A shadow falls across my page, and I look up. At the window is a man. As short and fat as Madame Lalouette is tall and thin. His thick, curly hair is like a bird’s nest sitting on top of his head. He wears khaki shorts with many pockets—all bulging—and a bright yellow T-shirt that appears to have shrunk in the wash. In one hand, he holds a trowel and in the other, a bunch of mucky carrots. He bends to remove his Wellington boots before sliding open the door and poking his head in.

“’Ello,” says Iris.

“Bonjour,” he says.

Madame Lalouette sweeps around the room, collecting our forms and bending to pick up a crumb from the floor that I suspect has fallen from Monsieur Lalouette’s vigorous beard. She returns to the sink and resumes a furious scrubbing motion with the French equivalent of what looks like a Brillo pad.

The reason I know the short, rotund man is Monsieur Lalouette is because of the framed photograph on the wall. A line of five children, in height-descending order, and, on either end of this orderly line, two adults, one tall and thin, the other short and rotund, and while the photograph was taken as many as twenty years ago and the female adult appears to be smiling and the man is not quite as round as Monsieur Lalouette, I recognize them all the same.

Monsieur Lalouette, moving towards the sink, hands his wife the bunch of carrots which she receives without acknowledgement. She turns on the tap and washes off the muck. He leaves the room, not making a sound.

After the carrots have been dealt with, she turns to us. “Dinner is served at seven thirty,” she announces. “I will show you to the rooms.”

We follow her up the stairs. Along the wall are five framed photographs, a young person in each, in gown and mortarboard holding a scroll. “Vous devez être très fière de vos enfants,” I say, hopeful that it means, “You must be very proud of your children.”

She nods.

We continue up the stairs. The quiet is like a weight, heavy and insistent. I imagine the house when it was full of the spill and splendor of five children, racing up and down the stairs, slamming doors, arguing over the hot water, sliding down the bannister.

It fills me with a sudden sense of loneliness. A realization that I am a long way from home.

The landing is a long, narrow corridor with no natural light. The carpet has faded. I imagine its original pattern, embedded in the soles of the shoes of five children who ran its length every morning before school and every night before bed. Even through the gloom, the spotlessness persists. I can smell it.

We walk in single file down the passage, Madame Lalouette in front. She opens three doors in turn, each of which reveals three identical bedrooms, small and square, all overlooking the back garden. Whitewashed walls. A single bed in each, covered with stiff white bedspreads that could star in an ad for detergent. At the foot of each bed, an extra woolen blanket, folded. My mother used to do that too. Leave blankets at the end of our beds. “Just in case,” she always said. I remember the weight of it on my feet in bed. The comfort of it.