Fontainebleau intaglio

I've been here three and a half weeks and I still haven't found the right place for the broom. Last night I left it against the back door, a gesture of tiredness. This morning, when I came in, I nearly hit myself on the chin. My great-aunt Léonie wrote everything down in notebooks, I know from my mother. The notebook for tidying up must be lying around the shop, between a 1962 Larousse and an old Spanish Blue Guide. I'll find it again one day.

Seven twenty. The coffee goes on, I raise the curtains and put the “Open” sign on the display table. The first bikes pass by on rue des Sablons, unhurriedly, heading for the station. Every morning I say to myself that I'm going to sit outside and watch them. Every morning, I return to sit behind the counter.

The air, in June, at seven o'clock, has the quality of paper coming off the press. The folds are still warm. My old job taught me to see a pavement as a stage, to count the terraces that fill up, to note which shops open five minutes before the others. Here, I'm unlearning. I take out the wicker basket of one-euro books for the teenagers at school, I lay out a pile of contemporary poetry that no one will take but that I love to look at, I pour my first coffee into a cup that's too big, Aunt Léonie's cup, with a broken handle that's been glued back together with epoxy. I'm a new bookseller. I'm beginning to realise that I'm not one yet.

At twenty past eight, a woman enters, hesitates in front of the table of new titles, picks up a Vargas, turns it over, puts it down again and comes out again. It's the third Vargas to be put back this week. I still don't know whether to move the pile back or forward. Aunt Léonie would have known. Aunt Léonie died in February, without leaving any instructions, which sounds like everything I know about her.

Camille arrived at around eleven o'clock, wearing a smock, a bag in her hand and looking like she wasn't going to stop for long.

- Sénéchal," she said. I can't stay. Twenty minutes, watch in hand.

She puts the bag on the counter. Cherries. Mum's cherry tree is falling over," she adds. You'll have enough for a week.

- I'm going to eat them on my own, Camille. Don't overestimate the time it'll take me, I'm not sure I'll leave any for Hugo.

She laughs quickly, with the tip of her teeth. Camille is a nurse at Fontainebleau hospital, and even when she's on a break, she looks as if she's running the whole department by herself. I pour two coffees without asking, because she won't ask. She pulls herself up onto the stool.

- You're looking well, aren't you? The fresh air suits you.

- The new boss is worried. I don't sleep well.

- You slept badly in Paris too. At least it's nice here when you wake up.

We smile at each other. She lowers her eyes to her cup, raises them again. She looks down again. Her spoon spins twice too much.

- Bruno has taken on five night shifts this month.

- Five.

- Five, yes.

She says it without saying anything, like a weather forecast. I've known her since the third grade and I can see where she's going even when she doesn't say anything. She starts again, without looking at me:

- Léo turned seven last week. Bruno had promised to be there for the cake. He called at nine o'clock to say he'd been detained. Léo didn't say anything, and that's what killed me. Last night, as he was falling asleep, he told me it didn't matter that his dad wasn't here for dinner. It doesn't matter. Can you imagine that?

She stops, smiles to tell me she's not going to go on, and continues.

- I was wondering if it wouldn't be easier to... well.

The “voucher” falls flat. She looks at the pile on the right of the till and changes the subject.

- Did you buy it back?

- A woman from Massy has cleared out her father's library. Six boxes. Not all to keep, but there are two or three nuggets.

- You still have time to look at these things.

- It's my job, Camille.

- Your job is a recent one.

She says it nicely, but she means what she says. She nods, drinks her coffee, which is too hot, and puts the cup back down.

- Right, I'm off. I'm from fourteen to twenty-two this evening.

She gets up, grabs five cherries for the road, gives me a quick kiss and runs off.

I rinse both cups. At the bottom of hers, the sugar has settled in a layer. Camille had sweetened her coffee this morning. She never sugared her coffee.

The pile of the Massy lady takes up half the table. It's going to take me all week. I'm sorting in the early afternoon, cold coffee in hand, pencil in bun. The rule is simple. On the left, new items in disguise, to be put back on the shelves at second-hand prices. In the centre, heritage items, to be added to the stock. On the right, unsaleable items, to be left self-service in the bin on the pavement.

