men. She crawled on hands and knees into a closet under the stairs and dragged out a trunk of mouldering fancy-dress costumes. She watched me eagerly, with intensity, her eyes fixed on my face, my lips. Then she frowned, and pushed away the marionettes and shut the lid of the trunk, and sat back on her heels and sighed, as if these things, these dolls and dresses and bits of silk, were things she was telling me, and I was not responding. In a moment, though, she was up again and running down the hall, beckoning me to follow. She opened a heavy, studded door on to a little room rigged up as a photographic studio. The place was cluttered with parts of antique cameras and foxed packets of chemicals and stacks of glass negatives. The light was dense and still. Sophie sat down on a bench with a bundle of dog-eared, grainy prints in her lap. She patted the place beside her, inviting me to sit. There was a faint, feverish hum in the hot air, and a sharp, chemical tang. Gravely I examined the pictures as she passed them to me one by one. She had been through them before, she had her favourites, a close-up of a stout baby with the head of a blank-eyed caesar, a crooked shot of a donkey wearing a straw hat, a formal portrait of servants arrayed like an orchestra on the front steps of the house on some long-ago summer afternoon. Towards the bottom of the pile the subjects changed. Here was a back view of a large lady in a bustle leaning over a balcony, while behind her a whiskered gentleman gazed in lively surmise at a plump, cleft peach he was holding in his hand and about to bite. There were studies of the same couple, he in drooping leotard now and she stripped to her corset, posing on an ornate bed in postures at once lewd and oddly decorous. There was something sad about them, these jet and pearl-grey ghosts, whose future was already our past. The final picture was of the woman alone. She sat naked astride a straight-backed chair, grinning into the camera, with her hands on her bulging hips and her legs thrust wide apart. Her sex, defenceless and thrilling, was like some intricate, tasselled creature brought up from the secret depths of the sea. I cleared my throat and looked sideways at Sophie. She was watching me again, with that intent, expectant smile. There were violet shadows under her eyes, and a faint, dark down on her upper lip. She had a milky odour, with something sharp in it, like the smell of crushed nettles. Her hair was a hot, heavy mass, I could sense it, the dark weight of it, the thickness. She put aside the pictures, and we left the studio and wandered into a large, long room with glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls and plaster mouldings on the ceiling. The bookcases were empty. French windows gave on to the glare of the sweltering day, making the room seem a vast, dim tent. There had been intruders here, there was a broken window-pane, and dead leaves on the carpet, and in the corner on the floor a huge, rusted turd. I opened wide the windows and stood looking out. Stone steps led down to a sunken garden with waist-high grass. The air throbbed, big with heat. A little brown bird flitted up into a tree without a sound. Sophie put a record on an ancient gramophone and cranked the handle. There was a splutter and a hiss, and a wobbly orchestra struck up a waltz. The music swayed out on the summer air, quaint and gay. She knelt in a sagging armchair, with her hands folded along the back of it and her chin on her hands, watching the disc go round and round. I wondered if she could feel the music, a kind of drunken buzzing in her head, as of someone a long way off playing on paper and comb. The waltz tottered to a close, and she took off the record and put it back carefully in its sleeve. I can see it still, that scene, the shiny arm of the gramophone, curved and fat like the arm of a baby, and the chrome nipple twinkling at the centre of the turntable, and Sophie’s slender hands lifting the record. What else?