“Come on! He always asks for you and I have to lie . . . Do what I do . . . I can’t understand him either, but I just say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and he’s perfectly happy! Talk about nursery school and don’t pay any attention to what he says, just give him a big hug and say it’s his bedtime, say whatever comes into your head, he just wants to hear your voice . . .”

Which was exactly what Mathieu did, sometimes for a good fifteen minutes; he’d sit on the kitchen counter, the receiver wedged between his ear and shoulder, and while he was doing something else—filing his nails or leafing through the paper—he’d let out a few grunts, laugh, feign surprise as he heard about some adventure he couldn’t make head or tail of, or anger if Louise had told him about some misbehaviour, or interest when he was barely ­listening, then it would end with noisy kisses that were absolutely sincere: there was a big fuss about who gave the last kiss that could go on for ages. Each claimed not to want to hang up first, and they both seemed to enjoy it.

I tried a couple of times, to please Mathieu. Disaster. After two minutes I panicked, sweating, spluttering, more ­incoherent than the four-year-old at the other end of the line who at least was trying to make himself understood. A dialogue of dyslexics.

But it was true that Sébastien liked talking to me and in the end I found it touching. Even if I was cutting our ­“conversations” shorter and shorter.

The week after his second visit, despite some very serious efforts, I became irritable again.

November had been disgorging its heavy rainfalls for more than two weeks. Montreal had been sullied—it had been a long time since you could say “washed”—by the rain, ­polished, worn down, exhausted. The leaves had been swept away, leaving the pitiful sight of denuded trees, the streets were empty, waiting for the first sprinkling of snow that would shed a little gaiety over this sinister setting, at least for a few hours, before it turned to a sticky mud that would bring out Montreal’s curses. Everything was waiting wetly for something to happen.