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By Root 258 0

which his stepfather had willed to his mother and which his mother had willed to him, and he had left his wife and family. Lucien Segura, in old age, was traversing the region of the Gers in a horse-drawn cart, in search of a new home. Now and then he gave travellers a ride in order to escape the strictness of this new solitude. They were of varying ages, from all walks of life, some alone, some who swung themselves onto the cart with one or two children and a dog. He conversed with them openly, as he always did with strangers, and heard the stories about forests they had worked in, their settlements by rivers, the gardens they manicured for a week’s pay. As he listened, he entered their worlds invisibly.

Until suddenly, one day, Lucien Segura had clambered off the cart and asked the family that was travelling with him to stay with his belongings. Then he had slowly walked like a pawn along the formal pathway of trees and found a shuttered and closed-up house. He broke the lock off with a heavy stone and entered a hallway full of dusty light. A door led into a kitchen, another to a dining room. He walked along the hollow-sounding corridor not even glancing at rooms, reached the back door and pushed it free of an old clasp, then stepped into the garden and beyond that into the depth of the long grass.

Now on his knees, the old writer touched the porous planks of the abandoned boat. It was the size of a child’s bed, half boat, half raft, with space between the planks. There was a manaclelike remnant of an oarlock on the side, and the tail of a rudder. It was a dried-up object, baked for years by the sun and tunnelled into for years by insects. But it meant there was possibly water nearby, and as soon as he assumed that, he began to smell it in the air and stood up, lifting his face to the sky. He bustled forward and within moments came upon the small lake. He stripped down and slipped into the water, all the scratches and bites on him covered now in its coldness.

For most of his life he had been regarded as a solitary. He was described once by an acquaintance as being ‘difficult as a bear,’ and this rough, impolite image projected onto the contained world around him was useful as well as false; it gave him space, and a border. But it was true that in spite of the gregarious situation of his family he lived mostly an imaginary life. When his marriage was dying, he found somewhere within himself the grisette Claudile and wrote three books about her divergent life. The fictional girl had kept him company. If this was sickness or a perversion of life, it was a sickness that had helped him overcome that difficult time, and he would never demean it, or her. He would remain faithful to this person in the town of Auch whose fate he’d invented and shared with readers. Some had come to love her, and wrote him letters as though he knew her in real life, not just in a fiction.

Cher Monsieur—

I have recently reminded myself of a dinner in which Claudile Rothère and her sister spoke of fig jam, telling how they love it.

So I have kept a pot for you, made by a friend living in the countryside of Cahors. I hope, sir, you enjoy it.

With my deepest regards,

Sarah S

Lucien had received this package a few days before leaving Marseillan, and now and then on his journey he carefully reopened the envelope and reread the letter—the formality and kindness of it—as if it were a billet-doux. He had brought the fig jam with him, and during the afternoons he would, with a similar formality, open it and share it with whoever was in the cart with him, most recently with three travellers—an ‘old thief,’ as the man called himself, and his younger wife and their son. They had been with him for several days, and by now Lucien was accustomed to them. Like him they were looking for a new home, so theirs was a journey similar to his. ‘La confiture de figue!’ he announced. ‘Faite par une dame à Cahors.’ The eyes of the young son at first pretended to gaze at nothing, like a falsely polite dog. Then he watched the knife’s spread of the jam, and like that