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Show 41 Eleven When Robeck arrives home, Annis is in her little room, but is not silent in there as usual. The glittering sound of the typewriter greets him, and he rushes to the door. "Annis," he says overjoyed, as she opens the door to great him. He looks at her, filling himself with the soft round contours of her body, the way she ties her hair back in a bun that is time-honoured and ageless. Age seems somehow so peripheral to her, as if it were a mere accident of her person, and not something central, inevitable, and wrong. "What are you doing, my love?" he asks, and he asks it entirely naturally, as if he is not in the least surprised that she is not still sitting silently in her darkened chair. She explains that she is writing letters; she leads him into the room, and shows him a large map of Britain spread out on the floor. He notices that the absence of the vines allows more light into the room, and that the bareness of the walls makes the room seem brighter than he'd remembered. He sees an old address book, something she must have uncovered in all her earlier packing around the house, lying open on the map. "Going somewhere?" She smiles, eases herself to the floor, flattens out the map with both arms outstretched. Robeck squats beside her; the map, he sees, is confined to southern England, and he watches as she traces a complex route through the countryside, from one small village to another, bypassing anything that might |