“Don’t let Reynaud know,” she told me, her mad, earnest eyes gleaming. “You know who he is, don’t you?”

I stared at her. I must have imagined what she said then. Or maybe our dreams touched briefly once, on one of our nights on the run.

“He’s the Black Man. “

Reynaud. Like a bad card. Again and again. Laughter in the wings.

Long after I had put Anouk to bed I read my mother’s cards for the first time since her death. I keep them in a sandalwood box and they are mellow, perfumed with memories of her. For a moment I almost put them away unread, bewildered by the flood of associations that scent brings with it. New York, hotdog stands billowing steam. The Cafe de la Paix, with its immaculate waiters. A nun eating an ice-cream outside Notre-Dame cathedral. Onenight hotel rooms, surly doormen, suspicious gendarmes, curious tourists. And over it all the shadow of It, the nameless implacable thing we fled:

I am not my mother. I am not a fugitive. And yet the need to see, to know; is so great that I find myself taking them from their box and spreading them, much as she did, by the side of the bed. A glance backwards to ensure Anouk is still, asleep. I do not want her to sense my unease. Then I shuffle, cut, shuffle, cut until I have four cards.

Ten of Swords, death. Three of Swords, death. Two of Swords, death. The Chariot. Death.

The Hermit. The Tower. The Chariot. Death.

The cards are my mother’s. This has nothing to do with me, I tell myself, though the Hermit is easy enough to identify. But the Tower? The Chariot? Death?

The Death card, says my mother’s voice within me, may not always portend the physical death of the self but the death of a way of life. A change. A turning of the winds. Could this be what it means?

I don’t believe in divination. Not in the way she did, as a way of mapping out the random patterns of our trajectory. Not as an excuse for inaction, a crutch when things turn from bad to worse, a rationalization of the chaos within. I hear her voice now and it sounds the same to me as it did on the ship, her strength transformed to sheer stubbornness, her humour into a fey despair.

What about Disneyland? What do you think? The Florida Keys? The Everglades? There’s so much to see in the New World, so much we haven’t even begun to dream about. Is that it, do you think? Is that what the cards are saying?

By then Death was on every card, Death and the Black Man, who had begun to mean the same thing. We fled him, and he followed, packed in sandalwood.

As an antidote I read Jung and Herman Hesse, and learned about the collective unconscious. Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know. What we fear. There are no demons but a collection of archetypes every civilization has in common. The fear of loss – Death. The fear of displacement – the Tower. The fear of transience – the Chariot.

And yet Mother died.

I put the cards away tenderly into their scented box. Goodbye, Mother. This is where our journey stops. This is where we stay to face whatever the wind brings us. I shall not read the cards again.

Bless me, father, for i have sinned. I know you can hear me, mon pere, and there is no-one else to whom I would care to confess. Certainly not the bishop, secure in his distant diocese of Bordeaux. And the church seems so empty. I feel foolish at the foot of the altar, looking up at Our Lord in his gilt and agony – the gilding has tarnished with the smoke from the candles and the dark staining gives Him a sly and secretive look – and prayer, which came as such a blessing, such a source of joy in the early days, is a burden, a cry on the side of a bleak mountain which might at any time unleash the avalanche upon me.