Paul was with Sylvia when he found out what happened to Amelia Dehr. In bed with Sylvia, who was sleeping, or pretending to, as blurred glimmers from outside, from the bateaux-mouches, bathed them, sweeping nonchalantly over their bodies, across the sheets, up to the ceiling. He mulled over how they might just blend into the space, into the surroundings, and maybe that was happiness, or the closest thing to it. Camouflage, really, Paul thought.

There was a phone call, she was between life and death, and Paul knew there could only be one outcome. Amelia Dehr wasn’t the sort to hold back. This precarity, rather, betrayed just how fragile, how frail she now felt – must have felt – not in going through with it but rather in failing, with an imprecision wholly unlike her. An imprecision that convinced Paul that at the moment she had set to ending it all, she was no longer the woman she had been. She had ceased to be Amelia Dehr.

The other possibility or interpretation – the idea that something in her was clinging to life, refusing to die; that the true Amelia Dehr, the one he had known, loved, yearned for, hated, this Amelia Dehr was now battling against death; the idea she was on the losing side, and was losing everything – was unbearable to Paul. He would rather believe that for ages now the woman about to die, the one struggling, had not been the real Amelia Dehr, that the relationship she bore to Amelia Dehr was the shaky one connecting a leaf to the tree from which it had fallen.

She had sunk into insanity, Paul thought, she who at twenty had been resplendent, lively, wildly imaginative; she who, lying in the grass, seemed to be an extension of the grass, no, even more than that: its continuation, its tenderness – she who, lying in the grass, seemed to be the wisdom of the grass, its vivid essence. The last time he saw her, he had been shocked to see her unkempt. Worse than that; listless. Lacklustre, even. She was sure she was being watched. She had called him and asked him to come meet her in the courtyard. She trusted him to tell her; as he stood down there, could he see her at her desk? He hadn’t understood the question. He would rather not have understood, had been tempted to brush it aside. Out of tact, or cowardliness. Or a tact that was also cowardliness. Why don’t you go back up, he said, that’d be easier, that way I can tell you whether you can be seen. Or not. The look she gave him wasn’t blind, strictly speaking, not so much blind as unseeing. It was a gaze that simply took him in amongst other things. As if Paul himself were somewhere beyond his body. And he felt himself drifting away. His spirit or personality or soul was just floating off, away, towards this place where he wasn’t, couldn’t be, but where Amelia Dehr’s gaze fell. This was the kind of power she still held over him. She had clutched his hand and, in a rush, before her pride (because she had been so proud, it was so much a part of her) forced her to hold back her words, she had let out: No, I want you to tell me if I’m sitting there right now, you have to tell me, Paul, please.

She was one of those people who destroyed everything and called it art.

*

At that time it seemed inconceivable to them that a young woman, a student just like them, could live in a hotel. It wasn’t even a particularly fancy hotel. On the contrary, it was one of those ever-sprawling American chains; but the mere sentence She lives in a hotel was provocative, explosive. An eighteen-year-old girl in an American hotel. Everyone thought she would become a writer, everyone except for her; it was her mother who was the writer, and the fact that her mother had been dead a long time didn’t change a thing. The writer meant her mother. And she, Amelia Dehr, was a character, and, as far as they could tell, determined to remain one. And whether she was the author who dreamed up that character, or merely a character in someone else’s story, nobody could quite say, and the question was never answered.