12 August 2016, 10 p.m.

‘My father didn’t turn the wheel.’

Clotilde had set down her book and was sitting on the chair, her bare feet and her red toenails digging into the mixture of sand, soil and grass. The lamp hanging from the olive branch above the green plastic furniture made the darkness sway. They had an area of fifteen metres by ten at their disposal, set slightly apart from the others, slightly shaded, to compensate for the absence of nearby washing facilities and the ridiculous size of the rented bungalow, even though it was supposed to be for three adults. We live outside here, Miss Idrissi, the boss of the Euproctes campsite had assured her obsequiously when she had booked the site the previous winter. Clearly Cervone Spinello hadn’t changed.

‘What?’ said Franck.

He was balanced awkwardly and didn’t bother turning around. He had spread out a newspaper on the back seat so that he could put his bare feet on it; his left hand was gripping one of the bars on top of the Passat while his right struggled to unscrew a bolt on the roof box.

‘My father,’ Clotilde went on. When we got to the corner at Petra Coda, he didn’t turn the wheel. That’s my very clear memory of it. A long straight line, a tight bend, and my father drives straight at the wooden barriers.

Only Franck’s neck turned. His hand went on blindly unscrewing the bolt with the wrench.

‘What do you mean, Clo? What are you implying?’

Clotilde took a moment to reply. She was studying Franck. The first thing her husband always did on the evening of the first day of the holidays was remove the roofbox and the rack from the car. He would justify his eagerness with a whole list of perfectly rational arguments – increased petrol consumption, wind resistance, the feet of the roofrack marking the bodywork. Clotilde saw it as giving them one more bit of clutter to stash away in their holiday patch. And basically it wasn’t even that. She didn’t give a damn about the roofbox that had to be taken down, put away, covered up. She thought the whole thing was genuinely idiotic. Boring yourself half to death taking out all the little screws one by one and putting them in little bags with little numbers corresponding to the little holes.

At such times, Valou wasn’t about to play the role of peacemaker. Their teenager had already set off to explore the campsite, assess the average age of the holiday-makers and take an inventory of their nationalities.

‘Never mind, Franck. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know.’

Clotilde replied in a slightly weary voice. Franck had switched holes and was grumbling about the idiot who had screwed on the bolts too tightly.

That was him, yesterday.

Franck’s sense of humour.