She turned abruptly and I followed her tall, arrogant figure as she pushed and edged her way through laughing and gesticulating people. At the door, she stopped, her hand on the brass latch. A sign swung gently against the net curtains: ‘FERMÉ’.

‘Don’t meddle. Remember that a key opens more than just a door, and on this trip you won’t find that you are opening a can of sardines, Buster. Think about it.’

I thought about it all right. She was not the sort of woman one can afford to ignore. Her words were weighed before delivery and were meant to be valued. But, consider, why else was I in Bargemon unless it was, indeed, to meddle? After all, if you suddenly get a whacking great key sent to you out of the blue, if it falls on the breakfast table before yoù, a note attached suggesting suicide, or at best a case of dropping out, you don’t just ignore it all. If the expediter happens at the same time to be your long-forgotten, almost, little brother, it increases the curiosity. You have to make the trip. Try and find out why the wretched man should mount his bike and just piss off into the snow without a backward look, seeking oblivion.

And, to be frank, since I had been in the village, I had started to pick up little shreds and shards of his life. Nothing much, not enough to make the proverbial pot, but just enough to whet my appetite for more. And, too, there was Florence. A bonus if ever there was one, a turning upside down of one’s life, standards, beliefs, expectations of the future. There was Thomas, a darker shadow than I had remotely thought of in the spring sunlight of her presence. There was her mother, the house beneath the cliffs, Martha Millar with her good head and voice like the gravel which she chucked at me. And Daniel Jacquet.

Now what about Mister Jacquet?

The only fish that is known to swim backwards is the conger eel and I was in too far to try to swim backwards.

Consider Miss Millar (I assumed she was a Miss). I liked her very much, liked her hands. I go a lot on hands. They give a good deal away about a person. Hers had square-tipped fingers, blunt, no nonsense, she had the knuckles of a manual worker: obviously she could saw logs, hem a skirt, change a plug, fire a gun as easily as she could plant out a bed of pâquerettes as, indeed, she had been doing the first time that I saw her.

Florence had slender hands. I had seen them for the first time in a portrait, kneading bread; there was something maternal, eternal, gentle, healing about them, small, firm, strong, unfastidious. I liked that very much.