There is a dead nun in the school chapel. She lies on a velvet-covered bier inside a dusty glass case surrounded by wax flowers and the stumps of night-lights winking in ruby glass containers. Sister Veronica contemplates her from the nuns' stalls behind the black wrought-iron grille. The novices are cleaning the chapel. They fight for the privilege to do so, for it is only this holy housework which enables them to enter the sanctuary, normally the chaplain's prerogative, and dust the brocade tent, the tabernacle, on the altar, that contains the Christ. The smell of floor polish mingles with that of incense, Mary Magdalene wiping the feet of Jesus with her hair.

Julie Fanchot was born in Normandy, in May, 1949. She should have been a boy, that was what they wanted, a boy with brown eyes, curly hair and straight strong limbs, a comfort to her father Julien for the diseased leg that had kept him out of any active part in the Resistance; a reassurance to her mother Claire that she had pleased her newly-won father-in-law; a reminder to her paternal grandfather of his own youth and a denial of his own death; a second-generation son for her grandmother to lavish care upon.

Claire Fanchot lies upon her marriage bed, on a hard mattress set in a high glossy wooden frame. Between fresh linen sheets her tired and aching body hides, her mind already blanking out the pain of the previous night. Above the bed, against the faded wallpaper of fields of tiny sprigs of flowers, her crucifix hangs, a branch of olive from Jerusalem threaded behind the arching body fashioned in white ivory.

Claire knows that her suffering is as nothing compared to His. She also knows that His suffering and her own have been caused by an action of disobedience and curiosity far in the past for which she is responsible, every woman's second name being Eve. Her daughter reminds her of that sin, every time her mother-in-law carries the child to Claire's breast and the mouth clamps itself hungrily, passionately, to the swollen nipple and causes her pain.

August 1948. Claire edges forward towards the mirror through a sea of ferns. They wave gracefully, slowly, from the window-sill between heavy double curtains of velvet and lace so that the pattern of sun on the faded turkey carpet is intricate and always in movement; they bend their delicate fronds from brass pots placed on small tables, like lengthy fingertips catching at the trailing skirts of her dress as she glides in slow motion across the narrow room. The mirror is in the far corner, over the high grey marble mantelpiece, protected by more ferns. A bronze can in the grate spills with complicated feathery greenness springing outwards, preventing her from getting too close to her reflection. On the mantelpiece three family groups invite her closer from their plush-surrounded frames, a Limoges Virgin and Child stretch their rounded gold-streaked arms towards her. She navigates a small buttoned armchair with a frilly skirt in dimly-flowered chintz, and arrives. Leaning forward slowly and gracefully from the waist she places her gloved elbows on the only two spaces that the crowded surface of the mantelpiece allows her, the chilly marble shocking her flesh through its silk and net covering. She bends as near as possible to the glass and gazes into it.

She sees the paper of the wall behind her: a cream ground with darker, yellow stripes and bunches of pale pink and blue flowers on the cream. Between the bunches hang pictures: a female gypsy framed in gold, wearing a yellow turban and smoking a long pipe, blue tassels dangling on her shoulder. Two water-colours of the ruined abbeys of the neighbourhood, Jumieges and St Wandrille. An engraving under shiny glass of the mother and child Ceres and Persephone, a plump pomegranate passing between them.

The bed is placed along the wall beneath the window, all overtones of night smoothed away by the stiff chintz cover with matching rigid bolster that turn it into a sofa, the room by daylight into a small salon where guests sip cassis-blanc before Sunday lunch. Claire loves her aunt's room, this elegant feminine sanctuary that smells of pot-pourri and is so often held in semi-darkness, shuttered and curtained against the sun blotting the farmyard outside into whiteness. Today the shutters are folded back; through the mirror Claire sees the olive-green majolica pot of geraniums on the outside window-sill. Everyone is out, helping with the harvest. One of the tasks of the women is to prepare the midday meal, long sandwiches of baguette split and filled with cheese and ham. Madame Fanchot has gone with the others, stepping across fields with jugs of cider, baskets. They lounge for half an hour under the lines of elms dividing fields, sunlight spattering their faces. Claire has stayed behind, wanting to deny the world of work. No excuse needed after she has blushed and murmured to her aunt. Her cousin Julien catches the mention of bad days; he looks at Claire with curiosity, with speculation, and she blushes again.

