Hadn’t we?

I launched myself out of the chair and across the room in a couple of strides. I pulled the windows open, sending the frame banging back against the wall, and thrust myself out as far as I dared. I needed to see the place on the hill where we had sat. Had to prove to myself it was there. Icy air rushed into the room and wrapped itself around me, though I do not believe I could feel it.

I felt Madame Galy’s hand on my arm. ‘Monsieur, please, come back inside. You will make yourself ill.’

‘Up there,’ I said, waving in the direction of the rising sun. ‘That’s where we were.’

I saw the concern in her kind face and was about to reassure her, when I suddenly became aware of the texture of the light in the room. The place de l’Église was covered in a thin dusting of snow.

‘When did it start snowing?’

‘In the early hours, monsieur. Three or four o’clock.’

I spun round to face her. ‘You must be mistaken. It was certainly not snowing when I came in and that was…’ I stopped, for in truth I could not remember. ‘I don’t know precisely,’ I admitted. ‘It was already light.’

It had not been cold enough to snow, I told myself, but my confidence was swiftly eroded. I looked down at my thin, bare arms. My skin was rough with goosebumps and my knuckles, braced tight on the sill, bulged blue.

‘It must have been later,’ I insisted, pointing down at the pristine snow beneath my window. ‘See, no marks. It must have begun to snow after I returned.’

‘You should rest, monsieur,’ she said gently. It was clear she did not believe me. Discouraged now, I stepped back from the window and allowed her to fasten the windows. The hinges squealed and a sliver of snow fell from the rim to the floor beneath the sill. Then she closed the shutters, too, barricading us against the world. The metal catch fell into place with a rattle.

‘You must have heard me come back,’ I insisted.

Madame Galy sighed. ‘It is not simply a matter of when the snow started,’ she said, obviously reluctant to be forced into admitting as much.

‘What are you saying?’

She paused, choosing her words with the greatest care. ‘Are you certain, monsieur, that you did go out at all? I did not see you at the Ostal last night. None of the other guests saw you. I was worried you had got lost.’

‘But that’s… ridiculous.’

‘I concluded that you must have thought better of coming out in the cold. It was only when you did not come down this morning that I began to worry you might be unwell.’

I became aware that I was swaying. Hoping to disguise my unsteadiness, I propped my shoulder against the wall. The paper was old, a repeated pattern of blue and pink meadow flowers, faded in strips where the sun had sucked the colour from it.

‘Monsieur, please,’ she said. ‘You should sit.’

I crossed my arms. ‘I quite clearly remember putting on the tunic,’ I glanced down, ‘this tunic, and the boots. I left the letter on the counter in reception downstairs, then headed out. Ten o’clock on the button. ’ I paused. ‘Did you find the letter?’

‘I did,’ she said carefully, ‘but I assumed you had left it there, then returned to your room, monsieur. Monsieur Galy says he did not hear you leave.’

I had no answer to that. It was clear she was increasingly concerned for my mental state. Perhaps she thought I was still drunk or suffering the after-effects of yesterday’s smash. Her eyes flicked away from mine for an instant, then immediately back as though there was something she did not want me to see. Too late, too slow, mocked the voice in my head. The spiteful voice I had heard so often in the sanatorium, setting me against the doctors and nurses, but had thought I had long since vanquished.

The borrowed boots were lying beneath the table. Had I kicked them off when I’d returned to the room? I could see they were pristine. No evidence that they had been worn outside, certainly not in the snow. The toes had no tell-tale stains of frost or dew. I felt the turn-ups on my trousers. They, too, were dry.

‘Look, I remember quite clearly walking to the Ostal.’ I spoke slowly, carefully placing one word in front of the other, as a drunk considers each step before taking it. ‘I followed your map to the letter. Across the square, along the passageway to the left of the church-’

‘The left? You should have gone right.’

I kept talking. ‘Well, it served me just as well in the end. I did linger a moment at the crossroads, a bit of a labyrinth in that quartier behind the church, as you’d warned me, but pretty soon I got my bearings-’

‘Crossroads, monsieur?’

‘-and found the Ostal with no difficulty. There was quite a crowd there, everyone dressed up for the fête, as you had promised, so it’s quite possible, don’t you think, that you simply missed me in the crowd.’

Her expression was beginning to alarm me. Sympathetic, but genuinely worried. I had seen such an expression before on the face of the ward sister at the sanatorium on the evening I was admitted. An inexplicable gulf, now as then, between the logic of my world and of theirs. I steamed on all the same.

‘I’m relieved to see you didn’t come to any harm in the uproar, Madame Galy. I was worried you might have been hurt.’

‘Hurt, monsieur?’

‘Fabrissa said not to worry. Part of the tradition of the fête, I suppose, but I don’t mind telling you, I was taken in. It looked real enough. But, of course, that was much later. Perhaps you had gone already.’ I knew I was talking too loudly and too fast, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘A pleasant chap, by the name of Guillaume Marty, took me in hand, introduced me to…’ I faltered, trying to recall the names. ‘Two sisters, a widow, Na Azéma…’

Madame Galy was silent. She had given up trying to reason with me. My confidence cracked a little more.

‘… and a husband and wife by the name of Authier, yes, and so many of your other neighbours. But most of the evening I spent in the company of a charming girl.’ I hesitated, suddenly shy. ‘Fabrissa. Do you know her?’

I met Madame Galy’s stare and saw pity in her eyes. A sharp memory of Mother that day in the restaurant near Piccadilly, and the contrasting look upon her face. Not pity then, but distaste. I blinked, furious that such a worthless memory, and one of many such, still hurt me.

I tried again.

‘A most striking girl, with long dark hair worn loose. Pale complexion. The most astonishing grey eyes. You must know her.’

Madame Galy shifted. ‘I know no one of that name,’ she said.

‘Well. Well, maybe she came as someone’s guest?’

Before the words were out of my mouth, I knew that was unlikely. If Fabrissa had come with someone else, would she have talked to me all night? Would she have left with me?

‘Then again, she might,’ I mumbled to myself. ‘If she liked me.’

I remembered something else, proof of a kind. ‘My coat,’ I said vigorously. ‘I left it in the lobby of the Ostal. When the brawl started, in my hurry to get us away, I forgot all about it. It must still be there.’

She held her gaze steady. ‘Your coat is still hanging on the hook by the front door where I myself hung it up to dry yesterday evening.’

‘Well, someone must have brought it back for me,’ I shot back, though, in truth, the fight had gone out of me. I couldn’t make sense of things. Madame Galy’s evidence contradicted my recollection of the evening. What more could be said?

‘Fabrissa must have found it and brought it back,’ I muttered. Where was she now?

I was shivering. My feet were suddenly painful on the bare floorboards. I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling my ribs beneath the thin tunic.

Madame Galy put her arm around me. ‘You should lie down, monsieur.’

‘Someone must know her,’ I said, though I allowed her to steer me off the chair and towards the bed. She turned away as I took off my trousers, then she lifted the eiderdown and I obediently climbed in. How easily I slipped back into the role of patient. Individual pockets of shiny material hemmed into tight squares of the eiderdown, the colour of nicotine. She pulled it up to my chin, patted it down. Where was Fabrissa? Fragments of our conversation were coming back to me, the awful tragedy of what had happened to her family.