"Not with any finesse. But I learned all the lessons they gave me. It was difficult to begin with because I was so far behind. But the teacher was encouraging."

"So he was your great benefactor, like the good genie in a story."

"Yes. Except for one thing. I didn't like him. I thought he would treat me like his son. But he didn't. He just made me work. He was a social reformer of some kind, I suppose, like the priests who went into the slums of London to work with the boys there. I think his interest in my learning was a subst.i.tute for other things in life. He never showed me any affection, he just wanted to know how much progress I'd made with my studies."

"But you must have felt grateful to him."

"Yes, I felt grateful. I still do. I write to him from time to time. When I finished at the school he found me an interview for a job with a firm in London who paid for me to go to Paris on their behalf to learn the language and find out more about the textile industry. Then I worked in London, living in lodgings in a place called Holloway. Then I was dispatched to Amiens."

He looked at her with relief. The self-revelation was over. "That's it." Isabelle smiled at him. "That's all? That's all your life? You seem so old to me, I think of you sometimes as being older than I am. It's your eyes, I think. Those big, sad eyes." She stroked his face with the tips of her fingers.

When they returned to the hotel Isabelle went ahead to the bathroom. She noticed with dismay that, despite her elaborate carelessness, the blood had returned at its appointed time.

After a week in Plombieres they traveled south. Stephen wrote to his company in London, enclosing his reports and explaining that he would not be returning. In Gren.o.ble they celebrated his twenty-first birthday and he wrote to Vaughan thanking him for his guardianship, which was now ended. They stayed until some money arrived for Isabelle, wired from Rouen by Jeanne, whom she had contacted by letter. Stephen still had two large English bills that had been given to him by his guardian for use in case of emergency.

In October they arrived in St.-Remy-de-Provence, where Isabelle had a cousin on her mother's side. They rented a small house and Isabelle wrote to Marguerite, enclosing some money and asking her to send a trunkful of clothes. She specified exactly which ones she needed; the occasional item purchased en route had been no subst.i.tute for the outfits put together so carefully from shops in Amiens, Paris, and Rouen or for the things she had added or sewn herself.

Resplendent again in her oxblood skirt and linen waistcoat, Isabelle read Marguerite's letter to Stephen as they sat over breakfast in the living room overlooking the street.

Dear Madame, I did not recognize your writing, perhaps you asked Monsieur to write it for you. I have sent the items you requested with this letter. Lisette is very well, thank you, and is being very good to Monsieur and is looking after him very well, she seems happy. Little Gregoire is also well, though he has not been to school every day. I am keeping well though we do miss you terribly, all of us, it's not the same without you. Monsieur and Madame Berard have been to call on Monsieur most evenings and I sometimes hear the two gentlemen having long conversations. I have done what you asked and not shown your letter to anyone so they won't know that you are in St.-Remy. I wonder what it is like there and if you are keeping well. Everything is going along fine in the house but we hope you will come back soon. With warm wishes from Marguerite.

Stephen walked through the streets of the almost-deserted town. The fountain in the square around which people gathered in summer played coldly into its stone basin. The loose shutters on the houses were blown violently back against the buildings by the autumnal wind that was rolling in from the south. Stephen did not mind the feeling of loneliness, nor the tedium that awaited him in his work. He had found a job as an a.s.sistant to a furniture maker. He did the preliminary sawing and planing, and was occasionally allowed to do some of the more skilled work in design and carving. At midday he and the other four men employed in the business would go to a bar and smoke and drink pastis. Although he could see they thought him curious and he tried not to outstay his welcome, he was grateful to them for accepting him into their company.

In the evenings Isabelle would prepare dinner from what she could find in the market. She was critical of what was offered. "Rabbit and tomatoes, that's all they seem to eat," she said as she set down a large pot on the table. "At least at home I could have a choice between a dozen different kinds of meat."

"Though Picardy itself is not the gastronomic centre of France," said Stephen.

"Didn't you like the food?"

"Yes, I did. I liked the lunches with you and Lisette especially. But I don't think a gourmet from Paris would have found much to cheer about in the local restaurants."

"Well, he needn't come then," said Isabelle, nettled at what she took to be a criticism of her own cooking.

"Don't be cross," he said, laying his hand across her cheek.

"The chisel. It was different from the ones I've used before."

