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trots after the old man as he scuttles out to the waiting carriage. A curl of smoke drifts lazily upwards from the chimney of the Laughing Woman. Though Auguste turns, triumphant, to display the child to the waiting world, there is nobody to see them go.
    The sun is an unforgiving white disc; a fine house comes into view as the carriage rattles on down the dusty trunk road, like something out of a painting: white and formal against the blue of the sky. The carriage sweeps through the valley below the house – a forest of rustling stalks, head-high. In between the stalks, heads lift. Plantation workers – the sons and daughters of sons and daughters of slaves – have paused in the cutting of sugar cane to see the carriage, with its precious cargo, sweep by.
    The carriage rocks uphill, arriving at a verandah that extends to the front of the house. Auguste leaps out as the wheels stop rolling; his feet make the verandah’s floorboards creak. André follows him, taking in the view with his arms laced behind his back, as the nuns taught him, indicating his politeness.
    ‘Caroline,’ Auguste calls, repeatedly and in mounting excitement.
    A young woman steps from the dark oblong of the door. Caroline is all porcelain and gold and in her early twenties.
    ‘This is André,’ Auguste says, his voice quivering: it is his great moment.
    She looks at André, looks at his poor serge suit. André’s pose shifts and becomes genuine: he wants to please her, never having seen anyone like her.
    But though she stares at him, he understands that she does not really see him.
    She kisses Auguste’s dry cheek and turns to go back inside.
    Over the next few weeks, visitors come to pay their respects to the child. They perch on the horsehair settee and look at André, and he feels special, he feels somebody, in his new suit with the high white collar. He learns to rank them in importance based on how anxious Auguste becomes when greeting them. Caroline isn’t upset at all, not by anyone: she sits, laughing at their jokes, when he can see she doesn’t really mean it; when he turns to look at her, she quickly looks away, and coldly, as though he has been too bold.
    One day a man with a handlebar moustache comes. He takes tea in the salon like the others, and the moustache twitches when he drinks and André longs to put his hands up to it and feel the bristle against the palm of his hand. This is Maître de la Houssaye, Auguste says, he is a lawyer come to help Papa with a dispute amongst the workers: would André like to come to the office and see?
    André nods, one eye always on Caroline. He wants her to be the one to give permission.
    ‘Kiss your mother goodbye, then, we’ll be a while.’
    The room hushes; André knows that this is a kind of test; and also that he isn’t the only one being tested. He slips off hissmall chair and hurries across to Caroline. She bends down, awkwardly, and loops her arms round his neck. He understands from her stiffness that she is not used to this, that perhaps she doesn’t hold people. It feels entirely strange.
    ‘Come on, boy,’ calls his father from the doorway. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

7. juillet 1913
    SOMETIMES ANDRÉ WOULD pop his head round the door of the costume department during the day. With a very straight face he would say, ‘Everything ticking over, ladies?’ And I would bend my head to the sewing machine and beat my foot on the pedal, and his gaze swept over me and back. He would nod and retreat: the picture of the caring boss.
    ‘Such a charming man,’ my colleagues would sigh, touching their hands to their hair; and I would feel the secret warm me up.
    The only person who remained immune to André’s charms was Elodie; when he came in she bent her head more closely to her work and hunched her shoulders as though trying to disappear. I could see no reason for her dislike; but in the end, I did not have long to wait before the answer was revealed, some weeks after my first