out, ‘Merci, Madame Guillemet.’ But then the phone on her desk rings and she dismisses us with another smile and a wave of her hand as she turns to answer it.
Simone helps me lug my suitcase up five flights of steep and narrow stairs. The first floor, she explains, is used as a photographic studio, rented out on a freelance basis. We poke our heads around the door to take a look. It’s one vast room with clean white walls, empty save for a pair of folding screens in one corner. With its tall windows and high ceiling it’s the perfect space for fashion shoots.
The next three floors are sublet as offices. The brass nameplates on their doors announce that the rooms are occupied by an accounting firm and a photographer. ‘Florence needs to make the building pay its way,’ Simone says. ‘And there are always people looking to rent a little office space in Saint-Germain. It’s a condition of the lease, though, that the top floor rooms cannot be rented out, so that they can be a perk of the job. Luckily for you and me!’
The top floor of the building, tucked in under the eaves, consists of a series of small rooms, a couple of which are used as storage, filled with filing cabinets, boxes of old office materials, defunct computers and piles of magazines. Simone shows me the cramped galley kitchen where there’s just enough space for a fridge, cooker and sink, and the living room, which has a round, bistro-style table with two chairs in one corner and a small sofa pushed against the far wall. Its compact size is more than compensated for by the sloping roof light set into the low ceiling which allows sunshine to pour in. If I stand on tiptoes and crane my neck a little, I can see the Parisian skyline and glimpse the roof of the church from which the Boulevard Saint-Germain takes its name.
‘And this is your room,’ Simone says, pushing open another door. It’s tiny – there’s just enough space for a single iron bedstead, a chest of drawers and a utilitarian, free-standing clothes rail which looks like it may have been salvaged from a warehouse at some point in the distant past.
If I stoop beneath the sloping ceiling, from the small square of the dormer window I can see an ocean of slate rooftops, across which a flotilla of chimney pots and television aerials are scattered, under a clear blue September sky.
I turn to smile at Simone.
She shrugs apologetically. ‘It’s small, but . . .’
‘It’s perfect,’ I say. And I mean it. Because this tiny room is mine. My own space, for the next twelve months. And somehow, even though I’ve never seen it before in my life, I have a sense of belonging here: it feels like home.
An old, long-forgotten photograph, discovered by accident in a box of fading memories, is my only tenuous link to this place. But then I don’t really have any other strong connections in life and so this most fragile of threads, as fine as a strand of age-worn silk, has become the only lifeline I know, binding me to this tiny bedroom in an unknown building in a foreign city. It has drawn me here and I feel a strong compulsion to see where it takes me, following it back through the years, back through the generations, to its source.
‘Well, I’d better get back to work.’ Simone glances at her watch. ‘Another hour to go before the weekend can officially begin. I’ll leave you to unpack. See you later.’ She leaves, closing the door of the apartment behind her, and I hear her footsteps fade away down the stairs.
I open my suitcase and dig beneath the layers of carefully folded clothes until my fingertips connect with the hard edges of the frame, wrapped for safe-keeping in the folds of a woollen jumper.
The eyes of the three young women in the photograph seem to be fixed upon mine as I search their faces for the thousandth time for clues about their lives. As I set the picture on top of the chest of drawers beside my narrow bed, I am more conscious than ever of how rootless I am and of how vital it is for me to find out more about them.
I’m not just searching for who they are. I’m trying to find out who I am, too.
The purposeful sounds of people who are homeward bound at the end