We ordered noodles for Rosette and plat du jour for the rest of us. It was far from crowded, even for a weekday; but the air was stale with beer and Gitanes. Laurent Pinson is his own best customer; but for that, I really think he would have closed down years ago. Jowly, unshaven and bad-tempered, he views his customers as intruders on his free time, and makes no secret of his contempt for everyone but a handful of regulars who are also his friends.

He tolerates Thierry, who plays the brash Parisian for the occasion, erupting into the café with a ‘Hé, Laurent, ça va, mon pote!’ and the slap of a big banknote on the bar. Laurent knows him for a property man – has enquired about the price his own café might fetch, rebuilt and refurbished – and now calls him M’sieur Thierry and treats him with a deference that might be respect, or perhaps the hope of a deal to come.

I noticed he was looking more presentable today – shiny-suited and smelling of cologne, shirt collar buttoned over a tie that had first seen the light of day sometime in the late seventies. Thierry’s influence, I thought; though later I came to change my mind.

I left them to it and sat down, ordered coffee for myself and Coke for Anouk. Once we would have had hot chocolate, with cream and marshmallows and a tiny spoon with which to scoop it – but now it’s always Coke for Anouk. She doesn’t drink hot chocolate nowadays – some diet thing, I thought at first – and it feels so absurd to be hurt by that, like the first time she refused her bedtime story. Still such a sunny little girl; and yet increasingly I sense these shadows in her, these places to which I am not invited. I know them well – I was the same – and isn’t a part of my fear just that: the knowledge that, at her age, I too wanted to run, to escape my mother in as many ways as I possibly could?

The waitress was new and looked vaguely familiar. Long legs, pencil skirt, hair tied up in a ponytail – I finally recognized her by her shoes.

‘It’s Zoë, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘Zozie.’ She grinned. ‘Some place, eh?’ She made a comic little gesture, as if ushering us in. ‘Still –’ she lowered her voice to a whisper – ‘I think the landlord’s sweet on me.’

Thierry laughed out loud at that, and Anouk gave her sideways smile.

‘It’s only a temporary job,’ Zozie said. ‘Until I come up with something better.’

The plat du jour was choucroute garnie – a dish I associate somehow with our time in Berlin. Surprisingly good for Le P’tit Pinson, which fact I attributed to Zozie and not to some renewed culinary zeal in Laurent.