"You should be more careful. Now sit down and have some rabbit." After dinner they read books, sitting on either side of the fire. They went to bed early in the room at the back of the house. Isabelle had painted it and sewn new curtains. Her photographs stood on top of the cheap chest of drawers and the huge carved wardrobe bulged with her dresses. There were not many flowers to buy in the market, though there was always lavender to put in the numerous blue pots around the house. Compared to the bourgeois opulence of the boulevard du Cange, the room was stark. The presence of Isabelle's things in it, however, gave it in Stephen's eye something of the atmosphere of her old bedroom. The silk stockings that sometimes trailed from an open drawer and the piles of soft undergarments, the finest fabric the trade could provide, mitigated some of the harshness of the bare boards. In that shared bedroom Stephen felt a privileged proximity to these small intimacies that even her husband had never been permitted. In sleep they were also together, though Stephen found the closeness of Isabelle's unconscious body made him feel uneasy, and he often took a blanket to the sofa in the living room.

He would lie alone, looking up at the ceiling and across to the big fireplace, over to the kitchen range and its black, hanging implements. His thoughts and dreams did not fill up with the big skies of Lincolnshire or the memories of refectory tables and inspections for head lice; nor did he give a backward thought to having abruptly left his employment, to import licences, dockets, or bales of cotton unloaded at the East India Docks. He thought about the moment and the next day and the capsule of existence in which he and Isabelle lived, contained within a town and a world of kinds outside. It was an existence he felt had been won by him but in some wider judgement would not be allowed.

He thought about what he would make at work the next day. Sometimes he thought about nothing at all, but merely traced with his eyes the lines of the timber in the beams above his head.

Two months pa.s.sed and winter calmed the worst of the winds with an icy stillness that made the pavements dangerous and stopped the water in the fountain. Isabelle stayed in the house for most of the day when Stephen was at work. She spent the time altering the decorations to suit her taste and cooking soup or stew for him to eat when he came home. She did not miss the comfortable life she had had in Amiens with the attentive delivery boys from the milliner or the grocer. It did not matter to her that much of her day was spent in performing tasks that even Marguerite preferred to leave to Madame Bonnet. Her cousin, whose husband ran the pharmacy, came to visit her frequently, and she was not lonely. At the end of December no blood came. She looked at the small black diary in which she marked the days and saw that it was due. By the end of January there was still none. This seemed appropriate to Isabelle. It had been hard to think of blood as the mark of new life, of hope, as Jeanne had told her when she first ran to her sobbing in alarm; now in the withholding of it there was a sense of being healed. She had stopped hemorrhaging herself away; her power was turned inward where it would silently create. She said nothing to Stephen.

One Sat.u.r.day at noon she went to meet him after he had finished work, and they went for a walk in the town. They stopped briefly at a cafe so he could eat after his morning's exertion, then carried on past the town hall and out along a narrow street of shops toward the outskirts of the place. Their breath left thinning trails behind them as they climbed a slight gradient leading out of town. They arrived in a square, which was the last before the street became a road and vanished into the grey-and-purple countryside.

Isabelle felt lightheaded and went to sit down on a bench. A slight moisture had come up on her forehead, which was now turning cold against her skin under the winter wind.

"I'll find you some smelling salts," said Stephen, and set off for Madame Bonnet's pharmacy.

Isabelle sat quietly, not sure whether to loosen her coat and allow the cool air to reach her or to wrap it more tightly around her to keep out the chill. She intended to tell Stephen about the child she believed she was expecting, but something made her delay. She wished she could present it to him whole without the long toil of pregnancy. She had no wish to be cared for or treated with special regard. She did not feel that the minute organic changes taking place inside her were the concern of anyone else, even of the man who had caused them. Yet she already loved the child. She imagined it to be a boy and could picture his smiling, open face. She didn't see a swaddled baby but a young man with a guileless manner, rather larger than herself, who would fling his arm protectively around her before returning to some undemanding task in the fields. He was never an infant in her imagination, nor a man of substance or achievement for whom she felt ambitious, but always just this ageless, happy male.

