I kept my fingers in the bag, unsure of whether or not I had imagined this kiss and wondering if I should pull out another nut, and . . . My heart? It dissolved like sugar on the tongue.

‘Have you ever been with a man?’ she asked.

‘I’ve never been with anyone.’ In this moment I could smell everything. Everything. The salt the oil the morning coffee her skin.

‘I see the way you look at me. You look at me as if you want to breathe me.’

‘Do I?’

Her lips on my lips, so quickly it almost didn’t happen. I couldn’t breathe at all.

She moved away then. As if nothing. She asked for a bergamot sweet and, when I came back from the kitchen, carrying a small plate of them and feeling as if I’d been slapped or woken abruptly from deep sleep, she had put her gloves back on and was preparing to leave.

‘Will you come again?’ I asked her in the vestibule. The sounds of Madame from down the hall: a body rolling in layers of blanket and sheeting, a low moan.

Axelle glanced towards Madame Debord’s room. ‘You had better tend to that,’ she said, ‘and perhaps we’ll see each other tomorrow.’

Axelle did not return the following day, though while Madame slept I read in the salon and pretended to myself that I wasn’t waiting and that I wasn’t looking for her out of the window. She didn’t come the next day or the next, and it must have been a week before the grey face of Monsieur Muller appeared at the door with her letter, which explained that she had been very ill but that she was better now, and that she would like to visit the following afternoon.

Which she did. Sitting together on the sofa, her hands on my face smelled of October and almonds. Madame was asleep down the hall and Axelle, chewing on her lower lip, pulled my shawl from my shoulders and undid the buttons at the collar of my blouse, and she pressed her lips to my neck. She pulled her face away and looked at me as if I were something to be read.

‘What are you looking at?’ I asked.

‘You. You’re fortunate to have naturally pale skin.’

‘Oh.’

Upstairs where the Russian family lived, something heavy dropped to the floor, and then panicked footsteps. The quick, muffled draft of an argument in a rhythm that had become familiar to me.

Axelle’s hands were at my waist. ‘You’re covered in gooseflesh,’ she said, and kissed me.

This time, this first time, was a fumble. We remained clothed, pecking at the edges of each other to where we were barred by buttons and petticoats and corsets. I was afraid – not of being caught; Madame Debord slept for hours and never got out of bed without my help. I was afraid of the way her touch triggered a kind of thickening inside my body, something like inebriation. When Axelle left that afternoon, I felt as if my own clothes could not contain me, and when I put my head on my pillow that night I found that my eyes would not close and that she had become everything. I stayed awake most of the night, sleeping a little at dawn, only to wake and be pummelled again by the sweetest thoughts of Axelle Paquet.