“Don’t tell me you didn’t suspect something, Mamma . . .”

Silence. She seemed to be in the grip of emotions so “ powerful she couldn’t speak.

“Mamma . . . you knew . . . and you’ve known for ages!”

Rose looked at him directly for the first time in half an hour. Throughout his confession she had watched Sébastien sleep, or nervously twisted the hem of her skirt, while she examined the flowers in the carpet.

“You were married . . . you had a child . . .”

“I explained all that . . . I don’t want to go over it again . . .”

“I know, I know, I’m not stupid! You don’t have to tell me again, it was painful enough the first time!”

She took Sébastien’s foot again, but a little too roughly; the child stirred and moaned in his sleep.

“What’s he going to say when he’s old enough to understand?”

“We’re talking about you now, not him. I’ll take care of Sébastien. I’m going to bring him up so things like that aren’t important . . . What I want to know is how you feel?”

“But Mathieu, I don’t know! Give me time! Half an hour ago we were splitting our sides over your adventures at the ad agencies, then you drop your bomb and want my ­reaction right away! I don’t even know if I believe you!”

“Of course you do . . . You’ve known for ages.”

“Will you stop saying that, it’s aggravating!”

Her good old temper was surfacing again; Rose was becoming the woman she was at her finest hour, who always came out of disasters on her feet, who would take the bull by the horns with a vigour you wouldn’t have ­imagined she possessed a moment earlier, fighting to the bitter end and never giving way. How he wished he were like her . . .

“Okay, I had my suspicions . . . When you’d come home late Saturday night, early Sunday morning I should say, after you left Louise, you never smelled of woman’s ­perfume, okay? . . . But I didn’t want to see it, can you get that through your head? When you were just a kid your father used to worry so much that you weren’t enough of a ‘man,’ and I didn’t particularly want to admit he was right! I decided long ago, Mathieu, that your father was wrong about everything, everything, and I don’t want him to be right about anything now!”

She heaved an exasperated sigh, then took a sip of cold coffee.

“I’m sorry, my trouble with your father has nothing to do with what you just told me . . . But it’s true that’s one of the reasons I didn’t see it before: I didn’t want him to know something before I did . . .”

“That’s not all, I know you . . .”