There was to be no respite, no pause. Let alone any social chat.

The fat man and the chilblained woman drew away as they walked back over the road.

Rachaela could guess their conversation. ‘Well that was a turn-up.’ ‘Who was she?’ ‘A young one.’ ‘No sunglasses.’

The adventure of the village of the vandalized phone was over. Now there was only the three-hour walk to the house.

A wave of exhaustion overcame Rachaela.

What would they do if she lagged behind, sat down on a rock.

Why, wait patiently for her under their loads.

She was not sorry to leave the village.

It was depressing and a disappointment.

The crows laughed among the dead cars.

Defeated by abstract random things, Rachaela found herself disgorged by the heath, back at the house of the Scarabae, dog-tired, her stamina used up.

In her absence her bed had been scrupulously made, as she herself never troubled to make it, only tossing it together, straightening the pillows for the Devil’s face to reflect on.

She ran a bath and lay there, listening to Mozart on her radio for which batteries were now assured. The piece was a piano concerto. It seemed to her she had dreamed of piano music in this house...

Her watch, assiduously wound, showed her it was three-thirty.

At four-thirty she left the bath and went into her room. She changed her clothes and lay on the bed, now only in a bath of music. She thought seriously about the house.

She had left it alone during her week of external walking, only trying the iron-bound door of the tower from time to time, indolently, knowing it would be locked.

In the passage from her room she had noticed the paintings more, how in places a top layer of paint had flaked off from them to reveal other scenes beneath. She recalled the goat’s head thrust from the woman’s belly.

And she had found the kitchen with the gas cooker and mouse-holes.

She thought of the storm, and the dream of the man.

She had begun to imagine, very often, that something followed her through the house. On the heath she had been free of this feeling. It was a sort of hysteria, she now believed; for the very mad, very old, old man had not pursued her, not popped out or been abruptly encountered. Perhaps he had lost interest in her.

Rachaela began to go to sleep. Well, she could rest until the dinner with Anna and Stephan. She did not mean to miss that. She wanted now to speak to them, to Anna.