Since we got married we rarely go out. I travel a lot for work.’

‘I know,’ said Yves. ‘I’ve heard about your invention.’

He was talking about a device that could capture and recycle the smoke from factory chimneys, which had earned the young engineer Jessaint a huge fortune during the war and a great deal of fame.

Jessaint blushed slightly; he had a kind face, even though it was somewhat simple with rugged features, but lit by his very soft, very clear blue eyes.

The maître d’ had just brought the coffee, so Denise poured it out; the sunlight shimmered on the downy hair of her bare arm; she had the serious smile of a statuette. Then she crossed her hands behind her neck, closed her eyes and started gently swaying back and forth in her rocking chair, while the men continued talking in low voices about the war, about the people who had come back and the ones who hadn’t.

A little while later she interrupted them: ‘Excuse me … Can you tell me what time it is?’

‘It’s nearly four o’clock, Madame.’

‘Oh, then I really should go and get dressed … Are we still going to Biarritz to buy your trunk, Jacques?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ said Yves, ‘I’m going to have another swim.’

‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll tire yourself out?’

‘Absolutely not, I could live in the water!’

They walked off together while Jessaint stayed on the terrace to finish his coffee. Yves watched the young woman in white as she walked in front of him. Against the dazzling sunlight, her black curls were light and bluish, like smoke rings from oriental cigarettes. At the foot of the stairs she turned round and smiled.

‘Goodbye, Monsieur, I’m sure I’ll see you again soon …’

She shook his hand. Her gaze was beautiful, frank, direct, something he had already noticed about her and which he liked. Then she walked away, going through the rotating door of the hotel as Yves made his way slowly down to the beach.

5

THE NEXT DAY at siesta time he saw her again on the warm beach. Jessaint had gone to London as he had said he would. Yves walked over and stroked little France’s damp blonde hair, then spoke to her mother about her husband and the friends you discover you have in common as soon as you take the trouble to ask.

He saw her later in the restaurant and noticed their tables were next to each other; he spotted her again in the foyer where she was reading the papers. And so on … every day, at every hour of the day, from then on, he would run into her. It was hardly surprising: Hendaye is a very small place and neither of them left Hendaye. Denise didn’t like being far from her daughter: she had the worrying nature and anxious imagination of a true mother. Yves was soothed by this charming, regular life that flew by with the unusual speed of certain happy daydreams … luminous mornings, long, lazy days in the sun, a brief moment of dusk followed by those Spanish nights that carry the sweet scents of Andalusia back out to sea …

To Yves, the presence of Denise seemed as natural and strangely precious as the presence of the ocean. Her feminine silhouette glided among the swaying tamarisk trees like a graceful shadow, born of the sun and the shade. She no longer surprised Yves just as the crashing sound of the waves filled both his wakeful nights and his dreams with brash colours, wild music, which he no longer noticed because he had grown used to them. Denise’s beauty left him calm and impassive; even though she ran along the beach in her swimsuit, half-naked, every morning, with the serene lack of modesty you find in very young, very beautiful creatures, Yves was not troubled by desire: he did not experience the arousal, the burning curiosity that plagues men when they first begin to fall in love. She was pretty and, more important, she was wholesome and modest, and her simplicity, her energy, charmed Yves in a way he almost failed to notice. He didn’t wonder whether she was an honest woman, if she had one or several lovers. He didn’t undress her with his eyes. Why should he? She had no secrets and, because of that, there was no mystery about her. When she was with him he didn’t think about her. But wasn’t she always with him? In the morning, when he first saw her, he felt happy: to him, was she not the symbol, the visible representation of these joyful holidays? When he had been in Hendaye as a schoolboy, every evening he would see two women pass by on the pier; two Spanish women who wore black mantillas … they spoke a coarse, throaty language that he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t see their faces in the darkness, but when the bright beam from the lighthouse swept over them they were suddenly lit up, almost too brightly, as if they were standing in a spotlight. Then they would fade into the distance, their skirts swaying.

Yves had never spoken a word to them; later on he thought they must have been maids in the hotel. They weren’t beautiful, and even if he was vaguely in love with them, as you are at fifteen, he was certainly more smitten with the daughter of the guard, his first mistress, and the little American he kissed on the lips behind the bathing huts. He had forgotten about those girls, though, and when he thought back to that summer of his adolescence, those two foreign women chatting in their strange language, with their swaying skirts and black mantillas in their hair, immediately came to mind … In the same way, he told himself, that if he later saw Denise again on some street in Paris, he would remember in incredible detail, all the wild splendour of a summer’s day, the warm, golden beach that curved along the Bidassoa river. Music has the same power to evoke days gone by, thought Yves, very simple music preferably, and certain women’s faces as well.

6

ONE DAY DENISE wasn’t at the beach. Yves did not notice at first; he went into the water, as always, swam for a long time, his eyes dazzled by the glittering flecks of gold that dance between the waves.