‘You said that you’d replace it when it ran out.’

‘It should last a month.’

‘It hasn’t.’

‘Buy another one.’

‘Where? And how would I get it to my apartment? In any case, we agreed that you —’

He made one of those expressive French noises like a verbal shrug. Then he hung up.

When striding around tired me out, I’d go to a down-at-heel cafe for warmth. It was the kind of place where old men hunched over drinks at the zinc-topped bar. Chronic little miseries seeped from the clientele – not operatic desolation, but the everyday erosion worked by creeping age and never quite enough money. A woman with receding eyes was always there, sitting in a corner with the furry croissant of a dog clutched to her heart. It was in that cafe that I learned to drink tea without milk. Milk came in a single-serve stainless-steel jug, whereas hot water was unlimited and free. The toilet à la turque was grim, but for the price of a cup of tea I was left alone for hours to draw up lesson plans, write homesick letters and read. There was never a flick-flick – the lightning, down-and-up glance with which the French took in every detail of someone’s appearance from shoes to hair. In the upmarket cafes at L’Oeuf, the flick-flick assessed, classified and dismissed me in the time it took to blink.

As October lengthened, the cold occupied my apartment like a malign force. The walls were icy – centuries of winter were trapped in the stone. To pass the long evenings, I’d get into bed, fully dressed, and read. The cold pressed into the sockets of my eyes and made them ache. My magnificent sheets seemed permanently damp. I’d go to sleep in my sleeping-bag and wake with my breath misting the air. When I thought of the weather that lay ahead, I knew I’d have to move. But where would I go? No one vacated apartments with winter coming on. Madame Bisset’s centrally heated room hung in my mind; it would be like living inside a mitten. Every time I brushed my teeth at the sink where I washed my dishes – a dual functionality that disgusted me – I was confronted with Ronis’s naked woman and her open window. It was a photograph of summer. Why hadn’t I seen that?

A couple called Berty lived on the ground floor of my building. Whenever I passed their door I’d hear them laughing. If I ran into them in the lobby, they’d greet me brightly, crying Bonjour! with brilliant smiles as they hurried outside or shut their door in my face. The apartment below mine was unoccupied, awaiting the ministrations of Monsieur Laval. The tenant on the floor below that lived by himself. Our letterboxes supplied his name, too: Rinaldi.