The pain was startling. It was quickly followed by a line of red that turned into a stream. His anger erupted giving him additional strength. He bore down on her and succeeded in mastering her flailing arms and holding them in his grasp.

In that position, she quietened, hunched over onto her side, her nightdress blotched and stained and asked the wall, ‘How long?’

He was breathing hard. He got up and opened a drawer. He dropped the razor into it and grabbed a handkerchief, which he tied awkwardly around his arm.

‘Oh God,’ he said, calling on a deity that he did not believe in.

Eva was breathing heavily but motionless, the fight gone out of her.

He bent over to kiss her shoulder, a kiss of peace which said: we’ve got through this one. Raising his eyes, he saw that Laure had been watching from the doorway.

She was transfixed. With horror? Fear? Disbelief?

All three.

Why had Laure got so thoroughly under his skin that summer in Prague? He worshipped his children, his job was demanding and left little time for anything else. He had worshipped Eva too. In his way. He was a man who had done his best to sort out his position – moral, philosophical, practical – and had been faithful to his commitments.

All the same and looking back, he had failed to understand the contradictions within himself.

Dropping his head into his hands, Petr did something he had not done for a long time. Not since he held the photograph of the children and himself taken in front of the Eiffel Tower that Eva had left for him.

He wept.

CHAPTER 21

HE RETURNED TO BERLIN IN THE LATE SPRING. He had been busy. Back home, there had been an economic crisis, the infant Czech stock market had wobbled, national growth had gone into the minus and he was required at the helm of Potio Pharma to steer it through.

After Easter, the situation eased and he considered himself at liberty. A priority was to visit Maria in Paris who had made it clear that she loved France and wasn’t coming home any time soon. Plus ça change.

Maria now wore carefully contrived student clothing, adopted Parisian slang, and dragged him to boites that ‘only the true Parisienne knew about’, which deepened his affinity with his daughter.

Over an espresso in the cafe by Pont des Arts, she asked him what had hit him when he first came to Paris. Petr found himself describing the chestnut blossom in public parks, the startling colour palette of women’s clothes after the greyness of home, individually wrapped bonbons, litter, perfume: all varieties, floral and musky and dangerous.

‘And the dentists,’ he added. ‘Don’t forget the good dentists.’

‘I want live in Paris,’ she told him. ‘Any objection?’

‘Yes. Jan and I won’t see you. But if you wish to, then you must.’

She lit up a Gitane. ‘I’ll come and go.’