She thought of all the mothers who lived in the villages that lined the narrow road leading from the town. Out there were millions of young men, strong, smiling, as her boy would be, working on the land. They never knew each other, never met, never considered any kinship or allegiance they might have to each other or to the country they lived in, because such things existed only in time of war. Isabelle began to look with regret toward her parents and their continuing lives. The coming child had already begun to still her most restless expectations. The need satisfied in her was so deep that she had not previously been aware of it; it was as though she had become conscious of a starving hunger only after having eaten. It seemed to alter the levels and balances of her needs. She felt closer to the girl she had been at home; a broken circle had been rejoined. Although this was a soothing thought, it brought with it some doubts about what she had done; it made her want to be reunited with her family, or at least with her sister Jeanne. It was to her more than to anyone that she wanted to talk. It was she, Isabelle thought, who must be the first to know about the child.

She had started to feel uneasy about the things she and Stephen had done in Azaire's house. Stephen seemed so sure of everything and she had been so overcome by desire that she had trusted him. She had followed her instincts and where there was doubt she was rea.s.sured by his certainty and by the tenderness of her feeling for him. Without the stimulus of fear and prohibition, her desire had slackened.

In the southern winter the excesses of their brazen love affair seemed to belong to a different season. She went into a church in St.-Remy to confess to the local priest, but found she could not bring herself to describe in detail the extent of what had pa.s.sed between them. The priest cut her off soon after she confessed to the adultery itself. The penance seemed to bear no relation to the sin; it was a formality plucked from the register where such commonplace transgressions were graded. Isabelle felt unsatisfied, and although she did not regret what had happened she began to feel guilty.

Stephen returned with a bottle of salts and sat beside her on the bench.

"I wonder what it is," he said. "Perhaps you haven't been eating well enough at home. Sometimes that makes people feel faint. I brought you a little cake as well."

"No, I don't think it's that. It's nothing serious." She laid her hand on his arm.

"Don't worry about me."

She was smiling at him in a sweet, indulgent way that made it seem as though it was he who needed to be cared for or protected. She broke the cake in half and offered some to him. A shower of yellow crumbs fell on to the wooden seat between them.

There was a whirring and banging of bird's wings above them as a fat pigeon, attracted by the sight of the crumbling cake, descended from the gutter of the building behind them and landed impudently between them on the bench.

"Jesus Christ!" Stephen leapt up from his seat in horror. Isabelle, who had been amused by the bird's fearlessness, looked up in alarm.

"What is it?"

"That bird, that bird. For G.o.d's sake. Get rid of it."

"It's only a pigeon, it's just--"

"Get rid of it. Please."

Isabelle clapped her hands, and the plump bird managed to heave itself back into the air, across the square and into the branches of a tree, where it waited in sight of the crumbs.

"What on earth is the matter, my darling? You're trembling."

"I know, I know. I'm sorry. I'll be all right."

"It's just a fat old pigeon, it wouldn't do you any harm."

"I know it wouldn't. It's not that I think it'll attack, it's just some strange fear."

"Come and sit down now. Come on. Sit next to me and let me put my arm round you. That's right. My poor boy. Is that better? Shall I stroke your hair?"

"No, I'm fine. I'm sorry to have made a fuss."

"The noise you made."

"I know."

Stephen gradually stopped trembling. "I've always hated birds. That time I told you about when I hit that boy and they made me go back into the inst.i.tution. He had been taunting me about some crows that the gamekeeper had nailed up to a fence. I went up and stroked one to show I was not afraid. It had maggots under its wings and drooling, milky eyes." He shuddered.

Isabelle said, "So birds make you think of having to go back to that place?"

"It's partly that. But I had always hated them, from long before that. There's something cruel, prehistoric about them."

She stood up and took his arm. For a moment she looked into his dark brown eyes, into the symmetrical beauty of his pale face. She nodded a little and smiled.

"So there is something that frightens you," she said.

A week later Isabelle was chopping vegetables on the table when she felt a pain just below the waistband of her skirt. It felt as though she was being penetrated by a knitting needle with large walnuts midway up its shaft. She pressed her hands flat over the pain and sat down heavily at the table. If she kept still and concentrated she would keep the baby; she would not allow it to escape. Her manicured fingers tenderly aligned themselves on the area she imagined the barely visible thing to be. Her pulse was transmitted through the fabric of the dress and the soft skin beneath to the chamber where the life was balanced. She willed it to stay, trying to rea.s.sure it through the gentleness of her palms, but she felt further sharp probes going right up into her womb. She went to the bedroom and lay down, only to find there was bleeding she could not stop.

