darkness from before Jeannette was born. Before long, in the natural way, her father learned to live with sadness, and soon that sadness lost its sting, and what had been unsealed in shock began to clam up again, and he would not release any more of what he knew. He brushed Jeannette off when she asked him to, with an appalled look, as if forgetting how much he had already told her.
They moved to Montpellier after Jeannette finished school. Frédéric’s sister lived in town with her children Marian and Xavier, and also nearby was the vineyard of Sylvain Leclair, an old friend of Ariane’s. Frédéric took up a position as maître de conférences at the university, and Jeannette enrolled to study philosophy, becoming one of only nineteen women in her year.
Father and daughter settled in quickly. They entered the society around the university and formed acquaintances that became friendships. It did not matter here if you were indigenous or from elsewhere since within those lecture halls and libraries all accents converged on a standard, and the commerce of knowledge dissolved regional difference. Sylvain brought the Molineus into the orbit of the vignerons, who also accepted them, albeit with reservations. The society of the vignerons had clotted over the last fifty years under pressure of various external disasters, including the droughts and the Algerian wine surplus. In distinction to the northern Gauls, they clung to the archaic identity of Occitania—although that was a name so diluted by now that half the restaurants along the seafront had it daubed in enamel on their front boards. But between the vines Sylvain was such a beloved and strange personality that he secured invitations for his friends “les Molineux” without any trouble, in spite of their voices and clothes, which recalled Paris through and through.
At the end of each weekday, father and daughter reunited in the blue salon to discuss philosophy. They drank from new china and debated Bergson’s notion of freedom experienced through time, which Frédéric liked for its emphasis on the action of the mind. Jeannette preferred Boutroux’s point that formulae can never explain anything because they cannot explain themselves, which she sometimes mistakenly distilled into the view that there is no point in commenting on any phenomenon since we are all part of the same fabric, which meant you could at most grasp the corner of something but never see the whole. These discussions, in which Frédéric encouraged the expansion of his daughter’s sympathies to consider alternative points of view, often touched on themes of significance but they were never applied to their own lives. Although father and daughter avoided candour, these evenings brought them into a new kind of intimacy from which each drew strength.
Since Jeannette earned her diploma, even this had dissipated. Her friends from the university were all married, and though she had no desire to leave her father their discussions had stopped, and without an emotional repertoire to buttress the intellectual bond they grew apart. Now Jeannette relied on her own powers of stillness for succour. Her philosophical education had sharpened the apparatus of her mind, which she had repurposed into ramparts. She let the hours of the day fall by remotely, and her thoughts slid from object to object without engagement.
Lately she had encountered a few difficulties. The arrival of Midhat was one cause. She had kept a distance from their visitor, but even at a distance his presence made it harder to submerge herself in her own mind. The war was another cause, and although that too was distant it was all anyone wanted to talk about. At least, she considered, they were fortunate to have left Paris—though, of course, the boys would be leaving soon, Xavier, Paul, Laurent. These small changes wrought vast work, and the corners of Jeannette’s mind had begun once again to glimmer with activity. And then that morning, the photographs of her mother. Her face and figure before the photographer’s painted screen. The freckle under her eyebrow, the lace around her collar, the stray hairs curving out, marked in immortal grey lines on the gelatin silver.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle.”
Jeannette started. Midhat Kamal was standing on the terrace at the back of the house. He held an umbrella between his graceful hands, and his thin black eyebrows were raised in greeting. As she lifted her arm to wave, he bowed, but remained on the terrace amid the iron furniture. He could have been a European from this distance; the coppery tone of his face,