Slowly, my shoulders began to lower themselves, and my heart rose a little as I took another sip of beer, despite my tiredness and worry and anxiety. (I know, I know, there are people who travel without ever worrying about it, who turn up and bounce on trains and planes and enjoy it and wake up in a new city without even batting an eyelid—I wonder what their lives are like, I really do, because I am not like that; I worry all the time.) Next door, at the flower shop, a handsome young man with slicked-back hair came out looking slightly furtive and carrying a large bunch of white lilies. I wondered who they were for. As I wondered, he caught my eye, boldly staring at me, and winked as he walked off. Heh. I grinned at that too.
The people started to leave work—early by my standards for rush hour, but they were leaving nonetheless. The women all looked like they’d just been in the hairdressers. Their makeup was subtle; their hair was dark and lovely and didn’t even look dyed—I thought regretfully of the highlights Cath put in, which cost me a fortune once every six weeks and was basically like being on a payment plan even at mate’s rates—and they mostly wore really subtle clothes of black or navy or gray; not many trousers, I noticed. The female managers at Braders wore trouser suits mostly, too tight trousers over fat bottoms with little short jackets perched on the top. It was not a look, I felt, that suited them. Here, if the women did wear trousers, they were over tiny, nonexistent bottoms and were flowingly cut and looked rather chic and boyish, not a containment exercise. Of course, I thought. This was how Mrs. Shawcourt—Claire—dressed. This was obviously where she had learned. I wondered how she had done it.
The old man at the next table leaned over.
“Anglaise?” he asked. Well, yes. Although I wished it wasn’t QUITE so obvious. I nodded, smiling.
“You ’ave been to Paris before?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Oh,” he said, his face completely creased with wrinkles. “Oh, you will adore it. To be young, and in Paris for the first time…Mademoiselle, I envy you.”
I tried to smile back as if I wasn’t desperate for a bath and feeling positively ancient compared to the beautiful young French girls rushing back and forth. I tried for a second to let myself believe that he was right, that a whole new world of adventure and excitement could open up for me, Anna Trent, from Kidinsborough, here in Paris. The idea was ridiculous and absurd. The most exciting thing that happened to me was finding those boots I loved 70 percent off in the Debenhams sale. But as I drained the rest of my golden beer and looked around at the warm-tinged early Parisian evening, I let myself, just for a moment, wonder if it might be true.
I knocked on the door carefully. The Île de la Cité was an island—there were two—right in the middle of Paris, connected by a series of bridges. It was mostly large buildings—a huge hospital and the law courts and police stations in proud, imposing stone, with Notre Dame Cathedral marking the west side—but around the back of the smart edifices were little streets too, cobbled and twisted, marking out an older city, and it was down one of these I finally found myself, on a road called the rue des Ursins, which was down some steps from the pavement, near a bridge, and across from some cobbles surrounding a tiny triangle of garden.
The street numbers didn’t seem to make any sense; they jumped hither and thither, and areas called arrondissements just seemed to pop out of nowhere. There’s something about the first time you go to a place—it takes far, far too long and you notice little details that you then notice forever, like the wrought iron lamps that lit the way as night started to fall. But finally I tracked it down. It was on the sixth floor of an old building made of golden stone that had wrought iron balconies with flowerpots full of pansies and large, floor-length windows.
When I first saw it, my heart leapt. As I drew closer, I noticed that the stone was a little shabby, that the pansies were dead or plastic, that the beautiful windows had old rattling frames and were single-glazed. It was not a set of smart apartments, but rather a subdivided old house, rather neglected. I sighed. Our house was small and smelled of boy and lynx aftershave and fish fingers and sometimes our farty old dog, but my little room was warm and cozy. Mum liked to whack the heating up, and Dad would chide her for it getting too expensive, and it was double-glazed and nice and modern. I’d never lived in an old building before. It was almost impossible to work out what the color of the huge old door had once been; a sort of sandy red seemed to cover it, just about. There was a jumble of old bells with writing all over them, and the steps were worn smooth. I couldn’t see the name—Sami—that I was meant to push, so I tentatively pushed at the door. It creaked ominously straight in front of me, and I stepped in.
“Bonjour?” I cried out. There was no response. “Bonjour?”
Nothing. There was a glassed door at the end of the broken parquet hallway that let in just enough light to let me see the dusty piles of old mail over the floor and a tired looking pot plant by the stairwell. The stairs led up into the dark. I fumbled a bit and found a light switch, turned it on, and moved upward—there was nothing on this floor—but before I was halfway up, the light went out. I cursed crossly under my breath and trailed my hand till I found another switch. This wasn’t, it turned out, a light switch, but instead a loud doorbell that went off like a gun.
“ALLO?” shouted an old lady’s voice. I knew I was meant to be on the top floor, so I cried out a quick “Pardon, Madame” and continued on my way.
What was with these accursed lights that couldn’t stay on? One had to dart between them. The staircase was incredibly twisted and narrow, so it was difficult to get up without scrabbling a bit on my toes, and I was beginning to feel terribly nervous when I finally made it to the top. Down below, the lady whose bell I had rung by accident was shouting her head off now, saying things I couldn’t make out, but I think one of them was police. I cursed again under my breath, some proper Anglo-Saxon words, hauling my now incredibly heavy bag up the steps.
Finally I emerged onto a tiny little landing with—thank goodness—its own light coming through a dirty skylight above me. It was a tiny space, like being inside a turret. Someone had put a little white bookshelf crammed full of books at the top of the steps, so I couldn’t get my bag past it. On the other levels, there had been two apartments, but here there was only one, as if the building had run out. I stepped forward. Beside the low white door was a little brass plaque that had “Sami” written in very tiny letters. I blew out a breath of relief. I didn’t fancy reliving the stairway of death. It then occurred to me that, if I was going to live here, I was going to have to negotiate the stairway of death on eight toes every day, but I put that thought out of my mind for once.