I decided I would slip out of my apartment one night while the cook and the housekeeper and the mayor were all asleep. I would walk out of the town on the road I’d come in on and I would go to a different place – a quiet beach or a little chalet up in the mountains – somewhere I wouldn’t attract quite so much attention.

And I would have gone, I really would have. I even got as far as putting a few things in my wheeled suitcase, ready for my departure. But then the people sent me Precious and once they’d sent me Precious, I just couldn’t tear myself away.

Precious was the daughter of the cook and she arrived very early one September morning before the queues had begun to form outside. I knew at once that she had come for some important reason because she was shown up to my apartment, not in the clunky old service elevator at the back which her mother the cook and the housekeeper and all the other townspeople were made to use, but in the beautiful hand-operated Schindler elevator at the front with its fitted carpet and gilded paintwork and its twinkling chandelier.

When I opened my apartment door that morning there she was – a small, serious-looking girl with dark hair and a pale face wearing a floral cotton dress and holding a large black leather bag with a metal clasp, like an old-fashioned doctor’s. As soon as she saw me she blushed and bobbed a sort of curtsey and told me that she had come to polish my head.

Everyone, she explained, wanted it to be as bright and soft as possible and they would all be very pleased if I would allow it to be polished first thing every morning. She was very good at polishing, she said, blushing again, and had been specially chosen by the people for the job. She would come every morning and do it before the crowds came, if I was agreeable.

I looked at her.

I looked at her shy serious face, her dark eyes with their grave almost sad expression, at her small neat fingers on the stitched handle of her bag, and as I looked, I forgot the anxiety I’d begun to feel about my strange position in the town; I forgot the certainty I’d felt, just the night before, that it was time for me to get out of there; I forgot the half-packed suitcase lying open on the velvet armchair in the sitting room behind me, waiting for me to pick it up and wheel it out of the door.

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. Of course I was agreeable.

Precious’s visits became the highlight of my days.