“Give it to your lady friend,” Jil Punkinflake says, the moon white in his pupils.

*

The Girl beams at me as she opens the door. I am led into the house, and she turns to look at me several times. Once, on the staircase, she stops outright, and turns to smile at me.

She stands and smiles at me, for a long time.

Then she turns and we continue to the landing, her opulent hips swaying with a rustle of silk to the right, and to the left, before my eyes. She does not accompany me to the door, but waves me on, her smile unchanged. I go down the hall, to the door I passed through before. When I turn to look back, to ask the Girl with my eyes if this is the right thing I’m doing, she is not looking at me. The Girl shivers, her hand comes up to her breast, where her other hand seizes and folds it around its thumb. She lifts her face slowly, still holding one hand in another hand, and gazes into the air in front of her.

I open the door, and enter the small room, the tepid air close with her fragrance. Light from a grey day sifts from the windows, and she sits soft and remote as a figure in a painting.

We are going downstairs this time, to sit together in the rare gloom beneath the veiled trees. She has gone for her hat. I wait at the window, looking down at the dark grass, the stingy flowered border, the strict line of the upright house. There is a protruding what-do-you-call-it, a cupola? Some sort of fistula. A light is there now, where there hadn’t been before. It is moving around the room, now bright, now faint. That’s the Girl there, at the window, moving about the room in that light, which is now still. She is voluptuously in her slip, and now she sees me. I am smiled at again, across these windows. I can see even the strip of pink ribbon that cinches the slip around her narrow waist. Looking straight at me, she looses the slip and lets it fall about her feet, and I fly through stair and hallways and doorways, ways and spaces, lights and darks unmoor and spin smoothly and rapidly around me until through what I seem to know is the right door I am flung headlong into darkness, into bare, enfolding arms.

Later, I join the veiled woman who waits for me beneath the veiled branches, in a small paved spot by an airy pavilion. The thick crepe folded down from her great hat is impermeable to my sight, and the waxy light lances in between us, making her even harder to see. There is little said, and less meant maybe, before it is suggested to me that I might go. But, I am also tersely instructed to come again tomorrow. She sounds different. I agree to go, but for the moment I am a little faint, and wait a little to collect myself. I rub my brow, and my face is tickled by three long grey hairs, tangled round the fingers of the hand that rubs my brow, fluttering in the wind.