‘We should let you go after this, but we agreed we don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t make sense for us.’ He smiled. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Do you like cake? All afternoon,  I wanted to eat cake!’ He walked her to a well known patisserie stall, Ou Lu Lou’s, up on the hill by the New Men warrens off Retiro Street, where the sidewalk was crammed with people eating ambient tart, listening to music and drinking small glasses of espresso or aniseed liqueur while the neon scripts and city lights shimmered across the warm air – love messages from  the  distant  all-night  venues along Tupolev and Mirabeau.

‘Look at this! Eclair! Cream  horn!’ Gaines rubbed  his hands together. ‘You look like someone who can eat cake.’

‘I don’t like anything with cream in it,’ the assistant said.

She laughed. Since the  events on  Funene,  she had  felt even more like an impersonation  of herself – of any self. Gaines tried to make her dance. She didn’t know how to dance. The crowd began to look uneasy, and some of them moved away. ‘Come on now!’ Gaines called after them. ‘It’s only fun.’ He asked the remainder, didn’t they think  the assistant  was beautiful? ‘Look at her!’ he said. He drank five or six liqueurs, but didn’t eat any cake after all. Instead he joked with everyone and made sure the assistant had the things she wanted. Later, back in her room, he sat on the bed with his knees apart and his hands loosely clasped between them, and said without preamble:

‘The thing about  life is that  if you get it wrong you can’t go back.’

There were two kinds of people, he said: those who lived their lives in the prolonged moment of panic in which they first realised this – ‘They have no idea where the door is now, let alone how to get it open if they could find it’ and who therefore spent their lives thrashing about in what he called ‘the disorder of hearing it click shut behind them’. The other kind, after a single awful pang, ‘one fast look back’, decide to make the best of whatever happens next. ‘Those people go on,’ he finished: ‘They’re still hoping for something good.’

The assistant did not how to reply. Nothing he said was in her area of expertise. None  of it applied to someone  like her.  She wasn’t sure anyway that he meant her to believe him. In the end she said:

‘Surely we can be anything we want in this world.’