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for lychees? Do you think I could be pregnant?’
    These tokens from the outside world did not sadden her. Her exclusion from it was complete and, as far as I could tell, without regret. It was a country she had left for ever and for which she retained no more than a fond and lively interest. I did not know how she could bear it, giving up so much, settling for the dullness here; the ruthlessly boiled vegetables, the fussy, clucking old folk, the dazed gluttony of their TV watching. After a life of such self-sufficiency, I would be panicking, or constantly planning my escape. However, her acquiescence, which was almost serene, made her easy company. There was no guilt at leaving, or even at postponing a visit. She had transplanted her independence to the confines of her bedwhere she read, wrote, meditated, dozed. She required only to be taken seriously.
    At Chestnut Reach this was not as simple as it sounds, and it took her months to persuade the nurses and helpers. It was a struggle I thought she was bound to lose; condescension is all to the professional carer’s power. June succeeded because she never lost her temper and became the child they intended her to be. She was calm. When a nurse walked into her room without knocking – I saw this once – sing-songing in the first person plural, June held the young woman’s gaze and radiated forgiving silence. In the early days she was marked down as a difficult patient. There was even talk of Chestnut Reach being unable to continue with her. Jenny and her brothers came to confer with the director. June refused a part in the conversation. She had no intention of moving. Her certainty was authoritative, tranquil, born of years of thinking things through alone. She converted her doctor first. Once he realised that this was not one more witless old biddy, he began talking to her of non-medical matters – wild flowers, for which they both had a passion and on which she was an expert. Soon he was confiding marital problems. The staff’s attitude to June was transformed – such is the hierarchical nature of medical establishments.
    I regarded it as a triumph of tactics, of thinking ahead; by concealing her irritation she had won through. But it was not a tactic, she told me when I congratulated her, it was an attitude of mind she had learned long ago from Lao Tzu’s The Way of Tao . It was a book she recommended from time to time, though whenever I looked at it, it never failed to irritate me with its smug paradoxes; to attain your goal walk in the opposite direction. On this occasion she took up her book and read aloud, ‘“The Way of heaven excels in overcoming though it does not contend.”’
    I said, ‘Just what I’d expect.’
    ‘Shut up. Listen to this. “Of two sides raising arms against each other, it is the one that is sorrow-stricken that wins.”’
    ‘June, the more you say, the less I understand.’
    ‘Not bad. I’ll make a sage of you yet.’
    When she was satisfied that I had brought exactly what she had ordered, I stowed the goods, except for the ink which she kept on the locker. The heavy fountain pen, the greyish-white cartridge paper and the black ink were the only visible reminders of her former daily life. Everything else, her delicatessen luxuries, her clothes, had their special places, out of sight. Her study at the bergerie, with its views westwards down the valley towards St Privat, was five times the size of this room and could barely accommodate her books and papers; beyond, the huge kitchen with its jambons de montagne hung from beams, demijohns of olive oil on the stone floor, and scorpions sometimes nesting in the cupboards; the living room which took up all of the old barn where a hundred locals once gathered at the end of a boar hunt; her bedroom with the four-poster bed and french windows of stained glass, and the guest bedrooms through all of which, over the years, her possessions flowed and spread; the room where she pressed her