She had caught sight of a girl in a red coat and pile of coffee grounds on the pavement. A bad-tempered exchange emanated from the Asian supermarket. A dog barked. The cold was neither kind nor exhilarating and grey, bad-tempered snow flurries threatened.

Exploring the quartier was to experience a jumble of impressions. It was only later, much later, these initial images assembled like a jigsaw to construct her personal landscape: the shutters, the noise of the dinky machines which cleaned the streets each morning, the ironwork on the older houses and, in her stone niche, a statue of the Virgin whose bovine eyes appeared to skewer passers-by.

She had been so certain that pessimism was a condition of life and the slightest setback tipped her thoughts out of the box in which she struggled to confine them. Not helped by her broken marriage, she was dogged by a sense of failure. By that she meant: the past was too big to cope with. Apparently, according to quantum physics, the atom does not follow one path in order to exit a maze. It goes down every path all at the same time, which was a fine description of what Laure was doing. Running down every path without knowing why, falling at every obstacle, finding her face in the mud.

It had taken her roughly thirty seconds to identify as interesting the flat-fronted, three-storey house at the further end of the street. A good proportion of its roof tiles were slipping from their moorings and the paintwork had bubbled and flaked. She watched the first few flakes of snow sift down over its roof while she absorbed its worn-at-the-edges presentation, the fact that it had obviously survived for a couple of hundred years, that it did not care a tinker’s cuss whether she, Laure, was a failure or not. Having absorbed that, the suggestion winged through her mind that the life inside the – nodoubt – moth-eaten rooms could be creative and serene.

Crucially, it was for sale.

She had no money. No expertise. Nothing except an idea that arrived as she gazed at the house from the opposite side of the street and clenched first her right foot then her left in an effort to drive circulation into her feet.

After arranging access to the house, she allowed herself plenty of time to walk through it. She examined its sash windows and tapped the floorboards, she trudged up the too-narrow staircase, poked her head into antiquated lavatories and ascended to the attics. She sniffed neglect, decay and trouble and winced at the reluctant squeal of a swollen door and the scatter of mice up above.

The atmosphere suggested past struggles to live and to thrive, some disastrous, some triumphant. She wished for no more turbulence in her life. None, ever. As she paced the freezing, despairing rooms, she asked herself: would it be better to avoid such a place?