We watched the other families, hand in hand like us. We smiled at sticky-cheeked children running along the white stones by the lake. We cooed at the strollers gliding by on all sorts of wheels. It got hotter and hotter. The heat was like a hand held tight over my mouth.

Women floated by all around me in billowing dresses. They looked serene, they looked like well-lit jellyfish. I needed not to be caught in the sun. I needed to find shade, ice, the dark inside of the apartment. M continued on ahead, running with E, pointing at the birds. A headache drifted across the bridge of my nose. We got in line to ride the boats. We would spend all day by the lake however we were.

Later, we had dinner at a pizza place in the old town. There were so many people crammed around the little tables, and into all the spaces between the little tables, that it was hard for the waiter to find us. We waited for a long time at the table, E colouring, M and me saying what a good job she did. How nice this was, and that.

When the waiter came M ordered a bottle of wine, a good one, from a region in Italy that we could now one day go to, that we were now living somewhat close to. We drank it knowing this and smiled at E and B and at each other. When a man came by the table holding a dozen or so plastic-wrapped roses, and asked M if he wanted to buy some ‘for the beautiful ladies’, M replied in perfect French that he would. That he definitely would, and bought them all. M and I laughed and piled the roses up high on our table in such a way that when our food came the plates had to be placed here and there among them. We laughed again and looked at each other and knew that we were lucky because here we were right in the middle of such a wonderful minute of our lives.

I’m not sure if the problem was that they had put a lot of spice in my pizza. I’m not sure if perhaps they had made me the wrong one, and M the right one, because we’d both ordered the same, the house special, but I found I could hardly eat without choking. Without my eyes burning, without tears coming out of my eyes and I kept laughing and wiping the tears on my napkin and drinking more wine. The more I tried to bite the pizza, though, the more impossible I found it even to bring it near my mouth. More and more there at the table, among the roses, the scent of the chillies seemed to find me, or the cheese, or whatever it was that was making me cry and sweat and dab at my face with my napkin until it was wet and ruined and to laugh and take E’s napkin and make a who-knows face at M. Finally I just left the pizza where it was on the plate, almost untouched, the cheese going all cold and hard and ruined at the edges. Something wrong? M asked me, his plate was empty. Of course he’d loved it, of course it had been wonderful, and perfect, and really I felt stupid and entirely unable to say.