I nodded: I did remember. And it had never seemed as if she was feeding me a line. No, it was more a declaration of intent regarding an inevitable and almost heroic future. When I had occasionally thought about her, I had always been surprised that I hadn’t one day come across a novel of hers in a bookshop.

“I did write a novel,” she said.

I wanted to appear interested, and was trying to formulate a question that wouldn’t hurt her feelings (I’m in the habit of browsing in bookshops two or three times a week: the fact that I hadn’t noticed the publication of this book of hers suggested it hadn’t exactly been a success), but she got in first.

“It was brought out by a small publisher.”

She said the name of a publishing house that was indeed small, but of good quality; I hadn’t seen any of their books around for a while.

“They went bust a few years ago,” she went on. “They were good at choosing books, but a disaster from a commercial point of view. I had some good reviews, I travelled everywhere at my own expense presenting it. I even won a few prizes, but there wasn’t much distribution, you couldn’t even find the novel in a lot of bookshops. Basically, it wasn’t a bestseller.”

“When did it come out?”133

“In 2002, in September.”

“What was it called?”

“The Catalogue of Absence.”

I behaved like a well-brought-up person; I didn’t tell her the title suggested the kind of novel I’m inclined to fling at the wall at some unspecified point in my reading, certainly never later than chapter three. Instead, I asked her what it was about. If it was possible to sum it up, I added.

She sighed and assumed the manner of someone preparing to explain something the person she’s speaking to may not understand.

“It was an attempt, I don’t know how successful, to come to terms with myself, and with what had happened to me in the years that might have been the most important of my life. For good or ill.”

“Which were?”

She drank the last wine remaining in her glass and threw a rapid glance at the bottle in the ice bucket. Catching that glance, I poured her some more.

“Let’s say the nineties. A lot of the nineties.”

I felt a touch of narcissistic pique: the most important time of her life didn’t include the period when she had known me. It was expected, but all the same it bothered me to hear it confirmed.