Pacha watched her in astonishment, hesitating whether to lick her arm or her cheek, level with its muzzle.

‘Pacha, heel,’ Orsu ordered again.

Pacha.

The name rattled around inside Clotilde’s brain, but rather than belonging to a Labrador, it had belonged to a small mongrel of dubious pedigree that her mother had given her for her first Christmas. She had been less than a year old.

Pacha.

HER dog.

For the first seven years of her life, Clotilde had carried the dog in her arms, taken him for walks in her buggy, secretly stuffed him with squares of chocolate and sugar lumps. Pacha had gone everywhere with her, like a living toy that didn’t leave her even at nap time or at night; who slept on her bed, who lay tucked up beside her on the back seat of the Fuego. Then one day Pacha had jumped over the fence and he wasn’t there when she came back from school with Maman. He had never come back. She had never seen him again. She had never forgotten him either.

Orsu whistled, and at last the dog ran back towards his master.

Surely it was just a coincidence, Clotilde reasoned, trying to calm her crazed thoughts. Another coincidence. There must be thousands of dogs in France called Pacha.

The Labrador was no more than ten years old. So it had been born many years after her family had died in the accident. Almost twenty years later. So why would anyone give him the same name as a mongrel from Normandy? A mongrel that had died in 1981? A mongrel that had never set foot in Corsica, since her mother’s parents looked after it every year? A mongrel that Cassanu, Lisabetta and Orsu couldn’t have known anything about?

Clotilde noticed that Franck was getting up under the pergola. Valou was sitting a little way off on the wooden bench, her fluorescent headphones in her ears.

‘Shall we go, Clo?’

Like mother, like daughter, Cassanu and Lisabetta must have thought. At that moment her grandmother came out into the yard and hugged Orsu as if he were her son.

‘Yes, let’s go,’ said Clotilde.

It wasn’t easy to refuse. It wasn’t easy to linger. By standing alone under the oak like that, Clotilde had hardly demonstrated an acute sense of family.

My whole life is a dark room.

In Beetlejuice, young Lydia Deetz has the gift of being able to talk to ghosts. Perhaps Clotilde possessed that gift as well?

Before. When she was fifteen.

She had lost it now. She hadn’t come into contact with a ghost that evening.

Apart from the ghost of her dog. Her mongrel.

Reincarnated as a Labrador.

15

Monday, 14 August, eighth day of the holidays
Forget-me-not-blue sky