Nick reached under the table and tiptoed his fingers up my calf. His skin was sun-dark again – he looked thinner, tougher. We ate in silence. Monsieur, madame, I’m listening: but there was nothing to hear. We were a worn-out couple of thirty-six hours with no words to offer each other. Uppermost in our minds were sex and Minna. The first didn’t require conversation, and we couldn’t talk about the second. Tripwires crisscrossed our past, so I searched the future and asked Nick whether he’d be working on his novel over the summer. ‘Oh, she told you about that, did she?’ he said. He looked grimly pleased, as if it proved that Minna had always been sly. The striped voice appeared: Minna had never respected his writing, The Face was her notion of literature, she was a spoilt TV child who placed images above words. She was a serpent. She was a swallow. The voice cried, ‘What will I do without her?’ In bed Nick had spoken of his family, saying, ‘We’re middle class now. But my great-grandfather was a fisherman. He went to sea when he was nine. There’s a photo of him standing on a wooden chest: a frightened boy.’ The way he said a frightened boy told me that he was talking about himself.

When I wiped myself in the restaurant toilet, the paper came away with a stringy blob of white. There were shiny stains on my thighs, where trickles of semen had dried. Nick and I had showered that morning, and then, ‘One last time,’ we agreed.

After lunch we drove to the Cimetière Marin, named for Valéry’s famous poem. In the car park at the foot of the hillside cemetery, we kissed again. I was leaning against the Goddess, and Nick’s mouth tasted of wine, tomatoes, cigarettes and very faintly, very beautifully of me.

At the caretaker’s lodge we were handed a map that showed the location of Valéry’s grave. We set off, on an upward path. Dark cypresses were keeping watch, the most soldierly of trees. In Sydney, too, there was a cemetery that overlooked the sea. The dead had the same white houses there, and the sky was the same seething blue. But grass and flowering weeds burst from those Sydney graves and broke up the paths between them. Here, impeccable brick and asphalt conspired to crush eternal life. And still Minna tailed us with her mocking chant: Paul Celery.

We found Valéry’s tomb at the end of a sweaty climb. Until then, we’d had our backs to the view. Now we sat for a while on the edge of his marble coverlet, seeing what he’d seen: the white boats like doves, the twitching sea. Resting there, with death close all around, my body felt arrogantly alive.

Nick was trying to remember how ‘Le Cimetière Marin’ began. He recited, ‘Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, / Entre les pins …’ and then he was stuck. ‘The next bit’s entre les tombes. But there’s a verb before that.’ Screwing up his eyes against the glare, he repeated, ‘Entre les pins, entre les pins …’