The most difficult thing was the handwriting, because mine was all convoluted and corkscrewed while Marie’s was like her socks, without a wrinkle or a crease. She gave me some examples and I practised copying them in the evenings. Afterwards my wrist hurt as much as if I’d been playing tennis in the French Open. When we got back from school, we would get straight down to our homework. I would read out the questions and she would come up with the answers, which I had to write down in her exercise book. She was the brains and I was the brawn. While she was thinking, I gazed around her room, which was white and yellow, and very bright. All around there was silence, and outside the windows you could see the big trees in the garden swaying gently in the breeze.

After a moment or two Marie would tell me the answer in a whisper, as though she didn’t want to wake me. And I would start writing. Sometimes there was a book we had to read, and then of course I had to read it to her. In the past I’d always hated reading. Everyone told me that literature could teach you loads of things, but frankly what was there to learn from these made-up stories? You could hardly tell one from another. I’d always felt that books were a bit like loaded pistols and needed to be handled with caution. Now, with Marie, things were obviously different. I don’t know how to explain it, but there was something more to it: the words went in with much less trouble and when they came out again they’d somehow been transformed, for Marie. I realized that the characters in the books were her, were me, were us. In understanding their lives and their feelings, I began to understand my own life and my own feelings. So I worked my way through The Lost Estate, a strange novel full of mists and ponds, followed by a seventeenth-century play (acting out all the characters, including a betrayed husband and his wife Angelica, who wasn’t exactly angelic). Then we read a medieval story about a knight who fights against other knights as well as a serpent and a monster, and goes completely off his head.

One day when we’d just finished one of these books, I said to Marie, “It’s not so bad, literature, after all. As something to pass the time, I mean. But I find it weird that you’re supposed to study it. To be honest, I can’t see what there is to study in it, really I can’t.”

“But you know what? There are people who spend years and years writing big books called theses about the books we’ve read.”

“And who’s interested in them?”