They made love in silence. So as not to be heard. By anyone outside, by Valou, as if they were a pair of teenagers.

Too quick.

Clotilde closed up again almost immediately.

Back turned. Sheet crumpled. Body bent.

Franck lost his erection.

Clotilde was slipping away from him.

Had it all been written since the outset?

He thought again of their first meeting, almost twenty years before; a fancy-dress party at a mutual friend’s house, both of them recently separated, she dressed as Morticia Addams and he as Dracula. Without that morbid similarity, Clotilde probably wouldn’t even have noticed him. What does a life hinge upon? A mask that you wear or don’t wear? Until the evening before the party he’d been looking for a Peter Pan costume, in which he could have returned home …

Franck’s cock was now nothing but a soft, damp, ugly thing that he would have liked to tear off. People meet each other through coincidences, he thought. A throw of the dice. If couples survived after chance had brought them together, it’s because things could have worked just as well with another girl if fate had decreed it that way. So no one love story was better than another, a thousand other lives could have been possible, perhaps better, perhaps worse. Basically, Franck thought, staring out of the window at the square of starless sky, the only true love stories were the ones in which one party cheated at the outset, played with chance, disguised themself, put on the right costume, wore the right mask, waited for years before taking it off. Long enough for the other person to be used to it, conditioned, trapped.

‘And the beautiful Italian girl?’ Franck asked her back gently.

‘Beautiful. Still beautiful …’

He felt like he was going mad. Clo was just worried. Perturbed. They would get over this as a couple. He would have to maintain his bearings. He ran his finger up his wife’s spine.

‘Beautiful,’ she went on. ‘But weird. She doesn’t remember Nicolas.’

His finger zigzagged a little.

‘Twenty-seven years later? You think that’s weird? What about you? Do you remember your friends? The people you knew here when you were fifteen?’

She hesitated.

‘No, you’re right.’

Franck halted the track of his finger just before he reached Clotilde’s neck, disappointed.

He knew she was lying.

23

Saturday, 19 August 1989, thirteenth day of the holidays
Sky the inky blue of your eyes

Dear future reader,

I’m writing you a postcard from Corsica, a short postcard, because to tell you the truth, I’ve got better things to do these days than write to you.

I’m too busy.

To do anything but dream.