It was the sign that summer would come overnight. It always arrived when the lift was stuck.
Two at a time, Perdu bounded up the stairs, which were covered with Breton, Mexican and Portuguese tiles. Madame Bernard, who owned the building, loved patterns; they were the ‘house’s shoes and, as with women, shoes are a sign of character’. Seen from this perspective, any burglar daring to enter would have assumed from the staircase that number 27 Rue Montagnard was a spectacularly fickle creature.
Perdu was nearing the first floor when a pair of satin mules the colour of golden corn with feather pom-poms on the toes stepped decisively onto the landing and into his line of sight.
On the first floor, above Madame Rosalette, lived Che, the blind chiropodist. He often accompanied Madame Bomme (second floor), who used to work as a secretary for a famous fortune-teller, to do her food shopping at Goldenberg’s (who lived on the third floor) and carried Madame Bomme’s bag. They shuffled along the pavement together – the blind man arm in arm with the old lady pushing her wheeled Zimmer frame.
Kofi – which meant ‘Friday’ in one of the indigenous languages of Ghana – had showed up at Rue Montagnard one day from the outskirts of Paris. He had dark skin, wore gold chains over the top of his hip-hop hoodies and a gold earring in one ear. A good-looking boy, ‘a cross between Grace Jones and a young jaguar’, was Madame Bomme’s opinion. Kofi often carried her white Chanel handbags and attracted suspicious looks from ignorant passers-by. He did caretaking jobs, or made figures from raw leather and painted them with symbols that nobody in the building could understand.
Yet it was neither Che nor Kofi nor Madame Bomme’s wheeled Zimmer that now hove into Perdu’s path. ‘Oh, Monsieur, how lovely to see you! Listen, that Dorian Gray was a very exciting book. How nice of you to recommend it when Burning Desire was out of stock.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it, Madame Gulliver.’
‘Oh, after all this time do call me Claudine. Or at least Mademoiselle. I don’t stand on ceremony. That Gray was so amusing, it only took me two hours. But if I were Dorian, I’d never have looked at that picture. It’s depressing. And they can’t have had Botox back then.’
‘Madame Gulliver, Oscar Wilde spent six years writing it. He was later sentenced to prison and died a short time afterwards. Didn’t he deserve a little more than two hours of your time?’
‘Oh, poppycock. That won’t cheer him up now.’
Claudine Gulliver. A spinster of Rubenesque proportions in her mid-forties, and a registrar at a major auction house. She had to deal with excessively rich, excessively greedy collectors on a daily basis – strange specimens of the human species. Madame Gulliver collected works of art herself, mainly gaudily coloured ones with heels. She had a collection of 176 pairs of high heels with a room of their own.
One of Madame Gulliver’s hobbies was to lie in wait for Monsieur Perdu and invite him on one of her excursions, or tell him about her latest continuing education courses or the new restaurants that opened in Paris every day. Madame Gulliver’s second hobby was reading the kind of novel that starred a heroine who clung to a scoundrel’s broad chest and resisted long and hard before finally he powerfully over … er … powered her. Now she twittered, ‘So, will you come with me tonight to—’
‘No, I’d rather not.’
‘Hear me out first! The university jumble sale at the Sorbonne. Lots of long-legged female art graduates breaking up their group housing, and dumping their books, their furniture and, who knows, their lovers.’ Madame Gulliver arched her eyebrows suggestively. ‘How about it?’
He imagined young men crouching among grandfather clocks and boxes of paperbacks with Post-it notes on their foreheads saying such things as: ‘Used once, almost new, barely touched. Heart in need of minor repairs’; or ‘Thirdhand, basic functions intact.’
‘I really don’t want to.’
Madame Gulliver gave a deep sigh.
‘Good gracious. You never want anything; have you ever noticed that?’
‘That’s …’
True.
‘… not because of you. Really it isn’t. You’re charming, courageous and … er …’
Yes, he was rather fond of Madame Gulliver. She seized life with both hands. More of it than she probably needed.
‘… very neighbourly.’
Heavens. He was so rusty when it came to saying something nice to a woman! Madame Gulliver began to totter down the stairs with a waggle of her hips. Clack-slap, clack-slap went her corn-gold slippers. When she reached his step, she lifted her hand. She noted that Perdu shrank back when she reached out to touch his muscled arm, and instead laid her hand resignedly on the banister.
‘Neither of us is getting any younger, Monsieur,’ she said in a low, husky voice. ‘We’re well into the second half.’