Nothing’s changed despite the camouflage, despite rejecting old family ways of thinking, despite Séverine and even despite the Arabs. Nothing’s changed. Manuel is still poor. A poor idiot who reaps only contempt from his wife’s father. Wheat that grows thanks to the soil. Of course, the landowner can act all superior. He has something tangible and living. And he doesn’t even have to get his hands dirty any more. The blood of seasonal workers, the fruits of inheritance and an area bursting with sunlight. Ten ancestors in the local cemetery. Séverine is from here, but he never will be. He’s landless and always will be. He’d hoped that the curse would stop at his daughters, that they’d be clever enough, like him, and marry local boys so that their children wouldn’t be treated like foreigners.

He feels the old man’s reproach acutely in his silence. The son of a bitch who got Séverine pregnant seventeen years ago, that was him. But if he’d refused to marry her, the old man would have got out his shotgun. The Spaniard’s head would have exploded in flight like a pheasant hen, nobody has ever had the slightest doubt about that.

So hatred bubbles up again as well as suspicion, gnawing at him like woodworm.

His daughter, his darling daughter, so promising with her beauty – an even better version of her mother. He watches his eldest as she brushes hair away from her forehead. The question takes the shape of images and his rage rises another notch, picturing that bastard Saïd doing stuff to Céline. Picturing him turning him into a laughing stock by buying stolen goods from him for a pittance, then making a mint from those thieving antique dealers. Taking the piss out of him, yes. Having a laugh. Bastard! No, not a boy any more, but with wide, muscular shoulders, a man’s shoulders. Making him the butt of his jokes. Making more money than him. Screwing his eldest daughter. The images take on the proportions of a nightmare in his head.

The afternoon settles in, heavy and yellow. Luckily, after coffee, the old man finally gets up and goes to have his nap, putting an end to the torture.

Manuel staggers a little as he approaches his pick-up truck, so Séverine snatches the keys from his hands before he has time to react.

“I’ll drive. You’ve been drinking.”

Not registering the deep hostility in Manuel’s eyes, or his shaking hands, Séverine sits behind the wheel. She starts the engine as if running away, avoiding her mother’s eyes. Manuel climbs into the passenger seat and sticks his elbow out of the window while his wife manoeuvres through the gravel. He’s relieved that the old man doesn’t see that he’s not the one driving. He hasn’t got the energy for a row, and Séverine can be tough, especially when her mother’s nearby. The girls, slumped in the rear seat, slap each other so they can grab more space for themselves and stretch their legs until they start kicking each other with bare feet, children that they are. Manuel, too, wishes he could sleep now. Go home and sleep the whole afternoon. Let the rest of the world melt away in the already stifling, dense July heat. He doesn’t want to think about anything – just sleep, sleep and silence the rising lava that’s burning him like hell. He must go and see his father. But not today, no. He’ll go later. He shuts his eyes.