The girl in the mirror mouthed it back at me; her eyes looked frightened.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ I said, brushing my hair back from my face.

She flicked hers back too, long dense dark waves that needed a wash to rid it of blood. Her face was a different shape from mine. Mine was slender-cheeked with clear skin and a straight strong nose, too strong for my face. But hers was lumpy with an odd shape to her lips and terrible skin.

I leaned over the washbasin, pushing my face very close to hers. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of you.’

Two tears started to roll down her cheeks.

*

I waited.

I waited day and night. Week after week. I waited through March and April while the clouds of lacy cherry blossom burst into life in the Jardin des Plantes and while the pavement cafés where I lived in Montparnasse teemed with lovers from morning to night. I waited for some word from André. I was not good at waiting but he had taught me persistence and I wore out my finger dialling the telephone number he’d given me to ring from Hôtel d’Emilie. Never any answer. Then one day the line went dead and it was like losing him all over again.

I worked hard at trying to trace the vehicle that had transported him from the hospital, but it seemed to have vanished into thin air. A green split-screen Citroën H van had hung around briefly that day, I learned. But that was all. A dead end.

And do you know how many Piquets there are in the Paris telephone directory? Enough to keep me walking the city streets day after day till my arm had almost healed, but none of them possessed the stone eyes of the one I sought. Each morning I stood at the window of my fifth-floor room at dawn, a dull ache pulsing in my head. I gazed out across the neat grey roofs of Paris, to the spiny wrought-iron lattice work of the Eiffel Tower, and imagined André doing the same. He had never been a sleeper. Always restless. Always on the move. Dawn had always been the time when we used to throw ourselves on the sturdy white backs of our Camargue horses and race them through the marshes, their glamorous manes flying, shimmering in that first light. The gaudy flamingos dipping their long matchstick legs in the languid lagoons.

I leaned my forehead on the cold pane of the window.

Why? André, why haven’t you contacted me? So many possible answers. Is your battered body too damaged to put pen to paper? Or are you still too angry with me? Disowning your sister? Leaving her unforgiven for the mistake she made. Or have you forgotten me? Is that it?