You’re crazy! Clotilde regretted her words instantly. You call that not pushing him?

This time Natale did react. His feet burrowed into the sand, as if he really did hope to recover the earring.

‘Yes … And you were ready to get your claws out, your pointed teeth and your spines, a little hedgehog rigid with jealousy over your mother.’

‘I had reason to feel like that, didn’t I?’

‘No!’

They stopped walking, turned on their heels and found themselves facing the Aryon.

‘I was fifteen, Natale, but I wasn’t a complete idiot. When you looked at my mother, your eyes … how can I put it … your eyes seemed to undress her! And she looked at you with the same desire. I never saw her look like that at any man … not even Papa.’

Gently Natale’s thumb stroked the palm of her hand. Like the way the wing-beats of a butterfly can supposedly trigger a tsunami on the other side of the world, those tiny rubs on her skin provoked sensations deep in her belly.

‘Right, Clotilde,’ Natale said, suddenly raising his voice. ‘Let’s take off those masks. They’re about as battered and old as our faces are wrinkled. Back in the summer of ’89 I was twenty-five and your mother was forty. We were attracted to one another, I grant you. Physically attracted, I should say. But your mother was faithful, and nothing happened between us, believe me, even if she was tempted.’

‘Like good little angels,’ Clotilde said sarcastically.

Natale went on as if he hadn’t heard her.

‘If your mother was tempted to deceive your father, it’s not because she fell in love with me, let alone because she’d stopped loving your Papa.’ He smiled sadly. ‘It was quite the opposite, in fact.’

‘Quite the opposite? I don’t understand, Natale.’

‘Your mother approached me, your mother flirted with me, she came on to me, she walked around in public with me so that people could see us, so that people would start talking … but it was your father that she loved. Do you understand that now?’

‘I still don’t. I’m sorry …’

‘Your mother wanted to make your father jealous. It’s as simple as that, Clotilde. She wasn’t interested in my sanctuary, the dolphins and my hands that smelled of fish. She just wanted to get a reaction out of your father.’

Clotilde let go of Natale’s hand. The wind brushed at her face, caressed her legs, more gently than any man.

‘Things were also a bit complicated, Clotilde, between your father and your mother.’

She didn’t want to hear any more. Not here. Not now.