I lowered my head in my hands and fought to make no sound as time ticked past and the ache inside me circled relentlessly. During the half-hour I stood there, André lay still as the grave, not even a flutter of an eyelid or a flicker of muscle. He could be drugged. Or he could be in a far-off place in his head. But not for one moment did I believe he was asleep.

He chose not to speak to me.

*

‘André, do you remember my birthday in the Chat Noir?’

I had moved over to the window in his room, snatching a glimpse of my father’s land as it dozed in the morning sun. The shutters blocked all but a thin strip of the view. I leaned my forehead against the glass, drinking in the thousand different greens that beckoned to me, out there in the wide-open spaces where wild spinach grew and the vibrant stalks of samphire spread in abundance underfoot. In Paris the cobblestones were hard and unforgiving, and my feet itched now to race through the cordgrasses of the Camargue.

‘Do you remember?’ I asked again, my eyes focused on Papa, whom I could see striding through the yard outside with one of his gardians. ‘In Paris? We were both drunk on Bollinger cocktails and I was wearing my first ever evening gown. Emerald silk. Remember, André?’

I waited. Just long enough for Papa and the gardian to move out of sight.

André’s life in Paris was a closed book. I knew nothing about it. Not where he lived, what he did all day, who his friends were. Not even what his job was, at first. Though he’d claimed to work in some vague capacity for the Ministry of Defence. We would meet up for coffee or a drink about once a month, and last year he took me to the Chat Noir to celebrate my birthday.

I had no telephone number for him, no address. I used to contact him by using a DLD, a dead letter drop, the way we did as children, a secret place where you leave a message or a package when communicating covertly with someone. A method dearly loved by Intelligence agents.

In the distance I could make out the salt meadow and the emerald tips of the rice fields rippling in the breeze off the Rhône. Out there everything moved. In here all was still. The bedroom was sparsely furnished, a single bed, a rush-seat chair, a homemade rug, a heavy wardrobe. It gave nothing away. Even the display of twenty or more aeroplanes had gone, the ones André had carved out of wood during his hours of hanging round the nearby airfield during the war. He was good with his hands even back then. In Paris they liked to pick locks and fiddle with a tiny subminiature spy-camera instead. He had shown it to me in the Chat Noir.