Even in the bright afternoon sun, Vidor could scarcely detect a line on her face, though she must be in her late sixties. She probably had regular injections of one of those chemical polymers that provided the illusion of youth. But nothing could disguise the prominent veins and liver spots on her hands. And where was the sense in trying to turn back time? She wasn’t fooling anyone. But what did he know? It was harder for women, he supposed, to relinquish the glow of youth.

As a young lad, still in his teens, he remembered surprising his mother in the entry hall of their flat in Paris. She had just celebrated her fifty-second birthday and was standing in front of the big gilt mirror, pulling at the skin by her eyes. When she caught him staring, she smiled sadly. ‘Silly, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘When we have so much to be thankful for, but a woman’s vanity…’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not easy to let go. We’re born, we age, we die. It all happens so fast.’ She clasped him by the shoulders and kissed his forehead. ‘My dear boy, you will take care of me when I’m old, won’t you?’

Naturally, he’d said yes, and he would have, but the chance never came. Five years after he’d seen her at the mirror, she was diagnosed with an aggressive blood cancer and dead within the year. In a strange way, it might have been a mixed blessing. A celebrated beauty in her youth, she had dreaded the idea of growing old, and turning into one of the wrinkled crones who’d stalked the folktales of her childhood. In sympathy with his mother, a flash of pity for this woman, who’d accosted him in the garden, or any woman who’d been cast aside when her looks started to go, softened his heart.

The woman glanced to her right and left before opening the clasp of her bag. She reached in as if to retrieve something from its depths, a pen perhaps or a lipstick, but her hand stayed inside, and she leaned close to whisper something he couldn’t hear. What the devil did she have in there? A kitten, a mouse? Or perhaps it was a doll she took for a real child, similar to a case he’d read in the newspaper once about a distraught woman in Cornwall.

A cloud blocked the sun, and as he looked at the dark peaks, jutting into the air like dragon’s teeth, an inexplicable terror squeezed his throat.

And this, the naked countenance of earth, on which I gaze, even these primeval mountains teach the adverting mind.

The glaciers creep like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, slow rolling on; there, many a precipice…

‘Are you talking to me?’ Her eyes, yellow-flecked like tourmaline, latched onto his.