The forest of Châtillon on her left. St Seine. An old grey abbey. She imagined cold flagstones, bare and empty rooms, prayers echoing in the great vaulted spaces. Out of the blue, a memory came to her from long ago, before Adrian. On holiday with four girlfriends and backpacking through France, they’d found themselves near a Cistercian monastery and on the spur of the moment entered, pulling cardigans or long-sleeved shirts over their bare shoulders, tucking hair behind their ears in an awkward gesture of respect. They had wandered round the church and then out into the cloisters, where water bubbled from a fountain and lizards ran up the walls. Then all of a sudden, they’d heard a sound, a chanting, coming from the church. Just a single male voice. And they’d all silently filed back inside to find a man in jeans standing in the aisle, singing a Gregorian plain chant. A ladder of sound, architectural and austere, climbing upwards through the still air. It had been many years since Irene had thought of that moment yet there it lay, intact in her memory and waiting to be triggered.

Memories as patches of light and foggy half-light in the close darkness that swallows up the greatest portion of our life. Is that it? Do most things fold back into our mind’s inky forgetfulness and become lost for ever, or are they only dormant there, waking with the prick of recall? She didn’t remember her father leaving, but she did remember him chasing her squealing round their garden with a hose, roaring ‘I’m coming to get you, look out!’ until she collapsed at his feet on the grass in a delicious wet heap. She remembered him pulling her out of the bath and holding her on his lap, wrapped in a towel. She didn’t remember her mother crying over him when he left, but she did remember her cutting off her long chestnut hair – holding long strands of it and chopping through it with scissors until the kitchen floor was thick with shiny tresses and her mother sat, defiantly shorn and de-sexed. And now that she came to consider it, Irene thought as she approached the outskirts of Dijon, that was pretty much what she’d done a year or so ago: cut off the long orange hair that had been her glory and presented herself to Adrian cropped, androgynous. Later, of course, her mother had grown her hair back, wearing it in a loose bun that she undid at night, man after man.