When she was a small child she had thought that if only she were patient enough, if she waited enough and lay awake enough, her father would one night speak to her. But the miracle never happened. The lips never trembled into speech. For hours she listened, tense against her pillow, while an owl shrieked in the forest, and Mother and Cousin Maurice laughed and tinkled glasses downstairs, and the moon moved from the wardrobe to the wash-basin and then across her eiderdown. Sometimes she thought: "Yes. That’s him. He hasn’t forgotten." But it was only a voice in the road or the wind shaking the door. Her father was dead. He had been killed when she was four years old and she could remember him hardly at all. There had been walks with him in the Forest of Fontainebleau; yes, she could picture that. Whenever they came upon litter left by some party of tourists he would stoop down, make it into a little bonfire, and then set it alight: so that it seemed as if their whole walk had been somehow rare and exciting because of these beacons.
