Coming downstairs after finding his torch, he overheard his mother say what she thought of the expedition.
     Mad, she was calling it, as he knew she would. 'Mad! The first in four months he has his eight-year-old son and what does he plan to do? Take him camping up a mountain! Talk about macho avoidance activity!' Her voice was low, and light and mocking, but he heard it catch, and he could also hear Jim, his mother's boyfriend who lived with them now, shifting at the kitchen table with an unhappy kind of rustle. His mother said: 'Well, what do you expect?' There was a choke in her voice now, and suddenly a kind of snarl: 'You wouldn't expect him to start now, would you - accommodating his child into his life?' He looked out through the open door of the cafe. It was hard to believe it was November. A brilliant sun glittered off the water. A passenger plane wheeled through the sky, very low, droning quietly towards Nice airport. A seagull landed on top of a flagpole and folded its wings. Policemen wearing baseball caps gave directions to tourists on bicycles. It was an attractive scene, but Sam was already bored with it. He thought of the book in his jacket pocket. It was A. J. Ayer's "The Central Questions of Philosophy", which he'd found in a book shop on the Rue de France the day before for only ten francs. He felt like reading the book now, but he knew that Helen would be offended. She'd already been offended the night before, when she'd come out of the bathroom dressed in a tee-shirt and knickers to find him reading in bed. He'd continued to read as she moved around the room, hanging up clothes and looking at the things she'd bought during the day. Eventually she'd said, "You must find me really boring, if you prefer that book."
     Sam had put the book down. "Sorry," he said. "I was just skimming through the first chapter while you were in the shower, and I got bogged down in Zeno's paradoxes."
     "What?"
     He told her about Achilles and the tortoise having a race. If Achilles gave the tortoise a head start he'd never be able to catch it, because no matter how close he got, the tortoise would always be able to move a tiny bit further in the time it took Achilles to close the intervening distance.
     When the boy stepped into the kitchen he saw her start with alarm and shame. He said, 'I found my torch.'
     'Oh good!' she said quickly, wrenching a look of bright enthusiasm onto her face.
     The light seeping through her fuzzy hair made the bones of his shoulders ache.