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Caroline sipped some wine, then continued, “His mother, my grand-mère, refused to listen to anything bad. I did not know her well. On the point you want to know, about the war, my grand-mère would refuse to listen. ‘Don’t bring it up,’ I can hear her say. She’s dead now, but I can still hear her say so clearly, ‘Robert, your wife doesn’t want to hear that, that other woman doesn’t even have a right to hear it, and I don’t want to hear it; that time is past. It’s over, fini. You have to think about providing for all those little ones. That is the only thing that should concern you.’ ”

Caroline leaned over the side of her chair as if to check on her dog, but she had not brought him. Marshall supposed it was some kind of reflex action, or perhaps she just wanted to expose her cleavage.

She said, “His mother, my grandmother, called my mother ‘that other woman’ in front of me! They did not know each other. Maman didn’t want to hear about the war either. All she asked for was financial support. She dutifully made his dinner on Wednesdays, and he gave her a pile of franc notes, not always the same amount. She never knew if there would be enough.”

“Did he have the épicerie then?”

“He had a business at Montreuil that was in his family for many years, and then he bought the épicerie for my mother. He did have the decency to provide us with the shop.”

“Do any of your brothers and sisters work there?”

She shook her head. “My brother Jean, my brother Claude—they made apprenticeships in construction. My two sisters married. I was married too—for about five years. Not now.”

“Children?”

She shook her head. For a while she talked about her marriage to a lazy machinist obsessed with horse racing. Marshall did not mention Loretta, and she did not ask him personal questions. From time to time he spoke up, to slow down her French or to ask her to repeat something. He didn’t know most of her slang. He was not sure she understood what he wanted. The Robert she was describing did not seem familiar. He knew he was prying, but he liked her voice, the way her breasts moved with all her gestures.

The langoustines appeared—a pile of what looked like overgrown crawfish, or baby lobsters.

“They resemble homards, do they not?” she said with a little laugh.

They hit a language barrier. He couldn’t give her a French word for crawfish, and he didn’t understand homards. The langoustines lay on a bed of rice, in their weird red shells, with long feelers and bug eyes. He had to follow her lead in breaking the shells and slipping out the slim slivers of pink-tinged flesh.

“Take the time,” she said, as she delicately extracted a morsel from the tail and brought it to her lips.

For a while they worked on the food, which seemed more like a surgical operation than a meal. Marshall was sitting with a view of some old black-and-white photographs, perhaps from wartime, on the wall behind her. He couldn’t keep from looking at them, as if he might recognize someone. Caroline obliviously tackled her pile of crusty sea creatures. Earlier, as she told about her mother, he was studying a photo of mothers leading children across a cobblestone street, mothers in head-scarves tied in a triangle. Loretta wore a scarf that way in the forties, he recalled. That photo was between a picture of a line of people outside a boulangerie and a picture of a crowd of young people dancing in the street.

“He gave my mother the épicerie,” Caroline repeated. “And now it is mine—since she died.”

“Does he ever come into the shop?”

She wiped her lips with her napkin carefully, then said, “No. He is never there.”

“Then how can I find him?” he asked impatiently.

“I don’t know.”

“The kid said he was in Beaucaire.”

“My cousin—Michel.”

“Is your father in Beaucaire?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t spoken to him in five years.”

There was a trace of sadness in her voice, but also bitterness.

“I really would like to find the Robert I knew,” he said. “Maybe I’ve got the wrong one. Don’t you have a picture of him?”

“He was