If only that was all it was. It would take too long to explain. And anyway, Marie had made me promise not to say anything, not even to the Honourable Egyptian, not even to Dad. I wasn’t going to betray her again.

In the night it felt like there was a procession of tanks in my head, with nuclear submarines and battleships bringing up the rear.

The next day I got up and looked out into the yard. The Panhard had gone, leaving an empty space, a dry rectangle on the wet paving stones. When Dad’s not here any more, I thought, that’ll be an empty space too: another square hole with straight lines and no rough edges. I drank my hot chocolate and thought of Marie. She must be really mad at me; she’d probably never think of me in the same way again. The truth is, I’d lost a reason to feel proud, and life doesn’t offer up many of those. What I’d liked, with Marie, was the feeling of being indispensible. Now I just felt like a piece of straw being swept along by the wind.

Before leaving for school, I turned my attention to wildlife conservation and the protection of birds in distress. It was actually a comfort, because I could see that my blackbird’s wings were all shiny, as though they’d been varnished. I took him in the palm of my hand and his little feet scratched at me gently. At some point he would leave, which made me think that life is nothing but a stream of separations.

Heartsick, I limped through two more weeks. Spring had burst majestically into life like a flower, but the bud of my heart was withering, as if it had been scorched by a late frost. I stopped making an effort at school, because I wasn’t doing it for anyone any more, so of course it was much less interesting. You need motivation to work, and my motivation was doing everything she could to avoid me. I watched her counting her steps at school: I was the only one to notice and I wondered why no one else did. I tried to go up to her a couple of times, but it was as though negative vibes enabled her to spot me approaching. What surprised me most was the casual, natural way she moved to a different desk. She really was extraordinarily gifted when it came to managing her life in darkness. Sometimes she brought her cello into class, because she had to have a music lesson straight after school. I heard her say that she’d asked her cello teacher to give her double lessons in the lead-up to the audition. I must say, I admired her deeply on the days she came in carrying that great big instrument.