‘This was the entrance to the château. You can see, nothing is left.’ He stopped the car where a small track led away from the main one through an ancient orchard of unpruned apple trees. ‘Le Pigeonnier is up that path. You’ll have to walk – I’m sorry, the springs won’t take the ruts. You want me to wait? No one is there, but of course you have the key, that’s it. I wait?’

I told him to come back and pick me up in about an hour. He agreed, reversing the car down the main track to the road. He gave two blasts on his horn and drove off.

I stood at the edge of the little track, the warm spring sun filtering through the greening trees; an early bee swung past. Far across the orchard to my left it was possible to see, suddenly, one tall tower, roofless, windows gaping, a jagged length of wall, an enormous cedar of Lebanon. The remains, I supposed, of the château. Ahead, as the track wound through the trees, a low wall, behind the wall a round, fat tower with many small arches just big enough for a bird, or a bat, to enter. The pigeon-house. Next to it, but not joining, a small house: ochre walls, faded blue shutters tightly shut, a rippled tiled roof, a small trellis running along the front, entwined with the dark spirals of a vine, coming into bud.

There was an iron gate in the wall leading up to the house, a metal sign wired to the bars, the lettering peeling after years of sun and rain. Looking at it closely, the key already in my hand, I read the single word ‘Jericho’. I pushed the gate open and walked towards James’s house through ragged grass, past an abandoned potager, sere with some of last year’s unharvested vegetables, beans on sticks, dried, curled, wind-torn; unpruned roses, a cluster of tall, dead sunflowers, their round faces empty of seeds long since thieved by birds; a torn rag fluttered forlornly on a bent cane, stuck in a row of dead cabbage stalks, writhen as old men’s arms. A strange feeling of loss, of desolation, especially on the little raised terrace under the trellis. A broken broom, dead leaves from the vine had scurried into corners, a child’s tricycle, rusted, tyreless. A large flowerpot cracked by frost lay fallen apart like the two halves of a split orange.

I opened the front door, letting sunlight stream into the shutter-darkened room like a searchlight, found a window, fumbled about with latches, opened the shutters and looked about James’s room.