“She brings babies,” he says.

“Ah. She’s a midwife,” I say, and he repeats the word as if he is learning it by heart. “Midwife.”

“Your version is better. Wise woman,” I hitch my handbag further up my shoulder. “So,” I say, “you will come? When your wife finishes...bringing the baby?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Great,” I say. “Well, thank you... Sorry, what’s your name?”

From a pocket of his oily overalls, he draws a card and hands it to me.

On it are three words—Lucas Petit, Mécanicien—and a telephone number. He watches me reading it, and there is something resigned about him, as if he is waiting for me to comment on his surname, which of course, I do not.

Instead, I nod and put the card into my handbag. “Is there a taxi service in the village?” I ask him.

“There is one taxi, but it is lunchtime,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. You really have to admire France’s reverence when it comes to mealtimes.

“Okay then, I’ll see you later.” I turn around and walk away. I feel Lucas’s eyes on me and the sensation is more curious than awkward. I wonder what he sees.

“Do you intend to walk back to your car?” he calls after me.

I turn around. “Yes. My father and my friend are there. I don’t want to leave them alone for too long.”

He steps out of the garage, slamming the doors behind him. “You can borrow my bike.” He walks—surprisingly fast for a man of his tremendous size—down the side of the workshop and disappears behind it. Despite my reservations—he is a stranger, after all—I follow because it seems rude not to.

Behind the shed there is a motorbike. A massive, gleaming, ominous motorbike.

Lucas takes a set of keys out of his pocket. He picks up a helmet, hanging off one of the handlebars, tosses it to me. I catch it in one hand. I can only put it down to shock, perhaps horror, this display of dexterity. Motorbikes are on my list of terrors. High on the list. I’d prefer the girls to tell me they were, I don’t know, drug addicts, rather than owners of a motorbike. You can always go to rehab. But there’s no coming back from the morgue. I quoted statistics at them, listed the injuries they could sustain if they were lucky enough to survive a traffic accident on a motorbike. “You could end up a paraplegic,” I told them. “Or a quadriplegic, even.”

“I’m sorry... You’re very kind but... I really can’t...” I take a breath and spit it out. “I’m not getting on that.”

Lucas either ignores me or doesn’t hear me. He straddles the machine and turns the key in the ignition, kicking a lever on the bike with his foot. The machine roars into life.

He turns one of the handlebars and the engine revs. He nods with satisfaction, then he looks at me. I have to shout to make myself heard. “Thank you, but there’s really no need for—”