They won’t mention it again, enough said as it is. The bag is lying at Johanna’s feet, and the champagne gets drunk. They plunge into silence the way they get into the water of a pool: suddenly, simultaneously and palpably. Alone and yet together. It can last a long time and it’s precious, even if they don’t know that yet. They’ll get back home later, there are always cars driving past on a Saturday night, even here, in the armpit of the world, in this rich tourist village they know only too well.

Céline wriggles her varnished toes in her high-heeled sandals, then slips the straps off and puts the soles of her feet on the rock. It’s not as cold as she would have imagined. She’s drunk but feeling good. Then, in the silence, her eyes fixed on her toes, Céline allows herself to think about him.

It had started last summer. Or maybe earlier. Maybe she’d always harboured the childish hope that he’d see her as a woman. Maybe it was even for his sake that she’d made herself more giggly and exercised her power of attraction ruthlessly. The Lucases and the others were just practice runs, guinea pigs so she’d be ready for a man, a real man. One who’d know everything she thought she knew nothing about.

Céline would drive boys nuts, but inside she was always dreaming of old-fashioned romantic scenes, sunsets on the beach like the ones decorating her bedroom walls. They bragged to one another, told their mates. She’d do things, true, quite a few things in fact; a load of things other girls didn’t really do, even the older ones who weren’t virgins any more. That’s why she had the kind of reputation only villagers can pin on you.

Patrick had always touched her, to make her laugh, to mess around. She was like a niece, the child he’d never had. When had that changed? When had it become an obsession, a problem or a solution? For Céline, the turmoil had been there so long, she couldn’t have said when exactly. She didn’t like to think about those hours at the end of her childhood when she’d look in the bathroom mirror and watch her breasts grow. She preferred to think about Patrick’s hands caressing them as though they were the perfect size.

But there was one recollection, more vivid than the others, that she associated with the beginning of this whole thing, one she would sometimes think about with a kind of embarrassed excitement, the kind that increased her desire.