In the afternoon she took her coat and found a doctor whose name had been given to her by her cousin. He was a bald man with a deep voice and a roll of fat that almost obscured his stiff white collar. He seemed unmoved by her anxiety and talked in brief, cheerful sentences as he examined her and gestured her to a door off his surgery where she would find a gla.s.s container. He told her the result of the test would be available to him within a week and she was to call back then. In the meantime, he said, she should take things quietly and not exert herself. He pressed a large, folded piece of paper into her hand and told her to pay the receptionist as she left.

On the way back to the house, Isabelle stopped at the church and sat in a pew at the back. She had no further desire to confess to the priest, but she wanted to admit, if only to herself, her feelings of guilt about the way she had abandoned herself to physical pleasure. Lurid images of afternoons in the boulevard du Cange came into her mind inside the wintry cold of the church. She could see Stephen's blood-swollen flesh in front of her face, her mouth; she could feel it probing and entering each unguarded part of her, not against her will but at her hungry and desperate insistence.

She opened her eyes and shook the sacrilegious pictures from her mind, feeling ashamed that she had entertained them in a church, even if it had been only to confess them. She looked to the altar, where a wooden crucifix was lit by candles, the waxy flesh below the ribs pierced and bleeding from the Roman soldier's sword. She thought how prosaically physical this suffering had been: the punctured skin on forehead, feet, hands, the parting of flesh with nails and steel. When even the divine sacrifice had been expressed in such terms, it was sometimes hard to imagine in what manner precisely human life was supposed to exceed the limitations of pulse, skin, and decomposition.

Isabelle wrote: My dearest Jeanne, I have missed you so much, not only in the past few weeks but in the years before when we never seemed to meet. How much I regret that now. I feel like a child who has been absorbed in her own game all day and suddenly stops, only to see that it is growing dark and she is far from home with no idea of how to get back.

I terribly want to see you to talk about what has happened. I am pregnant, though I thought last week that I had lost the child. I have strange pains and bleeding, though the doctor says these are quite common. He says there may be a bruise inside which is bleeding and could dislodge the baby. I am to rest and not exert myself.

I have still not told Stephen about it. I don't know why I can't do this. I truly love him, but he frightens me a little. I'm not sure he would understand my joy at being pregnant or how worried I am at the thought of losing it. He hardly talks about such things. Even when he has mentioned his own childhood he speaks as though it were something that happened to someone else. How could he feel attached to something that does not yet exist?

There is something worse, Jeanne. When we were young and I was the baby, no one ever paid me much attention (except you, of course) and I was allowed to do what I liked as long as my dress was kept clean and I was polite at mealtimes. I wanted to explore. Do you remember how I said I would go to Africa? Now I feel I have explored in some other way. It has damaged Rene, though I owe him very little after the way he treated me. It has also damaged Lisette and Gregoire, and of course you and Mama and Papa, though whether Papa takes much notice of anything these days I don't know. Although I will love the baby and protect it with all my strength, I will not be the ideal mother, compromised as I am.

At the worst moments I feel we have gone too far. Stephen and I were fearless--or unscrupulous you might say--and we had no doubts that what we were doing was right: it was its own justification, Stephen used to say. I feel we have lost our bearings. I am alone, like the child, on the verge of nightfall. Although I am lost I still think I can find my way home if I go now.

This must sound feeble, I know. She has made her choice, you must be saying to yourself, she can't expect to change her mind now. But I want so desperately to see you, I want so very much that you should hold the baby when it comes, take it in your arms. I want to sit on the bed in your room and feel your hand on my head as you start to comb my tangled hair. What mad thoughts and impulses have pushed me out so far from you? _ Isabelle was crying too much to carry on with the letter. Jeanne had been trusting enough when Isabelle first wrote to ask for money. She had never met Stephen, but out of love for her sister had sent funds of her own. It was not fair, Isabelle thought, to ask more of her.

She laid her head on her arms as she sat at the kitchen table. She felt as though she had been tricked. She had believed herself to be one thing, then turned out to be another. How was she to know whether to trust her latest inclinations, or whether to suspect they too might be superseded by other more compelling ones? In her confusion the only constant emotion was her devotion to the child inside her. For reasons she could not disentangle, its well-being could not be guaranteed in the life she was living, far from home, with Stephen, in this frozen town. Stephen also thought of home. His grandfather's cottage had been at the end of a village with a view of the church, some ugly new houses behind it, and the big road going north. In the other direction were flat fields, very pale green in colour, running out into deciduous woods in which the local farmers shot.

