake, though she gives no sign.

I shut my eyes, breathe deeply to still my agitation, and concentrate wholly on seeing her through my blind fingertips. Is she pretty? The girl I have just left, the girl she may perhaps (I suddenly realize) smell on me, is very pretty, there is no question about that: the acute-ness of my pleasure in her is sharpened by the elegance of her tiny body, its manners, its movements. But of this one there is nothing I can say with certainty. There is no link I can define between her womanhood and my desire. I cannot even say for sure that I desire her. All this erotic behaviour of mine is indirect: I prowl about her, touching her face, caressing her body, without entering her or finding the urge to do so. I have just come from the bed of a woman for whom, in the year I have known her, I have not for a moment had to interrogate my desire: to desire her has meant to enfold her and enter her, to pierce her surface and stir the quiet of her interior into an ecstatic storm; then to retreat, to subside, to wait for desire to reconstitute itself. But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover-I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her-but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.

It is not that something is in the course of happening to me that happens to some men of a certain age, a downward progress from lib-

ertinage to vengeful actions of impotent yearning. If a change in my moral being were occurring I would feel it; nor would I have undertaken this evening's reassuring experiment. I am the same man I always was; but time has broken, something has fallen in upon me from the sky, at random, from nowhere: this body in my bed, for which I am responsible, or so it seems, otherwise why do I keep it? For the time being, perhaps forever, I am simply bewildered. It seems all one whether I lie down beside her and fall asleep or fold her in a sheet and bury her in the snow. Nevertheless, bending over her, touching my fingertips to her forehead, I am careful not to spill the wax.

Whether she guesses where I have been I cannot decide; but the next night, when I am lulled almost to sleep by the rhythm of the oiling and rubbing, I feel my hand stopped, held, guided down between her legs. For a while it rests against her sex; then I shake more of the warm oil on to my fingers and begin to caress her. Quickly the tension gathers in her body; she arches and shudders and pushes my hand away. I continue to rub her body till I too relax and am overtaken with sleep.

I experience no excitement during this the most collaborative act we have yet undertaken. It brings me no closer to her and seems to affect her as little. I search her face the next morning: it is blank. She dresses and stumbles down to her day in the kitchen.

I am disquieted. "What do I have to do to move you?": these are the words I hear in my head in the subterranean murmur that has begun to take the place of conversation. "Does no one move you?"; and with a shift of horror I behold the answer that has been waiting all the time offer itself to me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me.

I shake my head in a fury of disbelief. No! No! No! I cry to myself. It is I who am seducing myself, out of vanity, into these meanings and correspondences. What depravity is it that is creeping upon me? I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves. There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars. How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman's body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!

I begin to visit the girl at the inn regularly. There are moments during the day, in my office behind the courtroom, when my attention wanders and I drift into erotic reverie, grow hot and swollen with excitement, linger over her body like a moony lustful youth; then reluctantly I have to recall myself to the tedium of paperwork or walk over to the window and stare into the street. I remember how in the first years of my appointment here I used to roam the obscurer quarters of the town toward dusk, shadowing my face in my cloak; how sometimes a restless wife, leaning over the half-door with the hearthfire gleaming behind her, would answer my gaze without flinching; how I would fall into conversation with young girls promenading in twos and threes, buy them sherbet, then perhaps lead one away into the darkness to the old granary and a bed of sacks. If there was anything to be envied in a posting to the frontier, my friends told me, it was the easy morals of the oases, the long scented summer evenings, the complaisant sloe-eyed women. For years I wore the well-fed look of a prize boar. Later that promiscuity modulated into more discreet relations with housekeepers and girls lodged sometimes upstairs in my rooms but more often downstairs with the kitchen help, and into liaisons with girls at the inn. I found that I needed women less frequently; I spent more time on my work, my hobbies, my antiquarianism, my cartography.

Not only that; there were unsettling occasions when in the middle of the sexual act I felt myself losing my way like a storyteller losing the thread of his story. I thought with a shiver of those figures of fun, fat old men whose overburdened hearts stop beating, who pass away in the arms of their loves with an apology on their lips and have to be carried out and dumped in a dark alley to save the reputation of the house. The climax to the act itself became remote, puny, an oddity. Sometimes I drifted to a halt, sometimes went mechanically through to the end. For weeks and months I would retire into celibacy. The old delight in the warmth and shapeliness of women's bodies did not desert me, but there was a new puzzlement. Did I really want to enter and claim possession of these beautiful creatures? Desire seemed to bring with it a pathos of distance and separation which it was futile to deny. Nor could I always see why one part of my body, with its unreasonable cravings and false promises, should be heeded over any other as a channel of desire. Sometimes my sex seemed to me another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach. Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked: simply because you were born without legs? Would it make any difference to you if you were rooted in a cat or a dog instead of in me?

Yet at other times, and particularly in the last year, with the girl whose nickname at the inn is The Star but whom I have always thought of as a bird, I felt again the power of the old sensual enchantment, swam out into her body and was transported to the old limits of pleasure. So I thought: "It is nothing but a matter of age, of cycles of desire and apathy in a body that is slowly cooling and dying. When I was young the mere smell of a woman would arouse me; now it is evidently only the sweetest, the youngest, the newest who have that power. One of these days it will be little boys." With some distaste I looked forward to my last years in this bountiful oasis.