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felt his soul sliced neatly down the middle by a barbarous desire to be poured out like milk, to flow around her ankles and soften that hard hem of rubbish. Soon, though, he began breathing evenly again.
    He came two steps closer to her and laughed. All counterfeit roguishness, he asked, ‘Did you tell Mrs Blythe that I’d already taken care of you a few times?’
    â€˜No,’ she mouthed, and her head went down. Halloran shrugged, softly, you could say. He caressed her elbow. In the shade of the Blythes, he could do no more; but his fingers staggered daft with pity on her arm.
    â€˜Halloran,’ she said, ‘I don’t think there’s ever been two such hopeless people. You with your confusion and me with mine.’
    â€˜Never have I seen a maid,’ Halloran recited to soothe her, ‘oh half so fair as that Spanish lay-dee. I’ve been waiting all the week to see your Spanish skin again. Without a lie.’
    â€˜Can’t we go now?’ she asked, without looking up. ‘I can’t be myself here.’
    He collected Captain Allen’s miraculous rifle with which he was often sent hunting and hitched it over his shoulder.
    â€˜My bride,’ he said. ‘Come on, then.’
    They did not take to the clay road which ribboned up a bunch of officials’ homes on the south point. Instead, he led Ann by the elbow up the hill behind the Blythe home, away from the clutter of stale brick cottages. They sidled past the crazy hut. Beyond it, they were aware of being in a sack-cloth forest, in a forest that mad, prophetic, excessive, had heaped dust on its own head.
    In no time, the gangling trees had them cut off from the town. Halloran was impressed by the sly antiquity of the place. Glossy shrubs, smelling like a cemetery a week after All Souls, took the spotted light on their tongue and tipped it brassy in his tracks. Rocks smelt of dry age. Here all things went on easily, mercilessly germinating, convinced of their inevitable survival. For some distance, he was more aware of hostility than he was of Ann. It seemed that in these poor scrubby woods, all his judgements on what a forest should look like were being scarcely tolerated by the whole pantheon of the gods of this, the world’s wrong end.
    When they were beyond doubt hidden in the forest, Ann stopped. She leaned against a tree-trunk the colour of old iron seamed with vertical corrosion. A honey-coloured ant, one inch from her shoulder, reared up polemically on its abdomen, but seeing that she was, for the moment, invulnerable, it galloped off drunkenly across the gullies of bark. Ann was transmuted by something very close to the pure animal joy of beingreleased from that God-abandoned hutch at the back of Blythes’. Here, in nobody’s country, in thin shade and thick heat, she became visibly young again.
    Halloran found himself holding on to her head so tightly with both his hands, that he could feel the skull-case, dear and mortal, beneath her hair.
    â€˜Do you want to walk, Ann?’ he asked her, implying that she probably didn’t want to. ‘We can find a shady place here and rest, because you need a rest.’
    â€˜I need a seabreeze, Halloran darling. It isn’t far to the seabreezes.’
    Halloran went on to say many trite things for a man who fancied himself as a poet. Just as they separated, he said, ‘My bride in Christ.’
    But, by the time they had crossed over the hill and come, slipping in the leaf-mould, to a dry stream-bed, Halloran felt again, as he had earlier in the day, that they were patently man and wife. It was about a quarter of a mile behind them that a rather Calvinist deity and the House of Hanover were the names by which contracts and marriages, baptisms and hangings were solemnized. Four hundred yards from the town, on untouched earth, they seemed as much fated, each to each, as two people in a fable.

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    Halloran knew that he would