She passed signs to St Omer, and to Lille, where as a fourteen-year-old she had gone on a school exchange. All she remembered of that homesick, bewildered, practically mute week now were fragments: sitting in a small and gloomy dining room on a straight-backed chair, eating pink slices of lamb with a few green beans; playing mini-golf with her exchange while her shoes sank into the mud and the ball careered off into the long grass; drinking cool and bitter coffee out of a bowl in the morning and eating hunks of white bread with chunks of chocolate stuffed inside; spending a day in a French school and learning from the English teacher, who was French, that there was a ‘whorl’ in the ear – she could still hear the way he pronounced it, with a whistling ‘w’ and a rolling ‘r’. And she remembered how she smiled all the time, from the moment she woke till the moment she went to bed, until her face felt rubbery as a squashy doll’s; how she had strained to pick out, from the stream of unintelligible sounds around her, single, stable words that she could hang on to.

She slid Lucinda Williams into her tape player and the Texan voice filled the car. A bar-room-brawling, sexy-raw voice. She felt a throb of longing in her belly, between her legs.

Past signposts to Béthune, to Lens, to Arras. Lush, flat landscape dissolving in the rain. At half past nine the light was vague and Irene was aware of her tiredness. She turned off towards Cambrai, and drove down a straight road, under giant pylons, until she came to the outskirts of the town. There were several bed-and-breakfasts along the road, and a few hotels. She stopped outside one with flaking green shutters that was set back in its own small garden, and parked the car. In her rusty French, she asked the man behind the desk if there was a room free, and on being told that there was, dragged her case, photograph and violin inside. The man, who was thin, with greasy black hair combed across a bald pate, told her that if she hurried she could still have a snack in the dining room.

Her room was dark and musty, with faded floral wallpaper and net curtains across the bottom half of a narrow window. There was a tiny shower room to the side, and a tall wooden wardrobe which Irene pulled open to discover piles of blankets smelling of moth balls. She sat on the high bed and closed her eyes for a moment, feeling infinitely strange. Then she stripped off her clothes and took a shower in the weak trickle of warm water, using a flat, cracked tab of soap that didn’t lather. She used the phone beside her bed to dial home: there were no messages.