She gave a start, so small that I wouldn’t have seen it if it hadn’t been in her colours.

‘That’s what Chantal says at school.’

‘Really?’ said Maman, beginning to slice up some bread for Rosette. Bread, knife, chocolate spread. Rosette with her little monkey fingers turning the bread slice over and over. A look of intense concentration in Maman’s face as she worked. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her eyes were as dark as Africa, impossible to read.

‘Would it matter?’ she said at last.

‘Dunno.’ I shrugged.

She turned to me then, and for a second she looked almost like the old Maman, the one who never cared what anyone thought.

‘You know, Anouk,’ she said slowly. ‘For a long time I didn’t think you even needed a father. I thought it would always be just the two of us, the way it was with my mother and me. And then Rosette came along, and I thought, well maybe—’ She broke off, and smiled, and changed the subject so fast that for a minute I didn’t realize that she hadn’t actually changed it at all, like one of those fairground acts with the three cups and a ball. ‘You do like Thierry, don’t you?’ she said.

I shrugged again. ‘He’s OK.’

‘I thought you did. He likes you.’

I bit the corner off my croissant. Sitting in her little chair, Rosette was making an aeroplane out of her slice of bread.

‘I mean, if either of you didn’t like him—’

Actually, I don’t like him that much. He’s too loud, and he smells of cigars. And he’s always interrupting Maman when she’s talking, and he calls me jeune fille, like it’s a joke, and he doesn’t get Rosette at all, or understand when she signs at him, and he’s always pointing out long words and what they mean, as if I’d never heard them before.

‘He’s OK,’ I said again.

‘Well – Thierry wants to marry me.’

‘Since when?’ I said.

‘He mentioned it first to me last year. I told him I didn’t want to be involved with anybody just then – there was Rosette to think of, and Madame Poussin – and he said he was happy to wait. But now we’re alone . . .’

‘You didn’t say yes, did you?’ I said, too loudly for Rosette, who put her hands over her ears.

‘It’s complicated.’ She sounded tired.

‘You always say that.’

‘That’s because it’s always complicated.’

Well, I don’t see why. It seems simple to me. She’s never been married before, has she? So why would she want to get married now?

‘Things have changed, Nanou,’ she said.

‘What things?’ I wanted to know.