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herself alone, ‘A little girl who deserves something better than this, I think.’
    Ah-hah! The seating arrangements! Always the best moment of the evening.
    ‘So . . . Laurence . . . on my right,’ declares my old dad, ‘then you, little Guy (poor Laurence . . . refrigerator department, shoplifters and havoc among the personnel coming right at you), Mado, you’re here, then Claire, then –’
    ‘No!’ protests my mother irritably, tearing the paper from his hands. ‘We said Charles, then Françoise, here . . . Oh, no, that doesn’t work . . . We’re one man short now.’
    What would become of us without our seating arrangements?
    Claire is watching me. She knows we are one man short. I smile to her and she shrugs her shoulders in a gallant sort of way to shake off my tenderness, which is making her uncomfortable.
    Our gazes are worth more than that absent man’s, after all . . .
    Without any further hesitation she grabs the chair before her, unfolds her napkin and calls out to our favourite grocer, ‘Come on, come over here, little Guy! Come and sit next to me and tell me again what I’m entitled to with my three discount points!’
    My mother sighs and throws down her weapons. ‘Oh, well, sit wherever you like, then.’
    Such talent, I muse.
    Such talent . . .
    But the intelligence of this marvellous girl, who is capable of sabotaging your seating arrangements in a split second, who can make a family gathering bearable, who can stir up a group of blasé adolescents without humiliating them, who can find favour with a woman like Laurence (needless to say, she never got along with the other two, something that gladdened my heart), and is respected by all her colleagues, who is called Our Little Vauban in the plush offices of certain elected officials (I read one day in an ultra-serious urban planning journal this paraphrase of a certain famous phrase, ‘A case fought by Balanda is a case won, a case defended by Balanda is an unwinnable case’) – all of this, all her finesse and common sense, stop short once you get anywhere near the region of her heart.
    The man who is missing this evening, and who has been missing for years now, does actually exist. Except that he too must be surrounded by his family this evening. With his wife (at his Maman’s, said Claire, her smile a bit too forced to be honest), and his napkin ring.
    Such a hero.
    And cutting such a fine figure, modern man in his well-worn slippers . . .
    The point is he very nearly came between us, the fat bastard . . . ‘No, Charles, you can’t say that . . . He’s not fat . . .’ That’s the sort of feeble rejoinder she’d come out with back in the days when I was still doing my Don Quixote act and would try to struggle against that flailing windmill of words. But I have since given up, it’s pointless. A man who, even if he is thin, can say calmly and without irony to a woman like her, ‘Be patient, I’ll leave when the girls are grown up,’ is not even worth the hay you’d feed to old Rosinante.
    He can go to hell.
    ‘But why do you stay with him?’ I have asked her, formulating the question every possible way.
    ‘I don’t know. Because he doesn’t want me, I suppose.’
    And that is all she has to say in her own defence. Yes, her defence. Our own little . . . Our lovely beacon and the terror of every court of law.
    A hopeless case.
    But I’ve given up. Out of fatigue, and from a sense of honesty, and because here am I incapable of cleaning up my own back yard.
    I’d make a lousy prosecutor, my arm isn’t long enough.
    And there are other things going on underneath all that, other renunciations and shadowy regions and slopes that are far too slippery, even for the kindred spirit of a brother like me. So we don’t talk about it any more. And she switches off her mobile. And shrugs her shoulders. So that’s life. And she laughs. And she doesn ’t mind getting lumbered with the resident champion, to take her mind off