The other guests appear to have left while I was in bed. I guess the roads have cleared now – I haven’t been outside, but I can see the snow has eased off. I haven’t seen Cameron either – I suppose he has other things to get on with and a bed-ridden, vomiting freeloader like me probably isn’t much of a draw for him. Millie has new guests arriving the day after tomorrow, so I am going to have to move to a different place and look at booking a flight home. But first, we need to arrange Will’s funeral.

Millie has been amazing about this too. I guess she has had the time pressure of her new guests arriving in the back of her mind and needs me out of the way. So along with helping me to get well so I can make my journey back to Thailand, she and Matt sorted out all the paperwork with the hospital so that the body – Will – can be taken to the crematorium and we can have the service, such as it will be, tomorrow. Millie brought the papers here for me to sign – apparently in France you can’t do anything without a signature. I didn’t entirely understand the forms as they were all in French, but signing them seems to have got the job done.

‘Was Will a religious man?’ she asks, putting some soup down in front of me on a tray set with silver cutlery and a white napkin.

‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘At least, we never went to church except for hatch, match, and dispatch type things, even as children. I don’t think he’d ever have gone to church of his own accord.’

She nods. ‘So no hymns or prayers then tomorrow, do you think?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so.’ I don’t think Will would have wanted any of that, but more than that, I want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. We don’t need hymns and prayers prolonging the agony.

‘Perhaps some other music then?’ she persists. ‘Did Will have any favourite bands? Or maybe we could include a reading? A poem or a book he might have liked?’