“I don’t know . . . I don’t know how to say it because I’ve never seen it before! I’m trying to be more tolerant like you asked me, but Christ it’s hard! I’m trying to accept things I never accepted before I knew you, but some of it’s just too much! What the hell do you think we looked like tonight, eh? Tell me! Why didn’t we just get the hell out of there? I haven’t got anything to say to those guys and they don’t give a shit about me . . . It’s normal, and there’s no reason we have to go out of our way to see them for Christ’s sake!”

Gaston was almost shouting. He felt Sébastien twitch. He looked down. The top part of a worried little face was ­staring at him. Sébastien had often seen his mother when she was worked up, usually because of him in fact, but this was the first time he’d heard Gaston raise his voice. It was a very nasty revelation, one that opened some disturbing prospects: until now, he’d always been able to run to Gaston when his mother was mad at him; he was the doting stepfather, the buffer, who could calm any anger with a ­hilarious joke or a soothing word, and now he was turning into a demon . . .

“Gaston, are you mad?”

Louise furiously ground out her cigarette in the already full ashtray.

“Of course not, Sébastien, Gaston isn’t mad . . .”

He unzipped the child’s parka to get a better look at him.

“Yes I am, Sébastien. I’m mad, and here’s what I look like when I’m mad. Not very nice, is it?”

“Noooo . . .”

“But it won’t last. Mummy and I’ll have a talk and it’ll pass . . .”

“Don’t talk so loud, it’s scary.”

Gaston hugged Sébastien against him.

“This time we might have to talk too loud . . . Better plug your ears . . . “

Louise had forgotten to close the venetian blind; the yellowish light from the street lamp just outside their window cast a patina of unreality over the room that unsettled Gaston: everything, including them, had turned yellow when he switched off the light and he thought, if we’re going to be up arguing half the night I don’t want the room to look so depressing . . . He got up, walked around the bed where Louise had just joined him, wearing the winter nightgown he’d laughed at when it first appeared in late November, and turned the plastic rod that controlled the movement of the vertical slats.

“What do we do when Sébastien starts with the ­embarrassing questions?”

He groped his way back to bed; Louise’s voice was his only reference point, a precise location he could use as a guide.

“Answer them as honestly as we can, what else? Anyway, maybe those things won’t be so important to Sébastien’s generation . . .”