‘It’s how I feel anyway.’ She shook my hands off, gently, and grasped her tumbler. ‘What if we hadn’t married? He might never have lived out here, never caught the fever.’

‘So?’

‘You know it weakened him. I’m responsible for that.’

‘He loved living out here. And he loved being married to you.’

‘I didn’t love him enough though – not the way he needed me to.’ She blinked and another tear leaked out from beneath her eyelid. I reached forward and brushed it away with my thumb.

‘He wasn’t right for you.’

‘Because he was kind.’

‘Because he was too afraid of losing you.’

She took a long drink of the cocktail. ‘Just after our wedding I said to him, I can’t be caged, Nico. Don’t try.’

‘But he did cage you. In France, and with the children.’

‘I was a child. I thought I was so rare, and delicate. I thought settling down was too high a price to pay. I broke out of the cage, didn’t I? For all it’s got me.’

She leaned back with her head against the chair, her body open invitingly.

‘You don’t know what you want,’ I said. ‘That’s your trouble.’

‘I wish I could have said goodbye.’

‘I do too.’

‘I was so angry with him the last time we saw each other. I blamed him for Samson’s death. Nico gave him to a zoo in France, to keep the nanny happy. I wanted to bring him back here, but they sold him on to a circus, and by the time Nico found him, he was …’ She shuddered. ‘They’d broken him.’

I felt sick.

‘Nico said he had some awful trainer who whipped him half to death. We’d never raised our hands to him – he’d never been afraid before.’ She dug her nails into her palms. ‘You know what he was like – such a ball of fluff. How could anyone not love him? How could they want him to feel confused and scared like that?’

‘Couldn’t Nico buy him back?’

‘He tried to. Samson attacked his trainer and they shot him.’

Images of Samson floated in front of me – rolling in the grass in the sunshine, sleeping with his face buried in Nicolas’s lap, panting his way up the hill after a deer that he’d spotted.

‘Nico was there when it happened,’ Sylvie said. ‘He said Samson died in his arms.’ She stood up and walked over to the sideboard. ‘I hope Genevieve was there for him.’

‘I’m sure she was.’

‘It must be awful to die alone. And Nico was never very brave.’ She covered her face again.

I stood too, and went to her. ‘Let me look after you.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘You can’t lie to me,’ I said, and kissed her hands. After a while she took them away from her face and I kissed her mouth.