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Even here, in Audrun’s wood, the signs of endothia were visible. And people told her there was nothing to be done, there was no magician or saviour, as there had been long ago, when Louis Pasteur had travelled down to Alès and discovered a cure for the terrible silkworm diseases. Endothia was part of life now, the part that had changed beyond recall, the part that was old and blighted and withered by time. Trees would soon die in this wood. There was nothing to be done except to cut them down and burn the logs on the fire.
    Audrun’s bungalow had no fire. It had four ‘night-storage’ heaters, heavy as standing stones. As the winter afternoons drew on, the heaters cooled, the air cooled, and Audrun had nothing to do but sit in her chair with a crocheted blanket over her knees. She folded her hands in her lap. And sometimes, in this deep cold stillness, she would feel an episode approaching, like a shadow that laid itself across her, a shadow attached to no solid form, but which took the colour from everything in the room, which bleached her mind and made the furniture stretch and shift behind a plane of glass . . .
    Audrun examined the trunk of the chestnut tree. No sign of disease on this one yet, but she said the dread word to herself: Endothia. The air was so still that she seemed to hear her own soundless voice. Then, the next moment, she became aware that she wasn’t alone and she turned and saw him, stumbling as he did these days – he who, as a boy, had been as agile and swift as an Indian brave – gleaning wood for the fire, putting the fallen pieces into some kind of sling on his back, a sling he’d cobbled together out of an old moth-eaten blanket.
    ‘Aramon.’
    He raised his arm, as though to prevent her from coming near him. ‘Just a bit of wood,’ he said. ‘Just a bit of wood for the fire.’
    He had trees of his own, a dense thicket of holm oaks behind the dog pound. But he was too lazy to take the saw to them, or else knew that he shouldn’t trust himself with the saw; the saw would have his hand.
    ‘Just a branch or two, Audrun.’
    His hair was dirty and wild. His unshaven face was pallid, almost grey in the sharp sunshine. ‘And I was coming to ask—’
    ‘Ask what?’ she said.
    ‘I’ve got in a muddle there, up at the mas. I can’t find anything. My carte d’identité, my glasses . . .’
    She hardly ever went inside his house – the house that had once been kept so clean and orderly by her beloved Bernadette. The stink of it made her gag. Even the sight of his old shirts hanging out of the window to be washed by the rain, she had to turn away when she saw these, remembering Bernadette’s laundry chest and all the sheets and shirts and vests white as fondant and folded edge-to-edge and smelling like fresh toast.
    ‘Aramon,’ she said. ‘Go home. Take the kindling. You can keep what you’ve gleaned, even though you know it’s not yours.’
    He let go his makeshift sling and the pieces of wood crashed around his feet and he stared helplessly at them. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated up there. You know?’
    ‘What d’you mean, “complicated”?’
    ‘Everything’s got jumbled up with everything else. I can’t tell one thing from another. Someone has to sort it out. Please . . .’
    Her stare was as hard as yew. She felt the poison of him, like a yew berry in her mouth.
    ‘You can have a couple of bantams,’ he offered. ‘I’ll wring their necks for you, pluck them, gut them. You can invite Marianne Viala, uhn? Have a lovely feast. Get the gossip. Pardi! I know how you women love to gossip.’
    ‘Have a couple of bantams for doing what?’
    He shifted his feet, scratched his neck. His eyes, once beautiful, were still brown and deep. ‘Just help me. Please, Audrun. Because I’m scared now. I’ll admit it.’
    ‘Scared of what?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s this mess I’m living in. I don’t know where to find the things I