All morning Camille had been troubled by a test result. All the doctors in genito-urinary had them done, every year. Obviously, for the past twenty years, they’d come back normal. This time she had chlamydia. She was just absorbing the possible implications of this when somebody knocked on the café window.

CAMILLE: It was my lunch break. I was eating my sandwich in a café on the corner of South End Green. A number of things too personal to go into contributed to this moment, but when I looked up from my coffee and sandwich, and through the window, and saw a photographer standing in the street, pointing a lens at my face, I knew that my life in England was over. There was a click from the other side of the glass and I ducked, spilling coffee on to my lap. As I stared down at my shoes, and felt hot coffee soaking through my skirt and trickling down my leg, I thought: I have eaten lunch on this street every weekday for the past eight years. I thought: That’s it, I’m moving back to France.

She thought: I don’t care whether or not he comes with me.