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and they started down the stairs. He walked behind her, without a word. On the final landing he stopped, and she turned automatically, no longer hearing his tread. He was leaning against the banister.
    "Are you going back?"
    The light went out and the huge staircase was left with only a faint glimmer from a casement window. Her eyes searched for the time-switch.
    "It's behind you," said Simon.
    He cleared the last flight and came towards her. He's going to grab me, thought Paule with annoyance. He reached his left arm past her head and switched on; then he set his right arm on the other side of her. She could not move.
    "Let me pass," she said, very calmly.
    He did not answer, but stooped down and cautiously rested his head on her shoulder. She heard her heart thudding away and suddenly felt perturbed.
    "Let me pass, Simon . . . You're annoying me."
    But he did not move. All he did was softly murmur her name twice—"Paule, Paule"—and beyond the back of his head she saw the well of the stairs, so dreary, so oppressively silent and gloomy.
    "Mon petit Simon," she said, just as softly, "let me pass."
    He drew back and she smiled at him for a moment before going out into the street.
     
    6
     
    S HE woke on Sunday to find a note under her door that would once have been poetically known as a bleu. ; today she found it poetic because the sun, reappearing in the flawless November sky, filled her room with shadows and warm patches of light. "There is a wonderful concert in the Salle Pleyel at six," Simon wrote. " Aimez-vous Brahms? I'm sorry about yesterday." She smiled. She smiled on account of the second sentence: Aimez-vous Brahms? It was one of these questions young men had asked her when she was seventeen. And no doubt she had been asked the same things later, but with no one listening to the answer. In that set, and at that time of life, who listened to who? Come to think of it: did she care for Brahms?
    She opened the lid of her record-player, poked about among her records and found, on the back of a Wagner overture she knew by heart, a Brahms concerto she had never listened to. Roger loved Wagner. "It's beautiful," he would say, "it makes a noise, it's music." She put the concerto on, found the beginning romantic and forgot to listen to all of it. She awoke to the fact when the music stopped and was angry with herself. Nowadays she took six days to read a book, lost her place, forgot music. She could not keep her mind on a thing, except fabric samples and a man who was never there. She was losing herself, losing track of herself; she would never be herself again. Aimez-vous Brahms? For a moment she stood by the open window; the sunlight hit her full in the eyes and dazzled her. And this little phrase, Aimez-vous Brahms , seemed suddenly to reveal an enormous forgetfulness: all that she had forgotten, all the questions that she had deliberately refrained from asking herself. Aimez-vous Brahms? Did she care for anything, now, except herself and her own existence? Of course, she said she loved Stendhal; she knew she loved him. That was the word: knew. Perhaps she merely 'knew' she loved Roger. Sound acquisitions. Sound touchstones. She felt an itch to talk to someone, as she had felt at twenty.
    She rang Simon. She did not yet know what to say to him. Probably: "I don't know whether I care for Brahms. I don't think so." She did not know whether she would go to the concert. It would depend on what he said to her, on his tone of voice; she was hesitant and found this hesitancy delightful. But Simon had gone out into the country for lunch, he would be back at five to change his clothes. She hung up. Meanwhile she had decided to go to the concert. She told herself: "It isn't Simon I'm going for, but the music. Perhaps I'll go every Sunday evening if the atmosphere isn't too awful: it's just the thing for a single woman to do." And at the same time she regretted that it was Sunday and she couldn't rush out to the shops and buy the