11

Saturday, 8th December

WELL, IT’S A start. The balance is shifting. Nanou may not see it, but I do. Little things, benign at first, that will make her mine in no time at all.

She stayed in the shop for most of today, playing with Rosette, helping out – and waiting for another chance to use those new peg-dolls of hers. She found one in Madame Luzeron, who came in mid-morning – though it wasn’t her day – with her fluffy little dog in tow.

‘Back so soon?’ I smiled at her. ‘We must be doing something right.’

I saw that her face looked rather drawn; and she was wearing her cemetery coat, which meant that she must have called there again. Perhaps a special day, I thought – a birthday or an anniversary – in any case, she looked tired and vaguely brittle, and her gloved hands were shaking with cold.

‘Sit down,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll bring you some chocolate.’

Madame hesitated.

‘I shouldn’t,’ she said.

Anouk gave me a furtive glance, and I saw her pull out Madame’s peg-doll, marked with the seductive sign of Lady Blood Moon. A plug of modelling clay serves as a base, and in a second Madame Luzeron – or at least, her double – stands inside the Advent house, looking out on to the lake with its skaters and its chocolate ducks.

For a moment she seemed not to notice; and then her eye was strangely drawn – perhaps to the child with her bright, rosy face; perhaps to the object in the window, now glowing with a curious light.

Her disapproving mouth softened a little.

‘You know, I had a dolls’ house when I was a girl,’ she said, peering into the display window.

‘Really?’ I said, smiling at Anouk. It’s rare that Madame volunteers information.

Madame Luzeron sipped her chocolate. ‘Yes. It was my grandmother’s, and although it was supposed to come to me when she died, I was never allowed to play with it.’

‘Why not?’ said Anouk, fixing the little cotton-wool dog more firmly to the peg-doll’s dress.

‘Oh, it was too valuable – an antiquarian once offered me a hundred thousand francs for it – and besides, it was an heirloom. Not a toy.’

‘So you never got to play with it. That’s not fair,’ said Anouk, now carefully placing a green sugar mouse under a tissue-paper tree.

‘Well, I was young,’ said Madame Luzeron. ‘I might have damaged it or—’

She stopped. I looked up, and saw her frozen.

‘What a funny thing,’ she said. ‘I haven’t thought of it in years. And when Robert wanted to play with it—’

She put down her cup with a sudden brisk mechanical movement.

‘It wasn’t fair, was it?’ she said.

‘Are you all right, Madame?’ I said. Her thin face was the colour of icing-sugar, sculpted into sharp little wrinkles like the frosting on a cake.