The protesters were surging down towards the town hall, where I could already see Mayor Durand standing on the steps, waiting for his moment in the sun. The largest audience he could wish for was heading his way and I hoped he had the right words on his silver tongue. I jumped down off the edge of the fountain and ran to the police van that I’d seen blocking the side street.

It stood unguarded.

Its rear door was held closed by a metal strut that hinged across it and it was the work of a second to flip it up, releasing the door. I swung it open in search of the hooligan who had thrown the first rock. He was seated on a metal bench in the gloomy interior but leaped for the door, all long limbs and blazing eyes. He stopped dead on the step when he saw me.

‘Isaac,’ I shouted at him, ‘you bloody fool.’

*

We sat at the back of the empty church and kept our voices low. The Church of Saint-Joseph was too grand for Serriac. Its rose-coloured marble floors too splendid, its marble columns too lofty, its vaulted ceiling too gloriously intricate to grace a plain-spoken rural town that had trouble raising enough money even to keep its library open more than two days a week.

I loved to sit in this church, though I rarely did so. Every time it made my heart swell because it smelled of my childhood. I remembered sitting on one of these pews with my mother. She wore a lavender frock and white gloves. A loving smile directed at me. Her belly swollen. The building had been gifted to the town in medieval times by a wealthy Parisian baron, Henri-Jacques de Montfer. It was to offer thanks to God for a Serriac fisherman saving the life of the baron’s sister when she almost drowned in the Rhône.

A brother and sister. The bond was strong.

‘Your face,’ Isaac murmured. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t bother about it. I don’t.’

It was a lie of course, but I didn’t want my little brother’s pity. Not that he was exactly little anymore. Only nineteen, but taller than my father or André and whippet-thin. A handsome face with a shaggy mop of wheat-coloured hair that had the coarse texture of Cosette’s mane. Of all of us, he was the one most like my mother and possessed the identical round blue eyes which, like hers, opened straight into his soul. I saw into it now, burning with belief.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Isaac? Arriving with rocks. Looking for trouble.’

‘Trouble is already here, Eloïse.’

‘We don’t need more.’

‘Trouble is staring us in the face in the shape of American nuclear bombs located in what they call a direct line of communications across France.’