‘Palma. Call me Palma. Spoken hereabouts, Madame Idrissi sounds like the queen mother.’

‘A princess, I’d have said.’

The princess clucks like a turkey. But you have to admit, she has a smart come-back.

‘Princesses hardly ever turn into queens,’ she says. ‘But in French at least, dauphins might turn into kings … isn’t that right, Monsieur … Monsieur?’

‘Angeli. Natale Angeli.’

On the way home I ruminate on my certainty.

It’s like a revelation.

Yes, my mother is capable of cheating on my father.

Cheating on him with that man.

Natale. Natale Angeli. A fisher-king of mermaids, princesses and dolphins.

While I … I’m having a lot of trouble writing these last few words.

But I couldn’t care less!

No one is going to read them. I know, my future reader, that you don’t exist.

While I’m the one he loves. I’m the one who loves him.

I knew it at first glance.

Don’t make fun of me, I beg you. Don’t make fun of me, it’s serious, serious enough to make me weep all the tears in the world over this notebook.

I love Natale.

I love, for the first time.

And no other man will ever be able to change that.

* * *

He closed the warped pages of the notebook and sat there for a moment.

Echoes of techno music rose up from Oscelluccia beach.

He stepped into the path to hear it more clearly.

22

17 August 2016, 2.30 a.m.

Franck looked at his watch.

What on earth were they up to?

The breeze from the sea carried the sounds of electronic music but all he could hear was the dull, percussive notes of the bass, repetitive, obsessive, as if a drum-skin had been stretched out by the sea and every wave were striking it. An endless rhythm.

Boom boom boom boom …

In the campsite, however, everyone else was asleep. Franck had to admit that with the doors and windows closed, the noise was almost inaudible inside the bungalows, the mobile homes and the Finnish chalets. Too bad for those actually camping! The disco was perhaps another way of getting rid of them and replacing the sites with fixed dwellings that multiplied the profitability of each plot ten times over.

What were they up to? Surely Clotilde wouldn’t want to be dancing all night to this techno soup?

Franck continued waiting for another half hour, wandering around the campsite, coming across only a few shadows, other insomniacs, dog-walkers, pensioners who were allergic to David Guetta, concerned parents.

The torch of Clo’s mobile phone lit up the end of the path at 3.04 precisely. Franck could have sworn as much to a policeman; he was checking the time on his mobile almost constantly. He recognised her as soon as she passed beneath the light at the entrance to their pitch.