You can close your eyes; you don’t even need to listen, and there are no hands you need to clasp.

Carolyn. The name has already defined her as the lover of an older, richer, married man. Carolyn – the sensual name of a stunted potential, of one who has persevered where others have fallen away, of a woman whose loyalty will never be a matter for debate, but whose destiny in this world is inextricably tied up with the ignominy of seducing another woman's man, of befriending his child, of creating, out of nowhere, ambitions for their shared future together. Like Carolyn herself, the explanations are unequivocal and unashamed; they have something passionate and absolute about them. And yet, despite all this, you somehow wish things could have been different.

Out on the verandah, fingers beneath chin and bright eyes expressionless as the sky, did you come out here to be yourself, or is that the question in avoidance of which you find yourself forced here, incidentally, from some other place of actual significance? What are you thinking now, Carolyn, beyond that pretty face of yours – that face upon which, like an ever more ambiguous affirmation, the age you are has started to settle? All I can see is worry - worry about how this day will turn out, worry about your own imperfections. How easy it is to forget you have finally arrived at the place that you now are, and there is nothing either to hold you back or draw you further forth except the complications you imagine.

The town is close by, and the house proposes few reasons to stay; yet, for all its birdsong, something evaporates on the dusty copper walk through the pine forest, and the lake is always more weedy than you imagine, and your feet heavier than you remember, and it seems you haven’t the heart to stride like a conqueror between the high walls where the gatehouse once stood, at which time your stepdaughter looks at you warily, as if she had made a mistake in you, and everything in the world feels strange and out of place and unlikely to succeed.

Once, there were others about; she was waiting among them; they quickly vanished, and she was alone with the moon and the smell of the river. They had gone to find things, and they depended on her to remain here. They depended on her, they said, because someone must stay. What they imagined might happen had never been stated; but neither was there any obligation to understand it; perhaps they even hoped the force of the inexplicable alone would bind her there. Now they have gone, without looking back, to complete the living of their secret lives over the hill.

And it is now that she first realises her life will not wait, that both they and she are mistaken to take her silence for compliance, that something deep within her makes its own promises and will not be countermanded. She cannot stay; she needs either to be with them or without them, but this middle ground, this indeterminate waiting without affiliation, waiting for the moon to shift or the scent of the river to change – it is too like the pattern of lives that go nowhere, that cross the hill only to reach a valley, followed by a further hill. She cannot stay; she needs companionship to endure the loneliness of the places she has been with them, even if really this loneliness is only the long-drawn, almost unrecognisable shadow of her own desire to stay. She cannot stay; she knows this without deciding anything, and later there will be no decision to regret, although there will also be no path back to follow. This is why, ten years hence, when her eyes make a pact with those of a certain, married man, and something happens as a result, what he will remember best will be the unsettling sensation of something sad and strong lost in a place too big to see; and she will say, to have done with the moment and clear the way for both of them: “The first rule of the countryside is to learn how and when to shut a gate.”

For what a thing it is to want a thing that can be had, if had it can be, only where the present breaks its rhythm; and what a thing it is to entertain and try to master that space of the absurd, into which nothing but truth and light can tumble down. However life tries to turn you, and whatever laughing hands it slips over your eyes, your desire is cold and silver, like lines to the horizon, and it only shines the brighter as you discover you have lost your heart to a protagonist whose need is infinite. Meanwhile the movements of your friends have slowed, the keys softly turning within their backs; the needles of their records have returned to the beginning; they have started out again on the second or third of many transits of not remembering, and the hard won lessons of their past have become little more than short-lived, circular arguments, whose purpose in life is not to clarify, but only to contradict. They bore you now, those repetitious voices once close to you, like white sheets preparing for new sin, falling and rising in their spume and soap beyond the pucker of the glass.

“They haven’t even begun to live,” she says aloud. “They haven’t even rung the doorbell of the house; they haven’t even learned the meaning of seeking shelter from the rain. And so I took nothing, really, away. I took nothing away that would have meant anything to them when it rained or they were lost.”

The other girl continues to watch her, without offering any rejoinder; it is not for her to decide whatever it is you are trying to justify or explain. Then the memory of the last bell rings in the schoolhouse amid the thunder of feet, and everyone spills out onto the wide road that leads nowhere, and all together, in a flash: your life – what does it mean? Is it the less lonely for pausing here in a place of your own initiative, the more worthy for its dubious accolade of being discriminated by you alone, and fought over, and won, by you? How long can originality retain its incipience, how long until you too are answerable to someone not in command of all the facts, or in charge of more of them than you, who will listen without condemnation as you justify the places you have been, but the recantation of which, for the first time, will seem suddenly like the ascent of so many hills and the descent of so many valleys, with the secret heart of whatever it is that makes all this worthwhile stolen by strangers or abandoned in childhood as an improbable dream that would never carry you anywhere? You look at the blue and yellow as they deepen at the horizon, understanding that, even as you watch, the day is fast heading toward its conclusion, and soon you will be left with an indecipherable fact. But you don’t want to remember the places you have been with it, or try to guess the route by which you will some day join it at its sudden, culminating truth. For you are too irresolute to understand, and all you know is that the answer to anything will never bring you peace.

“I come from the place where everyone is always young, and I am the oldest one there,” the other girl says at last. But she says it in a language we don’t recognise, and none of us are looking in her direction as she does so; we are looking instead at something else. What she actually said was “She always kept a straw in her mouth so that she didn’t need to talk to anyone,” but if they hadn’t heard her properly the first time, she wasn’t going to repeat it.