At the third box, I pause. The coffee is cold, so I heat it up and move on to Léonie's personal collection, on the shelf on the wall. Two hundred volumes that I've been cataloguing in packs of ten for the last three weeks. I pull out a hardback Mérimée, medium format, green half-chagrin, faded spine. The title page is annotated in black ink by Léonie. No stamp, no price in pencil. The personal collection did not mix with the stock. I'm beginning to understand that.

I open it, reflexively, like an archivist looking to see where the cracks are. Page one hundred and four, a sheet folded in four. Thick paper, laid paper, maybe ten years old. Léonie's handwriting, hasty this time. Not the careful calligraphy of a dedication. A note from work.

Carnelian, profile to the dexter, eighteen by fourteen millimetres, yellow gold setting with barley grain piqué, Greek signature, two characters, lower corners, fresh condition. Musée Napoléon Premier, vitrine 12. On the same line, tighter, as if added after the fact: to be checked, not.

The “ne pas” remains suspended. No comma, no continuation. Léonie wrote a lot, filed little, rarely finished, it seems. I never had an ongoing conversation with her. Three or four family lunches, spaced out, kind, brief. Each time she'd say to me: Iris, you look like me, only tenser. And I'd laugh.

I reread. Léonie saw the object in her window, she noted it precisely, she wrote at the bottom that something had to be checked. And not to do anything else. Without saying what.

I fold up the sheet. I put it in the counter drawer, under the envelopes from the day before. I'll tidy it up better this evening. A note slipped into a Mérimée is no big deal in itself.

Hugo arrived at a quarter to three, carrying a bag that was too big for his back. He crushed it under the counter, took out a binder and placed it in the coffee corner.

- I'm warning you, I've got a public law class at nine. If you want me to close, I'll have to leave at six.

- You go at eighteen. I'll stay a bit behind.

He nods, picks up a book from the centre stack, puts it down again and picks up another. He has a way of touching the books as if he were returning them to themselves. It's a detail that took me ten days to see.

- Did you work on your oral last night?

- I slept on my flash cards. If I fail the oral, I'll tell the teacher it's your fault.

- All right, then. I'll tell the teacher that you're confusing Tocqueville with Talleyrand.

- Ha ha.

He laughs, sincerely, and reveals a back tooth.

- Did you talk to Madame Vilars this morning?

- Ms Vilars?

- The lady in the rue Royale, she comes every Tuesday at ten o'clock, two Modiano, never the same one. She has a Modiano to buy before the end of spring, that's what she told me last week.

- Not seen.

I'll make a note. Tuesday, ten o'clock, Madame Vilars, two Modiano. The Fontainebleau Institute of Political Studies, or Sciences Po as the locals call it, is a stone's throw away. He taught her how to file, but I think he was already filing.

I like to close behind Hugo. Checking the shelves, straightening a shelf, putting away the envelopes from the day before with the folded note, which I slip in deeper, without thinking. At nine o'clock, I draw the curtain and turn the key. Outside, the air has warmed. Rue des Sablons is breathing, emptied of its last passers-by, like all the streets that have been given back to pedestrians and forgotten by cars.

It's at the end of the street, towards the square, that I recognise her. She comes out of a porte cochère, one of those big building doors you never notice, and stops on the doorstep to make a phone call. The coat first. A clean cut, made for elsewhere, a little too dressy for a Fontainebleau street in June. Then the profile, half-turned, the phone flat in her open palm, turned skywards, held with thumb, forefinger and middle finger, a gesture that no one does but her.

Above the door, a sober sign, like a shared workspace, offices by the hour or by the month. I know these places. You don't drop in by chance. You rent a space, you come back, you move in. My eye picks it all up by an old reflex from my old job, even before I decided to pay attention.

I stop. She doesn't see me. She puts her phone away and turns the corner into Rue de la Paroisse.

Tonight, I'm not going back through the square.