Florence opened a beer for me, handed me a glass. ‘That’s her way of saying “thank you for being so kind to the child”. Céleste thinks you are a magician with Thomas.’

‘It’s so odd. Because I’m not terribly good with my own children. I have hardly ever held my son, Giles, hardly ever carried his sister.’

‘You seem to love Thomas.’

‘I do. I love this beer too. God! I needed it. Are you going to stick to orange?’

She had a tin of beer in her hand, pulled the ring opener, poured it into a glass. ‘A beer too. I need it. The revelations of a life are exhausting.’

‘So you have five thousand dollars in the bank at least? That is a help for you. A boost anyway to what remains of James’s legacy from our father.’

She wore a little white moustache of foam across her upper lip. She took an olive, shook her head. ‘Ouf! The legacy. That went a long time ago. Long time ago. Boff! Why do you think that I got a job with Colin, the dentist? Thomas is a very expensive child. Oh, not because he has Down’s syndrome, not that, but he has to be looked after. Mama does not charge me rent. She pays for Annette and for Céleste, and food for us all. I’ll have to find another job very soon. I just hated sticking that water-thing into ugly mouths.’

‘Florence, I told you that Millar had bought the Agendas? Remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘For ten thousand dollars.’

There was a silence, save for the hum of the oxygenator in the tank and from somewhere outside, in the square, the angry voice of a boy shouting, a tin kicked along the gutter. The silence held, apart from that, and then she said, in a voice so low that it was a whisper, ‘Ten thousand dollars? For his Agendas?’

‘Millar told me. He bought them just before James went … away.’

She placed the olive stone carefully in a small brass bowl at her side. ‘I never heard of these dollars. They are not at the bank. That I do know. I have Aronovich’s money for the collection, plus a little bit more from what I have saved. Not much, a little bit. That is all, William. All.’

‘It was probably a cheque. No one, not even Millar, wanders about with ten thousand dollars in his hip pocket.’

‘If James had cashed a cheque at the Crédit Lyonnais in Sainte-Brigitte I simply would not know. He didn’t tell me those things. Sometimes, at the start together, I asked him. Tried to get financially sound. But he would never discuss things like that with me. Never.’

I poured out the last of my beer, went over to the tray and took one more. The pop and hiss, when I pulled the metal ring, caused her to look up.