Roux would have said: you care too much. Roux with his defiant red hair and reluctant smile and his beloved boat under the drifting stars. You care too much. It may be true; in spite of everything I care too much. I care that Anouk has no friends in her new school. I care that Rosette is nearly four years old, so alert, and yet without speech, like the victim of some evil spell, some princess stricken dumb for fear of what she might reveal.

How to explain this to Roux, who fears nothing and cares for no one? To be a mother is to live in fear. Fear of death, of sickness, of loss, of accidents, of strangers, of the Black Man, or simply those small everyday things that somehow manage to hurt us most: the look of impatience, the angry word, the missed bedtime story, the forgotten kiss, the terrible moment when a mother ceases to be the centre of her daughter’s world and becomes just another satellite orbiting some less significant sun.

It has not happened – at least, not yet. But I see it in the other children; in the teenage girls with their sullen mouths and their mobile phones and their look of contempt at the world in general. I have disappointed her, I know that. I am not the mother she wants me to be. And at eleven, though bright, she is still too young to understand what I have sacrificed, and why.

You care too much.

If only things could be that simple.

They are, replies his voice in my heart.

Once, maybe, Roux. Not any more.

I wonder if he has changed at all. As for myself – I doubt he’d know me. He writes to me from time to time – he got my address from Blanche and Zézette – briefly, at Christmas, and on Anouk’s birthday. I write to him at the post office in Lansquenet, knowing that he sometimes passes by. I have not mentioned Rosette in any of my letters. Nor have I mentioned Thierry at all; my landlord Thierry who has been so kind and so very generous, and whose patience I admire more than words can say.

Thierry le Tresset, fifty-one; divorced, one son, a churchgoer, a man of rock.

Don’t laugh. I like him very much.

I wonder what he sees in me.

I look in the mirror nowadays and there’s no reflection looking back; just a flat portrait of a woman in her thirties. No one special; just a woman of no exceptional beauty or character. A woman like all the rest, which is precisely what I mean to be, and yet today the thought depresses me. Perhaps because of the funeral: the sad, under-lit chapel-of-rest with the flowers left over from the previous client; the empty room; the absurdly enormous wreath from Thierry; the indifferent clergyman with the runny nose; the piped music (Elgar’s Nimrod) from the crackling speakers.