She has the whole house to herself, a luxury unknown in the cramped spaces of her recent childhood. She plays dolls-houses for a while, opening the great carved wooden cupboards and fingering the china and linen within, stealing a yellow plum from the black wicker basket on the cellar steps, sitting in her uncle's place at table and pounding her small fists on the gleaming top. Tiring of this, she moves a few years forward, entering her aunt's dressing-room, cupboards, clothes. The evening dress is loose on her. In the style of thirty years before it is cut low and square across the breasts in front and trails lacily along the carpet at the back.

Claire looks at her breasts in the mirror and feels a clamour in her stomach. She moves her eyes up to her face, studying its childish roundness, the crown of soft blonde hair. She sighs, she arches her neck to make it look longer, she lifts her chin to achieve a pleasing three-quarters profile, she practises a variety of smiles, haughty, flirtatious, tender, sultry. I am no longer a child, she thinks vaguely: I am a woman now, I'll show them all.

In the doorway her cousin Julien stands and watches her, his eyes moving from the tumble of lace and silk on the bed to her throat and face above the yellowing fabric that she wears.

She sees him as she gazes past herself in the mirror. His voice defines the situation before she can move.

- Already one of the family, aren't you, Claire?

Despite his lameness he moves more quickly than she between the furniture and ferns. This is his place, his mother's room, where every morning he brings her hot chocolate and rolls, reads her bits from the local newspaper, caresses her toes beneath the blanket. This is where she smiles at him and strokes his hair, Julien, my son, never mind your leg, you are here with me.

Terror and humiliation keep Claire from crying out; the shame of being discovered abusing her aunt and uncle's hospitality preoccupies her, to make her hope that whatever reproach Julien intends it will be over quickly.

But his arms are around her waist, forcing her head against his rough blue shirt and bruising her cheeks against the metal buttons. He murmurs words into her ear, words which she does not understand, in a tone which does not seem angry or reproachful. Claire squirms coyly, Julien, oh Julien, I thought you saw me only as a little girl. She is prepared for delicious flutters of the heart, for lingering kisses, she shuts her eyes and waits for the soft touch of his lips on hers, for the long handclasp and the words of respectful adoration which must follow the moment of blind passion, his mouth gobbling her neck. Her eyes fly open again as she hears him speak, hoarse and abrupt.

- This is what you want, isn't it?

He pushes her chin up with one hand so that her eyes stare into his, forced to recognise in muteness what his other hand is doing, fumbling its way through layers of lace and petticoats. He does not know the rules of courtship that she has read in novels, it appears. He is proceeding far too fast for her, but she does not know how to stop him. She is a child dressed-up in borrowed savoir-faire, which falls away from her now as rapidly as the evening frock he pushes off her shoulders with one hand. When his other hand makes contact underneath her petticoats with the hair and flesh she has never touched, she knows she has died, she cannot be connected with the horrors resident in that nameless place.

Her shudder pleases Julien, he presses her closer to him with one arm, his mouth at her ear.

- Oh yes, this is what you want, isn't it?

His certainty cannot be matched by any anger of hers, she has no words for this. If she is not to apply to herself the thundering denunciations of sin, the promises of hell from the pulpit, the sniggers of the peasant children on the farm outside, then it is better to keep silent, try to trust him, and to smile. He withdraws his hand from underneath her skirts and, still leaning against her with his body and his eyes, unbuttons his trousers, then pushes her on to the little frilly chair. Shame at his lameness, the fear of being interrupted, lend him speed and strength.

When the searing, tearing pain begins, Claire is forced into consciousness of what is happening, into guilt. It must be her fault for flirting, for leading Julien on. She cries out, feebly attempting to push him off her, the first time in her life that she has struck anyone, shown anger physically. Anger, even in self-defence, may be a sin. She knows she will not go to confession to find out. Her vacillating struggle, her little cries of no, you mustn't, serve for Julien to point her recognition of herself as female, of himself as male, and he is able to come. He gathers her into his arms, slumped on top of her on the small armchair, and kneads the soft creased flesh at the base of her throat. Mylittledove, my ladyofthefarmyard, you have no more secrets from me now, blood on your clothes, my pet, where there was none before.

Monsieur Fanchot is surprised and gratified by his son's eagerness for marriage. Noticing Claire's silence at dinner in place of her usual charming chatter, her lowered eyes, the scratch on her cheek, he concludes that his lame and girlish son is a man at last. An end to those cosy meetings with his mother, thank God, hanging about her room at all hours. He rubs his hands before he picks up his spoon and drinks, the soup slurping through his great baby moustache. Madame Fanchot sits in silence. She has noted the absence of an evening frock, the finger marks on her mirror, the moving of her little frilly chintz chair from the exact spot on the carpet it has occupied for the past twenty years. She has no pity for Claire, she thinks of future mornings, breakfasting alone.