I ran to him, leant with elbows on the roof, looking down at his tense, white face. ‘In twenty-four hours from now, exactly, I will inform the police here and the British Consul in Marseilles of a missing British subject. Resident of France. Missing for four months. They will investigate thoroughly every detail I can give them. You have twenty-four hours only to tell me. Where is James?’

‘That I cannot tell you. I have told you all that I can. I am desperately late. James is lost, Mr Caldicott, he is lost.’

He drove down the track crashing the car over the dusty ruts, spun left into the main road without stopping.

A general returning to his troops? But who were they?

Florence moved about the conservatory making herself deliberately busy with the little watering-can. She wrenched at the tap in the wall almost angrily. It was perfectly clear to me that she was not going to sit down to an eye-to-eye confrontation.

For my part, having told her all that I was able to of the meeting with Aronovich, I just sat on a cane chair and watched her fuss away, pulling at a leaf here, a pot there, dribbling water into the fish tank. Evading and avoiding.

What I had had to say had unnerved her, distressed her. When a diagnosis is confirmed it is extremely difficult to accept, even though, secretly, one has known that it would be so.

She was behind a huge pot of Lilium, rustling away at some dead leaves, when she said, ‘I remember now. The last time I saw Aronovich was in October, the first day. The end of summer. We were making jam in the kitchen and I saw him coming up the path. Mama saw him. We didn’t speak, we never met, but I remember that was the last time.’

She came from behind the lilies, the can in her hand, a quiet, defiant look on her face. We looked at each other through a lacework of mimosa and plumbago in silence.

Outside, the wind had risen, heralding the mistral, clattering at the rattan blinds on the glass, pulling and teasing the shutters, spiralling dust into high eddies in the front garden, the lilac bending stiffly like the bristles in an old broom.

‘Tomorrow I will go to the British Consul in Marseilles, tell him all I know, then to the Chief of Police at Sainte-Brigitte. I’ll have done my job.’

She came across to me, knelt at my side, a hand on my arm. ‘Don’t. I beg you not to. Don’t do that, William.’

‘Florence. Don’t be silly, darling, I can’t leave a man to just fall off the earth without alerting someone! I simply can’t.’

‘You can. You can. Leave it, let it lie where it is, please.’

She apparently had not heard my use of the word ‘darling’. It was the first time I had used it.