What she saw in it told her that her efforts had paid off. She had sometimes listened to other women saying how much they hated their looks but she felt that she had been through too much to allow herself to indulge in that. It hobbled the mind. She swept a finger over her cheek. Her skin, of which she was proud, was still clear and youthful-looking. Once upon a time, in another country, Tomas told her that her skin reminded him of mother-of-pearl. Her final act was to apply sun-protection cream before picking up her laptop and handbag and letting herself out of the front door.

Emerging into the street, she turned canalwards, glancing right and left and scanning the buildings. It was the old habit of ‘dry-cleaning’, the art of shaking off surveillance, that she had never discarded. Or rather, it refused to discard her. She set off and her mobile piped ‘Night Owl’. It was Xavier, her ex-husband. ‘Oui, mon brave.’

‘Ma belle.’

Neither greeting meant anything much. It was the language and tone they had mutually agreed to adopt since parting several years previously. Xavier had remarried and had had the son for which he had longed. So civilized had been the divorce that Marie, the new wife, invited Laure over to dinner from time to time. Possibly to keep an eye on her predecessor?

‘If we had loved each other more,’ Xavier once remarked, ‘meeting would be a problem, but it’s not.’

‘Strange to think how cut and shut it is now,’ she remembered replying.

‘Strange but true. Yet not uncomfortable, I think?’

‘No, darling Xavier, not uncomfortable at all.’

They had stared at each other. Laure could not help thinking, as she sometimes did, that his kindly, worldly regard enshrined the accusation: your heart is arid.

Traffic sounded in her ear and she deduced Xavier was in the street. A decade of marriage inevitably meant that this and that intelligence about your spouse stuck in the memory and there was a fair bet that he was wearing taupe chinos and the same black jacket he had cherished for years. His hair would be brushed back and, ten to one, he would be squinting into the distance because he was too vain to wear his glasses.

‘It’s one of the days I miss you, Laure. And your lovely gooseberry-coloured eyes.’

She smiled. ‘Me too, Xavier.’ Regret for the failed marriage surfaced more frequently than she owned up to. Xavier had his quirks, but he was a principled man and often very funny. ‘But you have a wife.’

‘So I do.’

Knowing that Xavier was still fond of her warmed Laure, picking her way around the rubbish on the street. ‘You will always be half a Brit,’ he once said. ‘However good your French and however long you live here. You need a champion.’