At Valence, she took the exit and drove along a busy road towards the town. She stopped at the first small hotel that she saw, but it was full up. So too was the next, which had a dark, peeling reception area and smelt rancid. Suddenly, she was overcome by a feeling of heat and listless fatigue, and slumped back in her car seat. She couldn’t bear the thought of slogging from hotel to grotty hotel in search of a bed. All that she wanted was somewhere cool, clean, quiet. Why not stay the night in the car, she thought – and having thought it, the idea was immensely appealing. She could park in the deep forest, by a stream perhaps, and stretch out on the back seat. A few hours’ sleep would restore her.

First, she tracked down a yellow phone box and, having fed in euros, phoned her answering machine. There was one message from Lisa, that was all. Then she stocked up, buying a large bottle of water and a bar of chocolate and two ripe peaches from the grocery she passed; a small, still-warm meat pie from the nearby butcher’s where rolls of beef, beautifully tied with string, and jars of foie gras sat behind the scrubbed counter. Finally, and on an impulse, she got a cheap bottle of local red wine, although as she drove away she remembered she had no corkscrew to open it with.

She left Valence on a minor road and wound up through wooded slopes until the town lay far beneath her and beyond it a panorama of hills and fields and distant spires scrolled away into the darkening sky. A random smaller road, winding past a single shuttered house, took her a few more kilometres up and then followed the line of the ridge, offering giddy views of empty valleys. The sun flickered low between the thick trunks of the trees and then sank beneath the horizon, turning the world suddenly grey. Here, where it was mountainous and shaded, and a fast-running stream cut a gorge into the hillside, Irene stopped her car and let the clear, pure loneliness fill her to the brim.

Twenty

The darkness outside was not the botched darkness she was used to, where the dirty orange of street lamps and the grid of house lights always broke up the night. Here, there was only a dim and eerie lunar glow. Nor was the partial silence the same: no creak of plumbing, slam of car door, yowl of far-off stalking cat. Instead, under the erratic pounding of her heart, she could hear the river. It was a bubbling, implacable sound that made her feel both fearful and consoled. And with the window open, the car was filled with a baked, aromatic heat and the electrical fizz of Mediterranean insects that seemed, in her waking confusion, to be wired into the humming circuitry of her brain.