Marc stayed a while, gazing at his open hand as a strange sense of calm washed over him. All that remained of his drunken state was the serenity of a master who has just freed a slave. The barstool seemed to slide back down to a normal height. He stepped off it without the slightest wobble, and reached the lift, an ineffable smile plastered across his face.

He kept the smile up throughout the meal, during which Anne did not once glance towards the bar or mention Désiré. She seemed to have forgotten him entirely, so absorbed was she in extricating her whelks from their shells.

‘Whelks are nice, especially the big ones. What’s the matter with your mouth? Are you having a stroke?’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t stopped smiling.’

‘That’s because I’m happy.’

‘It’s because you’re pissed. You stank of whisky when you came up earlier.’

‘Excuse me a minute, I’ve run out of cigarettes. I’ll get some at the bar.’

He had never felt so sure of himself. Everything seemed to have been pre-written, as carefully orchestrated as a musical score.

‘Désiré, a pack of Winstons, please.’

As he handed Marc the packet, Désiré blinked slightly. Beneath the cigarettes was a note folded into four: ‘OK. But not at the hotel. At mine: 4 Passage Grimaux, third floor, on the left, 12.30. 500 euros.’

Back in the room, when Marc had told Anne she had a date with Désiré at half past midnight, she had simply replied, ‘OK,’ without looking up from the TV screen, two pillows under her head, Boudu purring on her belly.

It took them a while to find it. All the roads looked the same and the street signs were illegible in the rain. At last Marc pulled up outside a narrow four-storey building and handed Anne the envelope with the five hundred euros.

‘Happy?’

‘I’ll tell you afterwards.’

He watched her, hunched over holding her coat above her head as she crossed the road and vanished into the building, its entrance area suddenly filled with lemon-yellow light. A few minutes later the automatic light clicked off again, returning it to darkness. On the third floor, a bluish light filtered through the shutters.

The rain was pounding the roof of the car, brown ink dripping from the night sky onto the windscreen. A car went by in the other direction with a hiss of tyres, its headlights casting a greenish beam across Marc’s dashboard. Marc yawned and stretched his arms. He took his phone out of his pocket. The voicemail was full of messages from Chloé. He picked one at random: ‘Marc, where are you? Ple—’ He deleted them all. He thought back to the bridge over the motorway and the time she had found him on all fours looking for his childhood in the rug. Where was he? On a road in Le Touquet, at midnight, in the rain, waiting for the daughter he had just paid a Togolese barman to make love to. Everything was fine. Le Touquet was not far, but it was becoming a little further away than before.