Three times now they have woken her in the small hours; she can hear them through the wall. Three nights running they have woken her and she has lain there till dawn beneath the crisp clean sheets of her comfortable double bed unable to go back to sleep.

Yesterday at the church in Dives she’d prayed.

After listening to the guide tell them about the blessing of the Norman ships before they set off on their conquering journey across the Channel, she’d walked up to the altar and bowed her head and clasped her hands together and prayed and then immediately felt ridiculous.

It was years since she’d set foot in a church except to look at the things inside, and even if she still said things like ‘Heaven help me’ and ‘God forbid’ she no longer believed they had any power or meaning.

Perhaps that had been part of the problem, believing that they did. Perhaps her mistake had been to tell herself, as the years slipped by, that what happened or didn’t happen in this life was of no importance; that none of it really mattered because if you were patient and did not dwell on things too much, your reward would come later. Well she didn’t think that any more, especially since her illness. Her prayer yesterday had been, in every possible way, a nonsense, an aberration, and all the way back to the hotel on the minibus she’d scolded herself for doing something so stupid and pathetic. For an hour and a half after they got back to town she’d walked along the beach, all the way up to the Roches Noires and back, gulping down the air.

Looking now at the umbrella boy, it occurs to her that she could pay him.

There’s a piece of orange nylon rope knotted around the handle of the open door to his little wooden hut and it looks to her as if the door could be tied shut.

It would be dark inside which she thinks on balance she’d probably prefer. Even though she would like to see him she is shy about him seeing her.

She closes her hand around the folded notes in the pocket of her quilted jacket and counts them with her fingers; wonders if what she has with her is likely to be enough, or if he might ask for more.

There are other things in her life she always thought would happen that never did, but this is the only one of them, she’s discovered lately, that seems important. It is the only one of them, now, she really, really minds about.

In her head, in her best French, she rehearses a form of words that will convey to the boy what it is she wants; what it is she has somehow ended up going her entire life without.