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‘Tak.’ Yes, came the proud reply.
Tears of frustration filled Yeva’s eyes. Olena, mistaking them for gratitude, smiled broadly and held the cake aloft so that her big sister could blow out fifteen candles.
Le Studio
Exiting the Métro at Barbès-Rochechouart, the reason behind the reasonable price of their Airbnb became disconcertingly apparent to Claire. Fluorescent tubes shone in shops selling fast food, cheap shoes and clothes that looked like – or maybe actually were – fancy dress costumes. Denizens of the underpass of boulevard de la Chapelle had a fire going in a galvanised bin. A police car pulled up on the footpath, then pulled off again, siren wailing. Leaning against the cement supports, a short, hollow-faced man with a black curly beard was rooting in the baggy pockets of his woollen overcoat. His left hand emerged, flicking open a knife. He caught Claire’s eye, raised an eyebrow and went back to searching his pockets.
Lifting her chin, she made an effort to approximate the posture of a woman who knew where she was going and adjusted her pace to keep close to Ronan. He led the way to rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, a residential street so quiet it seemed a world away from the hustle of the underpass. Counting house numbers backwards, they identified their entrance. Ronan entered the security code on a keypad to the side of a grey-painted wooden gate, and a small door cut into the main gate clicked. He pushed it open, and Claire stepped through.
A narrow alleyway, the width of the gate, gave way to a courtyard. She could see that, at the opposite side, a second alley gave way to yet another courtyard. The nondescript wooden gateway on the street in fact gave access to a hidden warren of homes.
To their left, a set of wide shallow steps led to a tall narrow doorway with tall, even narrower windows to either side. The top half of the door was glass, but white voile curtains shielded the interior from view, and flaking shutters blocked the windows.
Ronan punched the same code into a second keypad. They waited for the click of the lock, then pushed the brass hand plate to open the door.
The large foyer was dim but smelled pleasantly of wood polish. To the left, a shuttered hatch was stencilled in grey paint with the wordConcierge. An elaborate bifurcated stairway, with marble steps and a broad oak handrail, took centre stage, atmospherically twilit from four floors above by a domed window in the roof. Daydreaming herself the heroine of a Muriel Barbery story, Claire placed one foot after the other on the worn-down dip at the centre of each step all the way up to the first floor.
In an alcove off the landing, they dropped their bags. Ronan tapped on his phone and checked the code again. He opened a combination lock on a small, wall-mounted box, finally revealing a very ordinary key, which opened the door in front of them.
Claire shuffled backwards through the slender entryway, stopping when the bag on her back got caught in something.
‘I’m stuck,’ she said.
‘Hang on.’ Ronan ran his hand up the wall until he found light switches, then laughed out loud. Claire was entangled with the kitchenette’s sink. On her right-hand side was a two-ring electric hob, on her left an old-fashioned filter coffee machine. A low double bed was only inches from her feet.
‘I think I’m impaled on the tap.’
‘Just wait.’
Ronan squeezed his bag past her legs, then stood in front of her. ‘This is interesting.’
‘Help me!’
He put his hands under her legs and lifted her up so that she was perched on the edge of the sink. She wiggled her arms out of the bag’s straps.
‘Now, hold on tight—’ Ronan flopped backwards onto the bed, taking her with him. ‘Bijou,’ he said, summing up their first impression.
‘It’s nice, though,’ said Claire, stretching her neck to look around.
It was nice. On a small shelf above the sink, two plates, two bowls and two cups were neatly stacked. A glass bowl on the counter held a Noah’s Ark medley of fruit: two apples, two grapefruit, two kiwis, two bananas. A bottle of Vittel stood next to two wine glasses.
‘We’ll have to buy some wine,’ she said.
‘Hmm, yes.’ He was kissing her neck.
The bed, though it took up almost all the space in the room, faced a pair of ceiling-high windows with an antique radiator standing in between.
‘I have to try out these French windows,’ she said, rolling away from him and off the bed.
Claire turned a brass handle and pulled the first window inwards, then released the catch on the wooden shutters and pushed them outwards.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘there’s a teeny-weeny balcony.’
Ronan, climbing out the opposite side of the bed, seemed not to hear her. Looking down, she watched a woman pushing a bicycle through the arch to the farther courtyard. She closed the window, again appreciating the curve of the cold brass handle. She unwound her scarf and draped it over the radiator.
‘I suppose they just call them windows,’ she mused.
‘What?’
