There’s an old story my mother used to tell, about a boy who sold his shadow to a peddler on the road in exchange for the gift of eternal life. He got his wish, and went off pleased at the bargain he had struck – for what use is a shadow, thought the boy, and why should he not be rid of it?

But as months passed, then years, the boy began to understand. Walking abroad, he cast no shadow; no mirror showed him back his face; no pool, however still, gave him the slightest reflection. He began to wonder if he was invisible; stayed in on sunny days; avoided moonlit nights; had every mirror in his house smashed and every window fitted with shutters on the inside – and yet he was not satisfied. His sweetheart left him, his friends grew old and died. And still he lived on in perpetual dusk, until the day when, in despair, he went to the priest and confessed what he had done.

And the priest, who had been young when the boy made his deal, but who now was yellow and brittle as old bones, shook his head and said to the boy: ‘That was no peddler you met on the road. That was the Devil you bargained with, son, and a deal with the Devil usually ends in someone or other losing their soul.’

‘But it was only a shadow,’ protested the boy.

Once more, the old priest shook his head. ‘A man who casts no shadow isn’t really a man at all,’ he said, and turned his back and would say no more.

And so at last the boy went home. And they found him next day, hanged from a tree, with the morning sun on his face and his long, thin shadow in the grass at his feet.

It’s only a story. I know that. But it keeps coming back to me, late at night when I can’t sleep and the wind-chimes jangle their alarm and I sit up in bed and lift up my arms to check my shadow against the wall.

More often now, I find myself checking Anouk’s, as well.

3

Wednesday, 31st October

OH, BOY. VIANNE ROCHER. Of all the stupid things to say. Why do I say these stupid things? Sometimes I really just don’t know. Because she was listening, I suppose, and because I was angry. These days I feel angry a lot of the time.

And maybe too it was because of the shoes. Those fabulous, luminous high-heeled shoes in lipstick, candy-cane, lollipop red, gleaming like treasure on the bare cobbled street. You just don’t see shoes like that in Paris. Not on regular people, anyway. And we are regular people – at least Maman says so – though you wouldn’t know it, sometimes, the way she goes on.

Those shoes—

Tak-tak-tak went the lollipop shoes, and stopped right in front of the chocolaterie while their owner looked inside.