Alan Jenkins

M’introduire dans ton histoire C’est en héros effarouché . . . (Mallarmé) Her river was the swift-flowing Rhone; mine, all that improbable year, the Hérault (‘M’introduire, I said, ‘m’introduire dans ton histoire c’est en Hérault . . .’) The two come near but do not flow into each other, any more than the mighty...

A Sunday at home, since I still called them that, the house, the garden and the patch of lawn in front long gone to weeds and waist-high grasses that I crawled round, hacking wildly with the shears he’d once wielded, thick with rust now, blunt and useless, while she poked at flowerbeds or sat marooned in a deckchair and wiped her glasses that had misted with her hot flush, or with tears...