A chaperone. That’s what she needs. And what better choice than her friend Zozie?

‘But you’ve only just met me,’ I told her at last. ‘I could be anyone.’

She laughed. ‘No, you couldn’t.’

Shows what you know.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ve got a deal.’

Once more, I was in.

5

Tuesday, 4th December

SO THERE IT is. She’s moving in. How cool is that? – as Jean-Loup would say. She brought her stuff round yesterday – what there was of it, anyway. I’ve never seen anyone travel so light, except maybe for me and Maman, in the days when we were on the road. Two suitcases – one of shoes, the other filled with everything else. Ten minutes to unpack, and already it feels like she’s been here for ever.

Her room is still full of Madame Poussin’s old furniture: old-lady furniture, with a skinny armoire that smells of mothballs and the chest-of-drawers full of big scratchy blankets. The curtains are brown and cream, with a pattern of roses, and there’s a saggy bed with a horsehair bolster, and a speckled mirror that makes everyone look like they have the plague. An old lady’s room; but trust Zozie to make it cool again in no time at all.

I helped her unpack her things last night, and gave her one of the sandalwood sachets from my wardrobe to help get rid of the old-lady smell.

‘That’s all right,’ she said, smiling as she hung up her clothes in the old armoire. ‘I’ve brought some things to cheer the place up.’

‘What things?’

‘You’ll see.’

And we did. While Maman prepared dinner and I took Rosette to see the Nativity again, Zozie worked on the room upstairs. It didn’t take her more than an hour; but when I went up later to see, you wouldn’t have recognized the place. The old-lady brown-patterned curtains were gone, replaced by a couple of big loose squares of sari material, one red, one blue. She’d used another one (this one was purple, with silver thread) to cover the fluffy old-lady bedspread, and there was a double string of little coloured lights over the mantelpiece, where she’d lined up her shoes pair by pair, like ornaments above the fire.

There was a rag rug, too, and a lamp where she’d hung all her earrings like danglers from the bottom of the shade, and one of her hats was pinned to the wall where a picture used to be; and there was a Chinese silk dressing-gown hanging behind the door, and a row of jewelled butterflies, like the ones she sometimes wears in her hair, clipped all around the edges of the plaguey mirror.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I love this room.’

And there was a scent, too; something very sweet and churchy that reminded me somehow of Lansquenet.

‘That’s frankincense, Nanou,’ she said. ‘I always burn it in my rooms.’