Very early the next morning, we’d taken the main road heading south. We’d left the scattered outskirts behind us and now we were driving alongside a large forest. The trees were reaching their great bare arms up into the empty sky, which looked really awesome in the still morning. I’d taken the Krebs manual with me, as well as a notebook we kept specifically for anything to do with the Panhard.

“Up to what?” asked my father.

“Up to things in general. They make it quite clear in that little book that Madame Picques gave me last year. You remember – that very nice lady who moved away after meeting me. She told me to do the tests. And it’s obvious that I’m not up to it. They put it very nicely in the book, they make an effort not to be discouraging, they respect the pride and dignity of dimwits like me. But all the same it’s their kindness that makes you feel like an idiot … and in the end I’ve just got to get used to the idea that I’m never going to get out of this mess. Unless there’s a miracle…”

“A what?”

He was frowning as if he didn’t really understand, or as if I was speaking a foreign language.

“A miracle. A divine intervention, if you like.”

“Perhaps you just need a bit longer than other people. If you get discouraged straight away because you’re lagging behind the pack… You’ll find a way to get closer to the front of the race…”

“This is nothing to do with sport! Did you know that the chess player Reshevsky, when he was six years old, played games against twenty adults at the same time and won them all? And he didn’t even have a coach…”

“So?”

“So I don’t even know how to play dominoes.”

“You never learned…”

“That’s exactly the problem… Remember when Uncle Zak tried to teach me chess and I couldn’t even recognize the knight? And this summer Haisam tried to teach me the basics too, but they won’t go in… The thing’s got too many diagonals for me… And that stupid old horse moves in a really shifty way.”

“Lots of people don’t know how to play chess…”

“But it’s like that with everything: cosines, cones, the climate of the South of France. Even spelling: today I wrote “predidgious” instead of “prodigious”. I’m telling you, something’s not right.”

Just then we drove through a little village of houses built in stone. We passed some farms that still hadn’t woken up, with big signs outside saying TURNIPS.

“Look at that,” said Dad. “They’re insulting us!”