I wasn’t sleeping. It was summer and cold. When I arrived at Virginia’s house, I unpacked my linen dress, but thought maybe I would pack it up again. Even after I’d been there a week, it felt as though the holiday had never started, because we hadn’t swum in the lake or the river, or gone for a walk in the woods. 

Instead, Virginia and I went to see the kittens at the farm but the cat was still heavily pregnant. We all tried to play tennis but there was a couple on the court, so we walked up to the inn for lunch while we waited for them to finish. But the service was slow, and by the end of the meal I was falling asleep, so I had to return home for a nap. Under two woolen blankets, a sheet and a white bed spread assembled in the wrong order, I almost slept, enough to feel just about rested. 

In the afternoon, we drove to a car boot sale in the village, where last year Julian and Virginia had seen an ornamental cradle with a carved and painted baby inside, but we didn’t find anything like that—I mean anything that could amaze us—and then Virginia was gone. 

“She was wearing a black top,” I said. 

“Light jeans,” Julian said. We scanned the crowd, then I saw her face on the other side of the road, chatting to a woman, taking a melon from her. 

On the way home, Virginia honked before every sharp bend in the road, but she forgot to turn off onto her street and then, when I reminded her, forgot to check if a car was coming the other way. She’d forgotten her handbag in the village and had to drive back to pick it up.

Dinner, we could rely on. We ate melon and ham, with which I had a pre-made pancake stuffed with blue cheese. Then I peeled a peach, as Virginia and Julian smoked and argued. As he talked, Julian grabbed the air as though there were insects swarming around him. At the end of the evening, he blew out the candles that had burned down to stubs, tapped them under the sand in which they’d been standing, dug them out with a sieve, shook the sieve, and dumped the stubs in a bucket.

As a rule, at night I felt more alive than ever, as though I were waiting to be called upon. My room was above the kitchen and the smell of cigarettes was overstimulating. The bed was hard as a board. But when Virginia knocked as she left for the market, I said I wanted to sleep more. 

At around eight, the whistling began. There was a blow of one note on a horn of some kind. Brass music played. Children and adults shouted. It sounded like it was coming from next door, outside the retirement home. After some time, during which the instruments warmed up, a voice called: “It’s ten o’clock. Let’s get moving.” The whistlers who had been working separately seemed to join forces to form a new type of thumping judgment and draw nearer. 

I had to get up. Through the slits in the shutters, I could see maybe twenty people, like avenging spirits, blowing on whistles, looking up at Virginia’s house. One man nursed a didgeridoo. I closed the window behind the shutters, then I closed the second window too. 

The whistlers gave up on Virginia’s house and moved on to accost the large house at the top of the square in the same way, before performing a dance for the family further along, who were always sitting out front, watching the world go by.

I hauled a single mattress down from the third floor and threw it on top of my double, in a princess-and-the-pea construction.

Virginia called to say she had forgotten her shopping list, forgotten what was on her list. She’d forgotten that the whistlers would be coming to collect money for the annual fête. 

Even after we spoke, she forgot to buy cream. Forgot our conversation about honey, despite me reminding her on the phone and sending her a picture of her list. I kept noting down the things she forgot, first in my mind, then in a notebook, which I hid in my bed on the second floor. I found I liked this excuse to detach and run up the stairs. And that’s how things went that summer. We lived in an odd zone between noticing and knowing, between apprehension and reaction. Things began and were forgotten and, after several attempts at reminding Virginia, Julian and I gave up on them too.

The keys in Virginia’s house sat in the doors on the outside of the rooms, always ready to be turned, except for the kitchen, where the key was inside. That evening we drank gentian and wine. When she laid the table, Virginia moved Julian’s ashtray, cigarettes, and lighter onto the washing machine in the corner of the room, and kept hers by her plate. “Stop taking away my equipment,” Julian pleaded with her. 

As I peeled my peach, the argument grew more spectacular than usual. When Julian was yelling, Virginia told him to talk more quietly, and they started going back and forth. At times like this, when I felt the same old furrows were being plowed, I was elsewhere—imagining what they must do the other summers, swimming in a river that cut across a meadow, their laughs turned to the side as if to assert a choice, forcing the sun to cross their faces; rings rippling above their arms; one of Julian’s feet sticking out of the water; crickets making twisting, shivering noises.

“Do you think I talk too loudly?” Julian asked me. I said not to bring me into this. He insisted, saying he was deaf in one ear, he had fifty percent hearing and maybe he couldn’t tell. I said I wouldn’t have said that he was talking too loudly.

The next time he interrupted me, Virginia said that she’d like to hear the end of my sentence. She said Julian should let me breathe. He stood up, lit a cigarette, then moved to the chair outside, still arguing about what a conversation was. She shut the kitchen door on him and told me there were limits.

Virginia and I put the plates in a pile, then scraped the ham fat, cheese rinds, and fruit skins into the bin, then I asked if the peach knife could go in the washing machine. Virginia looked up at me with a curious smile and said she didn’t know, actually. Julian opened the door to say something and she leaned over and closed the door again. She turned the key. I asked about the butter knife. She said, proudly, that none of the horn knives did.

After a while, Julian was allowed to come in. He apologized, and even after Virginia accepted his apology, he held onto her arm and followed her around the kitchen. I felt calm, recharged. I said it was time I took a bath, and Virginia congratulated me on my good idea. 

In the morning, I sat on the chair outside the kitchen door and Virginia and Julian approached. Jointly, they proposed that the violence of their argument had been the reason why, that night, I had slept wonderfully. They said that a big fight like this came around once a year. That it was like a storm that builds, breaks, and cleans the air. And, because I liked the two of them, I agreed that the fight had been the cure, adding that, at the same time, all this was what we would miss in the autumn and the winter, and look forward to in the quiet of spring.