Monsieur Laval resisted at first, so I borrowed Minna’s quiet, scary voice. ‘I’ve been invited to this country,’ I said. ‘I know people in authority.’ After a while it was agreed: Monsieur Laval would provide me with three cylinders of gas a month. He delivered them the following day, huffing them up the stairs one by one. After the third, he had to sit down. He looked at the bottle of wine on my table but accepted a glass of water. He said, ‘Ce n’est pas normal,’ and repeated it a few times. It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to the water or to the bargain we’d struck. In any case he was no longer merry, and I felt sorry about that. Minna was wrong: Monsieur Laval wasn’t a piece of shit but only an old trickster who’d been outsmarted. The people in authority would have happily trampled us both, and that counted for something, although it didn’t count enough.

Another thing Monsieur Laval brought me that day was a rubber mat. He assured me that there’d be no problem if I stood on it while showering. So I did and I also took very good care not to touch the tiles, and in that way I avoided being electrocuted in France.

At night, electric lanterns strung on chains lit Minna and Nick’s street. In that part of the centre, Enlightenment architects with formal, beautiful pictures in their minds had created mansions of biscuity stone. Once the town houses of aristocrats, they now served as offices for lawyers and medical specialists, or grandiose apartments for the rich. Their street doors, wide and tall enough to admit carriages, were kept shut. A pamphlet from the tourist office had informed me that staircases and courtyards classified as national treasures could be found behind those majestic doors. Sometimes one stood open, allowing a glimpse of an elaborate balustrade or a potted tree. I told myself gloomily that I’d never have access to more of France than its splendid façade.

Minna and Nick’s building wasn’t a mansion but it was solid and high, with long, shallow-stepped flights of stairs. Their apartment, which must once have been used for storage or servants, occupied a space off the landing between two floors. The front door, set flush with the wall of the landing, looked as if it gave onto a cupboard but opened to reveal a string of four rooms. That echo of Narnia lifted the apartment out of the ordinary and the everyday at once. But it cost no more than mine. When Minna handed me a glass of wine on my first visit, I found myself swallowing envy as well. I looked and looked at everything – at art postcards propped on a shelf, a portable sewing machine, a Gitanes ashtray moulded from blue tin. The ashtray was spotless. As we talked, Minna tapped her cigarette on the rim of a vase full of flowers.