The gray-haired man was beating his stick on the floor again.

“That is insupportable! Do it again but correct.”

The dancers stood in a row, the music stopped, but they still looked ethereal to me, like something from a dream.

“It’s disgusting, do you hear? Like sixteen cows stamping in a meadow.”

“They’re amazing,” I whispered to Sami, who shook his head.

“They’re from the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, so they’ve been rehearsing for something else all day. Now they’re tired. But, you know. They must eat. This will be our ball scene in La Bohème.”

“Don’t ballet dancers get paid well?” I said, truly surprised. As the music started again and they glided back onto the stage, I couldn’t help appreciate every perfect arm extension, every perfectly turned-out leg. I had seen dancers at the pantomime, but never anything like this, so exquisite. The girls were unutterably tiny, like little fragile birds, their delicate bones visible through the skin until I almost felt worried for them. I wondered, as they leaped up on their toes, if having flat toes might not give me some kind of an advantage.

As I watched them dance again and again, totally hypnotized, I gradually started to see the tiny incremental difference in rhythm that might make them less than perfect and made the choreographer burst into apoplectic shouting, but like cowed army recruits they never talked back or did anything other than meekly follow orders. Until finally the music swelled one last time, getting on for midnight, and even the porter, who had let us in and was now sweeping up the back of the room, paused to watch them twist, float, and fly in circles in the air in a movement that was glorious together, as if they weren’t sixteen separate people, but one spinning circle, with component parts. It struck me that it would also look perfect if seen from above.

Everyone felt it; there was harmony and joy in the room as, finally, they stepped and twirled faster and faster as the music got slower and slower, until the great wide skirts were almost a blur and the men were lifting the women in the air, then swapping them one after another until you couldn’t see who was who. It was ravishing. The gray-haired man let them play all the way through to the end, whereupon they finished, perfectly, almost silently, and in the next second, disappeared off the stage so quickly, it looked like a trick.

Although there were only six of us there, we clapped our hands off. The dancers appeared back onstage, pink, pleased, and clapped for each other too. Sami had been right; it was exactly what I needed to take my mind off it.

“Okay! Dinner!” shouted Sami, starting to round everyone up. “We shall go to the Criterion. They won’t mind.”

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly midnight, and I had a busy day ahead.

“I shan’t join you,” I said, suddenly distracted by the sight of one of the dancers taking off her shoes and revealing blood on her toes. She was so exceptionally beautiful, but her foot was disgusting; covered in weird lumps and bumps and bunions. The toes were in fact all misshapen and bunched together. I couldn’t take my eyes off them, till I realized she was aware of me staring at her and wrenched my face away.

“I know,” she said, smiling. “They are disgusting, non?”

“Mine too,” I said, suddenly feeling slightly excited to be in any way included in this otherworldly gang. “Look.”

I showed her. There was still blood on my ballet slippers.

“My God,” said the girl. “Ah well. Who wants to wear heels anyway, right?”

I smiled at her and she smiled back. She must have been about five foot one.

“Right,” I said.

I went up to Sami and kissed him.

“Good night,” I said. “Thank you.”

Sami kissed me back on the cheek. “Don’t worry, cherie. It will be all right.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The next few weeks, the queues for the shop definitely fell off a bit. I panicked. It was full August now, and Frédéric did try to persuade me that this was normal, that most of Paris emptied out and most of the businesses shut down—in fact, we would be closing ourselves for a fortnight at the end of the month. I had no idea what to do with myself. I supposed I should go home, see Mum and Dad. Or maybe invite them over, although they’d have to get a hotel, and the whole process would worry my mother to bits. If I could get to Thierry, who was being kept in the hospital for what seemed to me a very long time—the French, it seemed, did things very differently—then I could nail down the exact date for Claire to come over. It seemed to me, the sooner the better, although I know her periods of feeling better and worse ebbed and flowed. It was difficult to time them, exactly.

I called her late one night. “Hello?”

“Anna!”

I tried to gauge the tone of her voice. It sounded a little breathier, but not much.

“Have you been running?”

“Ha, yes, very amusing. How’s your accent coming along?”

I smiled secretly to myself. In fact, people had almost stopped addressing me in English, as they usually did—Parisians all seemed to speak wonderful English and take great delight in showing it off to you, thereby thoroughly dissing your French in the process. But the last couple of weeks, as I’d spent more and more time out the front of the shop, that had really started to calm down. I would never be an Alice, almost pass for French. Everything from my hair to my shoes screamed “rosbif.” But no longer did everyone scramble into English at the first sight of me; people now even forgot to slow down when they were talking to me. I took it as the greatest of compliments (even though it meant I had to ask people to repeat themselves all the time).

“Super bien, merci, madame,” I said cheekily. I could almost hear her smile down the telephone.

“I have written to Thierry,” she announced out of the blue. “He never gets my letters, but I have told him I am coming. With you of course. On the twentieth of August.”

“Perfect,” I said. He must be up and about by then.

“Can he…Well, I would like him to meet me at Calais.”

I thought privately that Alice would rather let him climb Mount Everest without oxygen, but I didn’t say it.

“Okay,” I said guardedly. “I mean, he’s had a major operation. Uhm…I’m just a bit worried about you and the bags and everything…I mean, I’m confident I can help you, but I’m not sure he could get to Calais.”