I flicked through the admin file, and looked in the section headed Louis: school lunch bills, medical certificates and subscriptions of all kinds. Registration for his guitar lessons (he gave up after three months), his table-tennis course (I warned him he wouldn’t like it, but he wouldn’t listen, and he hated it), registration for football, football, football. From the age of six. In the early years, I had to get up at five o’clock in the morning on a miserable June day to go and queue to sign him up. The leisure-centre staff didn’t arrive until nine, but I had to stand there from dawn, surrounded by parents ready to do anything to get their brat on to the course for their favourite sport, glaring daggers at anyone who stepped over the imaginary line they’d drawn to indicate that they were first in the queue. This year, I’d managed to duck out of that chore; Louis was big now, and I’d sent him to do his own queuing – well, not completely . . . in the company of two of his footie friends and the mother of one of them. He’d waited and signed himself up. Since the beginning of the school year, in September, he’d been going to training sessions and coming home on his own, and I’d managed to wriggle out of going to watch any tournaments or matches. I was very proud of the success of my avoidance strategy and boasted about it around the coffee machine at Hégémonie, declaring myself a disgraceful mother and laughing about it. At the time, I sincerely thought that it meant I was a woman who successfully juggled being a mother and working.

I felt a pang as I realized the extent to which I’d completely dismissed this passion of Louis’s, the extent to which I’d treated it as a permanent joke, and how upset he must have been at my excuses. Parental approval and interest are so important. In months, I hadn’t devoted a single minute of my precious time to football. Football wouldn’t suffer, I said to myself. Football hadn’t suffered, of that I could be sure, but what about Louis? Wasn’t this wholesale rejection of my son’s passion the same as my mother’s rejection of the normal capitalist world I so wanted to be part of, a stance that had exasperated me when I was a teenager? How come I had replicated my mother’s behaviour so automatically? Louis had appeared to deal with it . . . of course, what else could he do? But what would it have cost me to show a little interest? A few hours standing around on the sidelines, cheering him on, giving him a little encouragement; a few smiles in my eyes, in his. That, too, I had missed out on, and I deeply regretted it.