The village was most probably the same as it had always been, although it was only now, when I found myself obliged to point it out, that I really bothered to look at it. They had paused beside a schoolboy on a stepladder, who was sending floods of bright water through the collander of a hanging-basket. This was where the village began, and it ended, no less abruptly, where that single street gave way to fields of broom and wheat and hedgerows overrun with wild grass.

I yawned again, not exactly sure where these two girls had come from; and while they had solicited the tour, I was also not convinced that they could have taken in much of what I showed them. When they said "Algeria", I groped for details - rose gardens? French houses? - but either they did not understand me or my almost non-existent knowledge of that place, gleaned from a book I had once read, was years out of date.

The two girls exchanged glances and laughed politely.

"It is very different," the younger girl conceeded at last.

Both of them spoke with the brevity and heavy accent of a second or third language most of whose vocabulary remains to be learned. Therefore, while I did not doubt that she indeed meant that Algeria was different, I suspected that she also meant much more than this. Without consciously realising it I had started to parrot their verbal simplicity, so that when I now asked "Is it more industrial?" I had very little interest in whether it was or not, but because this was a simpler question than asking "What does it look like now?"

"Mm?" said the younger, again.

"Does it have much industry?"

The question seemed to throw her; they consulted each other quickly in undertones, the one obviously asking how to translate this or that word, her companion as swiftly responding with English words that made no sense out of context - "state", "estate", "station". The translations themselves were as often as not questions, and I was not convinced that when all this finally assembled itself I would be able to make much sense out of it. But the younger girl seemed to take pride in being exact; for the most part her companion left the talking to her, and what she might have lacked in terms of vocabulary she more than made up for with effective grammar and an unambiguous choice of words.

"We have guards on our estate," she said slowly. "If you do not have guards, you will be shot?"

I smiled and nodded excessively, and the girls smiled back with small and perfect white teeth. Again, I was searching for a way to show that I had understood, and the simplest way was to appeal to something they would both know about.

"Like South Africa?" I asked.

"Precisely!" the older one said without hesitation. Then she looked at me with faint inquisitiveness, slightly embarrassed by the celerity and enthusiasm of her response. Something had changed in her attitude toward me, and I realised it must have been the shock of hearing a foreigner in a very different and distant land saying something that was topical to her situation. I also realised two other things - firstly, that up till now the reason she had hardly spoken was because I bored her; and secondly, that the deference she showed her friend had nothing to do with vocabulary, but rather was a natural consequence of power relations between the two of them, which would be the same wherever they went together.

As if trying to grasp something, she went on more slowly: "Tell me, where is your home? Do you live - near here?"

It was the first honest question she had asked.

"Yes. Just there."

I pointed, suddenly struck by how repercussionless such information would have to be; true, everything I had told them, most probably, would be without repercussion; but the sincerity of this enquiry made me care about the house in particular, wishing I could find a way to wrap it up in images so that she would remember it. I had neither guards nor servants, and if a fisherman drowned in the duck pond it would be the talk of four counties before the day was out. Nevertheless, this was my home, and the word "home" has a special meaning in any language. But I knew it was just another country house with a garden. So.

The girl paused respectfully for a few seconds, following my gaze.

"It is very beautiful," she said at last, perhaps with simple candour, perhaps with something less; the accent concealed what a native speaker could not. Very beautiful, as had been the castle, a paved precinct, a public garden and the outlook from the quarries above the town. Where language was lacking, those words must always have been sufficient; and through them they had seemed both to acclaim and disclaim, as though anatomising to themselves scenes which were too culturally remote to find a lasting place in either their memories or their hearts.

And so, at length, I watched the taxi carrying away and onward those two girls beneath an avenue of trees, both crouching forward and glancing from side to side. Later, mounting a flight of familiar steps, I found myself remembering inconsequential moments of my own past - buying an ice-cream on a sunny day in a distant town, trying to ring a farm from a gutted booth in the Pyrenees, watching a Spanish girl pass down a busy street and disappear between two buildings; they were details that one has no clear reason, or even right, to recollect. But I found myself vaguely moved by the things memory stores away in despite of herself, vaguely allured by the young man in my past who must have noticed these things, who recalls them now with a certain emotion, but who, for all that, must remain a stranger.