This hinge moment, I once thought, could have occurred when my father died and Tante Huguette became my keeper. Or when my mother died, or when as a child I realized I was in love with a girl whose name was Emmanuelle.

It could have occurred before I was born, when my grandmother and Madame Debord met as young girls.

But, there again. Perhaps every moment, every single moment of our lives, is a pivot, a fulcrum. Perhaps the moment of which I should have been wary began with a patch of wood rot, with damp plaster and rusty nails. Maybe it was the morning Madame and I woke to what sounded like all the dishes in the world crashing to the floor.

That morning. I scrambled from my bed, wrapped my dressing gown around my shoulders and moved quickly through the apartment to the kitchen. There, I found the cupboards hanging crookedly off the wall, their doors open and Madame’s everyday dishes in shards at my feet. A lone cup slid from a collapsed shelf to the floor, pirouetted on its rim for several rotations, before wobbling and eventually coming to rest while Madame cuckooed from her bedroom. Where the cupboards and shelves had come away from the wall, a wound gaped from the plaster, revealing thin wooden laths with dried mud and horsehair filling the gaps. On the floor, broken pieces of glass, ceramic and dust, and pieces of the mouldy plaster that had finally given way. I stood in the middle of all this, unsure what to do. Madame squawked.

A querulous rapping at the front door. I went quickly down the hall, and opened it a crack to find Monsieur Muller standing there with a face puffy and demented from sleep interrupted.

‘What in God’s name?’ he asked, breathless. His fat hands twitched at his thighs.

‘The kitchen wall,’ I said, ‘has fallen apart. The cupboards have come down.’ I opened the door further and stepped back. ‘Have a look for yourself.’

I left him to it and went to Madame Debord, who was standing in the middle of her bedroom, reaching around her back, wrestling with one arm of her dressing gown. She looked like a marionette dancing spastically under the strings of a mad puppeteer. I gently untwisted the garment and helped her into it, and brought her to the kitchen.

Her eyes, like holes, moved from the gash on the wall to the pile on the floor. ‘This is a catastrophe.’

‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘It can be fixed.’ I turned to Monsieur Muller, who was rubbing both hands up and down his bald head, the loose folds of his scalp wrinkling and stretching. ‘You can call on someone for us, today?’

‘My man is holed up in his bed with a broken leg, fell from a roof just last week. It’ll be hard to find anyone good, and for the right price, at such short notice,’ he said.

‘I am not paying for this,’ Madame Debord said, pointing a shaky finger at the concierge. ‘I told you this had to be fixed. I told you many times.’ She put her hands to her temples, trying, perhaps, to rub away the two large glasses of wine she’d consumed the night before.