In the shaft of sunlight that protrudes through the open door, I can detect no dust motes.

Perhaps the key to maintaining this level of sterility is lack of clutter. Spartan comes to mind. A small glass table on which sits a telephone, a telephone book, a notebook, and a pen. A coat stand, which accommodates two coats; one a massive, all-weathers wax jacket and the other a belted gray gabardine coat with a scarf, also gray, threaded about the collar.

“Hello?” I call out. There is no response.

“You have to say it in French,” says Iris. “Like this.” She steps forward. “’Ello?” she calls, grinning, and I try not to laugh. Laughing does not seem appropriate in a hallway like this.

A door opens and a woman appears, wearing yellow rubber gloves and a buttoned-up housecoat. She is tall and hard-to-look-at thin. A collection of bones around which her skin is pulled taut. Her hair, pulled into a small bun at the back of her head, is thin too. The features of her face are pointed. The lines around her thin mouth are set, in anticipation of disapproval.

“’Ello,” Iris says again, and she steps into the hall without wiping her feet on the mat. She extends her hand and the woman has no choice but to peel the rubber glove off her right hand and offer it up; already, she can tell that Iris is a woman who doesn’t take no for an answer.

The woman—Madame Lalouette she admits, her voice heavy with housework—tells us that she will not speak English.

I presume she means she does not speak English?

I unpack my paltry store of rudimentary French. Iris—whose French should be as polished as Madame Lalouette’s furniture, having spent a year in France as an artist’s muse when she was twenty-five—mostly speaks English with a French accent.

Madame Lalouette’s store of French also appears to be paltry, given the terseness of the information she imparts.

Yes, she has vacancies.

No, all of her rooms are singles.

Strictly one person per room, she stresses.

No, she says curtly, when Iris asks about putting a camp bed in my dad’s room. Although I’m not sure she understood the question, in spite of Iris’s flamboyant miming technique.

Do we want the rooms or not? Madame Lalouette glares at me.

“We can put him in the room between each of ours,” Iris suggests. “Like a dad sandwich.” I nod. What else can we do? We are where we are, as my mother would say.

Madame Lalouette hands each of us an A4 sheet with lines and lines of questions to be answered. She calls it “registration.” Interrogation would be more apt. We are directed to three hard-backed chairs in the kitchen and given pens. The room is saved from the severity of Madame Lalouette’s ministrations by the view through the—smear-free—glass doors that look onto the back garden, which is just as abundant as the one at the front of the house.