The South was pulling at me. I could feel it. Drawing me to it like a magnet, as though there was something hard and metallic lodged inside me that was powerless to resist and yet I felt a softening of my sinews, a loosening of my bones as the hours crawled past. The sun played hide-and-seek with the ladybird-shaped shadow of my car on the N6 and I passed the towns of Auxerre and Avallon, barely aware of them. The tedium of the pancake-flat landscape lulled me into a false sense of passivity where too many memories from the past could sneak in, such as André’s arm tight around me when he told me goodbye and to be strong, as he departed for Paris. I was twelve years old, he was eighteen. Losing him was like having my right arm ripped off.

My father’s face had turned a strange shade of grey that wasn’t grey because it was also purple. I knew then it was the colour of an anger so deep it burned away the words I’m sorry. Their words were hurled at each other like grenades.

‘He’ll be back,’ Papa had growled into his beard, as André strode off down the gravelled track to the road with no more than a small pack on his back.

Papa’s hand lay heavy on my bony shoulder, holding me there in a grip of iron. I longed for André to turn and wave but he kept his sandy eyes fixed on the road to freedom.

‘He’ll come back,’ Papa reiterated, ‘because this farm is in his blood.’ His fingers dug deeper. ‘I tell you, Eloïse, Mas Caussade is in that boy’s soul whether he wants it there or not.’

But he didn’t. He never came back.

*

The trees told me I was nearly home. They were the first. Instead of shady avenues of the pale trunks of plane trees peeling like lepers at the roadside and the silvery shimmering poplars, there were bold stands of dark cypress trees and pines stretching tall to the sky. Vineyards with a haze of green shoots started to spill around me on both sides of the road, worker-bees humming, as I rubbed shoulders with the mighty Rhône. All I had to do was hurry down its broad valley and I’d be in Arles. I had grown up with the Rhône river, it flowed in my blood. I’d learned to swim in it before I could walk, dived for catfish in it, paddled a homemade raft on it. Almost drowned in it more than once, and I still heard the sound of its dark waters coursing through my dreams at night.

*

The heat hit me. I had grown soft. Four years in Paris and I had forgotten what a humid August in the Camargue felt like and how monster mosquitoes set your bare skin on fire.