‘An old friend. Someone I knew the first time I came here.’

Jack and Lola made the face they always made at each other following any suggestion that their mother might have had a life that pre-dated them.

‘Are we ready to go?’ I asked. ‘Tu n’as pas encore faim?’

‘Why do you keep saying that, Mum?’ Lola groaned. ‘It’s really annoying.’

‘It’s what my friend’s mother used to ask me.’

I was wondering if Marie-Ange Lesert might still be alive. I hadn’t found an opportunity to ask Philippe in the course of our short conversation.

Two more days passed. It was hot and windless, and I sat on the terrace with my book and stared out over the built-up valley towards the sea. Lizards ran over the baked stones and bees hummed in the clumps of red clover along the margins of the campsite. I thought I could just make out the position of the old farmhouse and when I borrowed Jack’s binoculars to look more closely I saw a grey smudge that I was sure must be the tiled roof.

Lola had made friends with the volleyball boys and went down with them to the beach in Cannes. Jack didn’t want to go to the beach. He wandered through the tinder-dry woods and up the steep incline at the head of the valley to sit on the rock ridge at the top and watch birds. The other families at the site played noisy ball games together and lit barbecues, or loaded up their cars with elaborate picnic equipment before driving off for long days beside the sea, but it was as if we three were on separate holidays within the envelope of a family trip. Yet it was a solution of a kind, I decided, since even Jack seemed reasonably content. His luminous white skin turned blush-pink and then developed a faint glow of colour.

On the third day I drove to meet Philippe for lunch in a restaurant up in the old town. When I walked into the dim interior a man stood up at a corner table. ‘Sadie, I would have known you anywhere.’

He kissed me on both cheeks and held my hands between his. I wasn’t so sure that I would have recognised him. He was still slim but his black hair had turned grey and there were deep vertical lines at the sides of his mouth. He was smaller and much sadder-looking than I remembered. For all Philippe’s gallantry, I guessed that if he were being truthful he would have said the same about me.

There was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket beside the table and Philippe poured me a glass. ‘To nineteen sixty-five,’ he said. I echoed the toast and we drank.