He thought how he would take Isabelle to see them one day. He had no sentimental attachment to the idea of home, he did not weep for his thieving grandfather or his absent mother, but he wanted to see Isabelle against this different background, so that the ages of his life would be united. He had surprised himself by the gentleness he had discovered, all of which was now directed toward Isabelle. When he worked the wood in the mornings he imagined how smooth it would need to be if she were to walk barefoot on it. When the tedium of the work lowered his spirits he thought about her face lighting up at his return in the evening. In his affections she had moved from the object of fearful pa.s.sion to someone whose well-being was his life's concern, though in that transition he had not lost his sense of her dignity, of her superior age and position. Meanwhile Isabelle privately made plans to visit Jeanne in Rouen. She would tell Stephen that she would be gone only a few days, then when she was there she would decide whether or not to return. The moment would come, she told herself, when she would tell Stephen.

Another week pa.s.sed and her pregnancy became visible. Stephen noticed that she was heavier, but some new-found modesty meant that he never had a chance to examine her properly without her clothes. He noticed that she talked to him less and he wondered why. She seemed troubled and removed. There had been another episode of pain and bleeding.

One day when he was at work she packed a small suitcase and sat down at the table to write a note of explanation.

"I feel we have gone too far and I must turn back," she began, then tore up the sheet of paper and put the pieces in her pocket. There was nothing she could say to explain herself. She looked around the front room with its open range and the heavy wooden mantelpiece that had so much delighted her at first. She went upstairs to take one final look at the rough floorboards of the bedroom and the curtains she had made. Then she left the house and walked to the station. When Stephen returned in the evening he saw at once that some clothes and personal things, her photographs and jewellery, were gone. He opened the wardrobe. Most of her dresses were still there. He took out one she had worn soon after he had arrived at the boulevard du Cange. It was cream-coloured with a rustling skirt, ivory b.u.t.tons, and a ribbed bodice. He held it against his face, then crushed it in his arms.

He felt like the blocks of wood they sometimes split in the back yard at work, when the axe was first embedded, then raised and driven to the ground, so the wood was cloven in half, from top to toe. No shred or fibre escaped the sundering. In the days that followed, he returned to work. He arrived on time in the morning and exchanged pleasantries with the other men. He swore and spat at the snagging teeth of the saw as the blade caught in the grainy timber. He rolled off the long curls beneath his plane. He sanded with three grades of paper, feeling the surface of the finished wood beneath the soft skin of his fingers. He felt the sweet taste of aniseed on his tongue at midday and watched the viscous liquid cloud over in the gla.s.s as he poured in water. He talked and told jokes with the men and showed no sign that anything had changed.

In the evening he laboured with the range, conjuring what he could from the food available, from the variations of rabbit and tomatoes. Then he sat in front of the fire and drank bottles of wine as he looked at the embers.

She had returned because she felt she could save her soul. She had gone home because she was frightened of the future and felt sure a_ _natural order could yet be resumed. He had no choice but to continue with what he had begun. When he had drunk the wine he went upstairs and lay on their bed, his boots on the white cover. He could think of nothing.

He lay and stared at the night beyond the window.

He felt himself grow cold.

FRANCE 1916--PART TWO.

Jack Firebrace lay forty-five feet underground with several hundred thousand tons of France above his face. He could hear the wooden wheezing of the feed that pumped air through the tunnel. Most of it was exhausted by the time it reached him. His back was supported by a wooden cross, his feet against the clay, facing toward the enemy. With an adapted spade, he loosened quant.i.ties of soil into a bag which he pa.s.sed back to Evans, his mate, who then crawled away in the darkness. Jack could hear the hammering of timbers being used to sh.o.r.e up the tunnel further back, though where he worked, at the face, there was no guarantee that the clay would hold.

