“I don’t know. If it’s him who did this to my daughter…”

He looks up to check if anyone else is listening.

The other builders aren’t looking at him and their intention to avoid him – so as not to make him feel uncomfortable – is having the opposite effect. It’s obvious everybody’s been talking about the girl. Beautiful, on display before their eyes in her strappy tops and skinny jeans. Too pretty, no doubt. Manuel imagines them laughing at him behind his back. He’s wrong. In fact, the men feel sorry for him and, among themselves, indulge in a few salacious remarks which they think are male-style compliments. Of course, Manuel wouldn’t appreciate them, even though he sometimes makes the same cracks about the waitress at the Fin de Siècle, who’s the same age as Céline. He doesn’t make the connection.

“If he’s the one who got Céline pregnant…” He keeps telling himself that, so the notion sinks in. “Fuck, if it’s him… I’ll kill him. I’ll do a pretty job on that rat face of his.”

When the owner pops out on the verandah right in the middle of the building site to see how the work’s progressing, a frown runs a line across her pretty forehead. She’s furious: the Italian tiles still haven’t been laid around the edge.

What the fuck are these builders doing in her garden? Is she paying them to chat?

Manuel feels a surge of anger twisting his belly. He wishes he could rearrange her face, but he can’t. Maybe because she’s a woman. She’s wearing a navy-blue swimsuit, a linen shirt that comes halfway down her thighs and a straw hat with a wide brim that hangs around her face, sullen with annoyance.

“Are you the foreman?”

“Yeah,” Manuel mutters.

“Is it you who gives the orders to all the – the others?”

“That’s me, yeah.”

All of a sudden he’s not feeling so cocky. And yet he’s pleased that the boss has put him in charge of the site. But under the unfriendly gaze of the woman on her high horse, it’s a pain to be forced to take responsibility. He’d happily tell it straight to this posh bitch. These marble slabs, a thousand euros a piece, are already sticking in his throat.

She pulls a face as she sees her heeled espadrilles sink into the loose soil.

“I’m warning you, if the terrace and the decorative pond aren’t done in the next three days, I’m not sure I can pay you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look, my garden’s been taken over for a month, the soil is dug up, I can’t get to my terrace, not to mention the pool. It’s 10 August!”

“Your daughter’s getting married on the eighteenth, right?”