There was no relapse, though Lacroix was braced for it. She found her appetite. He bought her shrimps from the shrimp girl, bought her cinnamon bread, bought her an orange and watched her break its skin with untrimmed nails. Catching Rizzo on the stairs—“I’m writing it all up,” said Rizzo. “I will send my drawings to Paris!”—he asked how much longer Emily would need to stay in the hospital. Rizzo shrugged, touched his beard. “Three days. Three or four.”

“So soon?”

“Why not? You already know my thinking on this.”

“And her dressings?”

“No, we will have finished with them. You must buy a fine silk scarf for her. She will wear it for a week, then wear it only when the light is most brilliant. Then it is over, and we will know. I expect a letter from you. This is very important. How she is, what she sees. What she sees exactly.”

“I will do it, of course,” said Lacroix. “And I may include drawings of my own.”

“Wie Sie wollen, mein Freund!” called Rizzo, running up the stairs, taking the steps two at a go. Lacroix followed more cautiously but thought that he would, back on the island, do some running himself. Go down to the beach, take off his boots, drop his coat in the sand . . .

The red-haired woman left the hospital. She was better or she could not be helped. She made her farewells around the ward. She had a stick Lacroix had not seen her use before and her street clothes looked too large for her. He did not ask if anyone was coming for her, did not ask what she was going on to. He was afraid of her answers.

On the following day they went for a walk. Emily wanted to be outside. She said she needed to be outside. Lacroix, as nervous as though he had charge of a new-born, was over-solicitous.

“It does not help me,” she said. “All I need is your arm and that you should warn me if I am about to step over a precipice.”

All the same, they went slowly. To reach the front door was the work of half an hour but the effect on her of being outside—immediate, unmistakable—rewarded all effort. He led her about the garden. It was a place the season was making untidy in lovely ways. He lifted her hand to the honeysuckle, to the silk edges of tulips, to cornflowers whose colour she would not allow to be simply “blue.”

“Like the sky,” he said, though the sky overhead was white and grey.

But this too she sent back. The morning sky? The sky at midday? The sky at sea?

“Blue like your coat,” he said, unsure if air and movement were making her excitable or if she were merely recovering her old intensity. “Like Jane’s coat.”