The sweat ran down into his eyes and stung them, making him shake his head from side to side. At this point the tunnel was about four feet across and five feet high. Jack kept sticking the spade into the earth ahead of him, hacking it out as though he hated it. He had lost track of how long he had been underground. He found it easier not to think when he might be relieved, but to keep digging. The harder he worked, the easier it seemed. It must have been six hours or more since he had seen daylight, and even then not much of it, but a thin green haze across the lowlands of the French-Belgian border, lit by the spasmodic explosion of sh.e.l.ls. His unit had not been able to return to its billet in the local village. So intense was the activity in this part of the line that the surface troops would not stay in their trenches without the protection of the men underground. The miners had to sleep, for the time being, in chambers at the top of their shafts or in the trenches with the infantry.

Jack felt a hand clutch his elbow. "Jack. We need you. Turner's heard something about twenty yards back. Come on."

Evans pulled him off the cross, and Jack turned stiffly, easing the sweatsoaked vest off his shoulders, and following Evans's crawling b.u.t.tocks until he could stand. Even the murk of the timbered tunnel was bright to him after the clay face. He blinked in the gloom.

"Over here, Firebrace. Turner said it sounded like digging." Captain Weir, a startling figure with disarrayed hair, in plimsolls and civilian sweater, pushed him over to where Turner, a tired, frightened man, shivering with fatigue in the hot tunnel, was resting against his pick.

"It was just here," said Turner. "I'd got my head close up to this timber and I could hear vibrations. It wasn't our lot, I can tell you."

Jack placed his head against the wall of the tunnel. He could hear the rhythmic gasp of the bellows in the overhead hosepipe draped from the ceiling.

"You'll have to turn off the air-feed, sir," he said to Weir.

"Christ," said Turner, "I can't breathe."

Weir dispatched a message to the surface. Two minutes later the noise ceased and Jack knelt down again. His exceptional hearing was frequently in demand. The previous winter, two miles south of Ypres, he had lowered his ear to rat-level in the trench into a water-filled petrol can and held it there until his head lost all feeling. He preferred the airless quiet of the tunnel to the numbing of his skull.

The men stood motionless as Weir held his finger to his lips. Jack breathed in deeply and listened, his body rigid with effort. There were sounds, distant and irregular. He could not be sure what they were. If they evacuated the tunnel as a precaution and the noise turned out only to have been sh.e.l.lfire or surface movement then time would be lost on their own tunnel. On the other hand, if he failed to identify German digging coming back the other way, the loss of life would probably be greater. He had to be sure.

"For G.o.d's sake, Firebrace." He heard Weir's hissing voice in his ear. "The men can hardly breathe."

Jack held up his hand. He was listening for the distinctive knocking made by timber when it was hammered into place against the wall. If a tunnel was very close it was also sometimes possible to hear the sound of spades or of bags of earth being dragged back.

There was a thumping noise again, but it did not sound hollow enough for wood; it was more like the rocking of the earth under sh.e.l.lfire. Jack tightened his nerves once more. His concentration was interrupted by a noise like the delivery of a sack of potatoes. Turner had collapsed on to the tunnel floor. Jack had made up his mind.

He said, "Sh.e.l.lfire."

"Are you sure?" said Weir.

"Yes, sir. As sure as I can be."

"All right. Tell them to turn the air-feed on again. Firebrace, you get back on the cross. You two, get Turner on his feet."

Jack crawled back into the darkness, feet first, where Evans helped him regain his position and pa.s.sed him the spade. He sank it into the earth ahead of him, feeling glad of the resumption of mechanical toil. Evans's grubbing hands worked invisibly beside him. Toward the end of his shift he began to imagine things. He thought for a second that he was standing in the lighted bar of a London pub, holding up his beer gla.s.s to the lamp, looking at the big gilt mirror behind the bar. The bright reflection made him blink, and the flickering of his eyes brought back the reality of the clay wall ahead of him. Evans's hand sc.r.a.ped. Jack struck out ahead of him again, his arms grinding in their joints.

Evans swore beneath his breath and Jack reached out and gripped him in rebuke. Evans had tried to light a candle but there was not enough oxygen. The match burned bright red but would not flame. The two men stopped and listened. They could hear the roar of their breathing magnified in the silence. They held their breath and there was nothing. They had dug to the end of the world. Jack could smell the damp earth and the sweat from Evans's body. Normally he could hear the timbers behind them being put into place by hand, pushed quietly against the clay. There was not even this cautious sound. The narrow tunnel closed round them. Jack felt Evans's hand grip his arm. His breath rasped out again. Something must be happening behind them.