Funnily enough, when push came to shove, she minded that Petr thought badly of her – and that was puzzling. Her relationship with him was, obviously, more complicated than she imagined.

‘It won’t happen again.’

CHAPTER 26

LAURE WOKE AT 6 A.M. THE CHILDREN WERE STILL ASLEEP and the interregnum between her waking and their waking was hers to possess.

Her nightshirt was bundled up around her hips. Shifting to adjust it, her hand brushed her stomach, which was satisfyingly flat. She let it rest on the bony part of her hip.

The days had come and gone, beads on a string, and each one she fancied as a colour. Red for her passion, blue to mark a second sun-drenched trip to the chata which Tomas so loved. Green, for the song Tomas wrote and composed while she lay naked in his bed and watched. Black, for the marionettes: the water spirits, the princes and princesses, the whack, slam and slap grotesques and their metamorphosis under her dazzled eyes into mysterious life.

The beads had been counted and the end of September was in sight. The nights were cooling and the sun less fierce.

Why did Tomas love her?

The question was always there, a pulse that beat along with that of the one at her wrist. A while ago, she had resolved it was a question that should not be asked, let alone answered but, like many such speculations, it was disobedient.

He loved Anatomie.

He loved his country.

‘We have to bring back basic freedoms.’

‘Artistic freedom is the right of every human being.’

She kept the best recollection to the last.

‘You’re different, Laure. Thank the deities.’

In the old days she might have shrugged that off as easy words but, in this country of writers and artists, she was beginning to look at words with a new respect. They were freighted and a source of power.

He loved her. And weren’t words everything?

At least, Eva was no worse and the drop in the temperature brought some relief. The children were preparing to go to their chosen schools. ‘Elite ones,’ Petr explained, with no hint of irony. ‘Otherwise, they have no chance of keeping up if we return to Paris.’

The new timetables indicated that Laure would not enjoy the same freedom to come and go as she had during the summer and she would have to renegotiate. She swung her legs out of bed. Nothing like the present.

In the late afternoon, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a flower-patterned scarf tied around her head, she walked to the Újezd and caught a tram to the Kinsky Gardens.

The tram was crammed with workers going home. It gave her a slight cultural shock to realize that a couple of those who had space to read were absorbed by books of poetry.