‘Can I come up?’ calls Anouk.

‘Not yet. I told you. It’s a surprise.’

There is something fey about Anouk tonight; an animation that is one part joy and three parts delirium. One moment she looks barely nine years old; the next she is half-adult and troubling, lovely in her red cloak, her hair like stormclouds around her face.

‘Calm down,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll wear yourself out.’

She hugs me impulsively, the way she used to when she was a child, but before I can hug her back, she has gone, flitting restlessly from dish to dish, glass to glass, rearranging holly leaves, ivy twists, candlesticks, napkins tied with scarlet string, multicoloured cushions on chairs, a cut-glass bowl from a charity shop now filled with a spiced garnet-red winter punch rich with nutmeg and cinnamon, spiked with lemon and a gasp of cognac and with a clove-studded orange suspended in the crimson depths.

Rosette, by contrast, is unusually calm. Swaddled in her monkey suit, she watches everything with wide eyes, but is most fascinated by the Advent house, with her very own Nativity scene with its falling snow lit up in a halo of light, with a group of monkeys standing by (Rosette insists that the monkey is a Christmas animal) in the place of the more customary ox and ass.

‘D’you think he’ll come?’

Of course she means Roux. Anouk has asked me so many times; and it hurts me to think of her disappointment if he does not. After all, why should he come? Why should he still be in Paris at all? But Anouk seems quite convinced that he is – has she seen him, I ask myself? – and the thought makes me feel dangerously light-headed, as if being Anouk could be catching, somehow, and that snow at Yule might not be a chance weather phenomenon, but a magical event that could wipe out the past—

‘Don’t you want him to come?’ she says.

I think of his face; of the patchouli-machine-oil scent of him; the way his head dips when he’s working on something; his rat tattoo; his slow smile. I’ve wanted him now for so long. And I’ve fought him too – his diffidence, his scorn for convention, his stubborn refusal to conform—

And I think of all the years we fled, as we ran from Lansquenet to Les Laveuses to Paris and Boulevard de la Chapelle with its neon sign and the mosque nearby; to Place des Faux-Monnayeurs and the chocolaterie, trying vainly at every stopping-place to fit in, to change, to be average—

And I wonder – in all that travelling, in hotel-rooms and boarding-houses and villages and towns; across those years of longing and fear—

Who was I really running from? The Black Man? The Kindly Ones? My mother? Myself?

‘Yes, Nou. I want him to come.’