At four o’clock I heard the sound of something moving in Anouk’s room. Rosette was awake. I went to see. And I found Anouk sitting on the floor in a badly drawn circle of yellow chalk. There was a candle burning beside her bed, and another one over Rosette’s crib, and in the warm yellow light she looked rosy and flushed.

‘We fixed it, Maman,’ she told me, bright-eyed. ‘We fixed it so that we could stay.’

I sat down beside her on the floor. ‘How?’ I said.

‘I told the wind we were staying here. I told it to take someone else instead.’

‘It isn’t that easy, Nanou,’ I said.

‘Yes it is,’ said Anouk. ‘And there’s something else.’ She gave me a smile of heartbreaking sweetness. ‘Can you see him?’ She pointed to something in the corner of the room.

I frowned. There was nothing. Well, almost nothing. A fugitive gleam – a flicker of candlelight on the wall – a shadow, something like eyes, a tail—

‘I don’t see anything, Nanou.’

‘He belongs to Rosette. He came on the wind.’

‘Oh, I see.’ I smiled. Sometimes Anouk’s imagination is so infectious that I find myself almost carried away, seeing things that cannot be there.

Rosette stretched out her arms and mewed.

‘He’s a monkey,’ said Anouk. ‘His name is Bamboozle.’

I had to laugh. ‘I don’t know how you think of these things.’ And yet even then I felt uneasy. ‘You know it’s just a game, right?’

‘Oh no, he’s real,’ said Anouk with a smile. ‘Look, Maman. Rosette sees him too.’

In the morning, the wind had dropped. An evil wind, a tornado, the locals said, felling trees and levelling barns. The newspapers called it a tragedy, and spoke of how, on New Year’s Eve, a branch from a tree had dropped on to a passing car as it drove through the village early that evening. Both driver and passenger had been killed – one of them a priest from Rennes.

An act of God, the papers said.

Anouk and I knew otherwise.

It was just an Accident, I repeated as she woke up crying night after night in our tiny flat in Boulevard de la Chapelle. Anouk, those things aren’t real, I said. Accidents happen. That’s all it was.

And as the year turned she began to believe. The nightmares stopped. She seemed happy again. But still there was something in her eyes – a shift from the summer child she was – something older, wiser, stranger. And now Rosette – my winter child – seeming more like Anouk day by day, imprisoned in her own little world, refusing to grow like other children; not speaking, not walking, but watching with those animal eyes . . .