L'Intaille de Fontainebleau

Three and a half weeks I've been here, and I still haven't found the right place for the broom. Last night I'd left it leaning against the back door, out of sheer tiredness. This morning, coming in, I nearly catch it in the chin. My great-aunt Léonie noted everything down in notebooks — I know that from my mother. The notebook with the layout is bound to be somewhere in the shop, between a 1962 Larousse and an old Guide Bleu to Spain. I'll come across it one day.

Seven twenty. The coffee's brewing, I raise the shutters, I set the 'Open' sign on the display table. The first bicycles go by on the rue des Sablons, unhurried, heading for the station. Every morning I tell myself I'll put a chair out front to watch them. Every morning, I go back to sit behind the counter.

The air, in June, at seven, has the quality of paper fresh off the press. Still warm from the fold. My former trade taught me to read a pavement like a stage, to count the café terraces filling up, to note which shop opens five minutes before the others. Here, I'm unlearning all that. I bring out the wicker basket of one-euro books for the lycée teenagers, I lay out a stack of contemporary poetry that no one will take but that I love to look at, I pour my first coffee into an oversized cup, the one that was tante Léonie's, its handle broken and glued back with epoxy. I'm a new bookseller. I'm beginning to understand that I'm not one yet.

At twenty past eight, a woman comes in, hesitates at the new-releases table, picks up a Vargas, turns it over, puts it back, leaves. That's the third Vargas put back this week. I still don't know whether to move the pile back or forward. Tante Léonie would have known. Tante Léonie died in February, leaving no instructions, which is rather like the little I know of her.

Camille turns up around eleven, in her scrubs, a little bag in hand and the look of someone who won't be staying long.

— Sénéchal, she says. I can't stay. Twenty minutes, watch in hand.

She sets the bag on the counter. Cherries. Mum's cherry tree is groaning with them, she adds. You'll be eating these all week.

— I'll eat them all on my own, Camille. Don't overestimate how long it'll take me — not sure I'll leave any for Hugo.

She laughs quickly, through her teeth. Camille is a nurse at the Fontainebleau hospital, and even on a break she looks as if she's holding up her whole ward single-handed. I pour two coffees without asking, because she won't ask. She hoists herself onto the stool.

— You're looking well, I must say. The fresh air suits you.

— That's the worry of the new owner. I sleep badly.

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

We smile at each other. She lowers her eyes to her cup, raises them. Lowers them again. Her spoon stirs two turns too many.

— Bruno's taken five night shifts this month.

— Five.

— Five, yes.

She says it without leaning on it, the way you'd announce the weather. I've known her since we were eight; I can see her coming even when she says nothing. She goes on, without looking at me:

— Léo turned seven last week. Bruno had promised to be there for the cake. He called at seven in the evening to say he was held up. Léo didn't say a word — that's what got to me. Last night, as he was falling asleep, he told me it didn't matter that his dad wasn't there for dinner. It doesn't matter. Can you imagine?

She stops, smiles to tell me she won't go on, and goes on.

— I was wondering whether it wouldn't be simpler just to… well.

The 'well' falls flat. She looks at the pile to the right of the till, changes the subject.

— Bought more stock?

— A lady from Massy cleared out her father's library. Six boxes. Not all worth keeping, but there are two or three gems.

— You still have the time, you, to look at things like that.

— It's my job, Camille.

— Your job — that's a recent thing.

She says it kindly, but she means it. She nods, drinks her too-hot coffee, sets the cup down.

— Right, I'm off. I'm on from two until ten tonight.

She gets up, takes five cherries for the road, kisses me quickly and leaves at a run.

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

The lady from Massy's pile takes up half the table. It's going to take me the week. I sort in the early afternoon, cold coffee within reach, a pencil in my bun. The rule is simple. On the left, the not-quite-new, to be reshelved at a second-hand price. In the middle, the heritage stock, which will join the collection. On the right, the unsellable, to be left out for free in the bin on the pavement.

At the third box, I pause. The coffee's cold; I reheat it; I move on to Léonie's personal collection, on the shelf along the wall. Two hundred volumes I've been cataloguing in batches of ten for three weeks. I pull out a bound Mérimée, medium format, green half-leather, the spine faded. The flyleaf is annotated in Léonie's black ink. No stamp, no pencilled price. The personal collection was never mixed in with the stock. I'm beginning to understand that.

I open it, by the reflex of an archivist looking for where it cracks. Page one hundred and four, a sheet folded in four. Thick laid paper, perhaps a decade old. Léonie's handwriting, hurried this time. Not the careful calligraphy of the dedications. A working note.

Carnelian, profile facing right, eighteen by fourteen millimetres, yellow-gold setting, barleycorn-grain studding, Greek signature, two characters, lower corner, fresh condition. Musée Napoléon Premier, case 12. On the same line, more cramped, as if added afterwards: to be checked, do not.

The 'do not' hangs there. No comma, no continuation. Léonie wrote a great deal, filed little, rarely finished anything, so they say. I never had a real conversation with her. Three or four family lunches, far apart, kind, brief. She would tell me, every time: Iris, you take after me, only more highly strung. And I'd laugh.

I read it again. Léonie saw the object in its case, noted it down with precision, wrote at the bottom that something had to be checked. And something else not to be done. Without saying what.

I fold the sheet back up. I put it in the counter drawer, under yesterday's envelopes. I'll tidy properly tonight. A note slipped inside a Mérimée isn't, in itself, a case.

Hugo arrives at a quarter to three, loaded down with a bag too big for his back. He crushes it under the counter, takes out a binder and sets it down in the coffee corner.

— Fair warning, I've got a public-law class at seven. If you want me to close up, I'll need to dash off by six.

— You dash off at six. I'll stay on a bit after.

He nods, takes a book from the middle pile, puts it back, takes another. He has a way of handling books as if he were giving them back to themselves. It's a detail it took me ten days to notice.

— Did you work on your oral last night?

— I fell asleep on my notes. If I flunk the oral, I'll tell the examiner it's your fault.

— Very good. I'll tell her you mix up Tocqueville and Talleyrand.

— Ha ha.

He laughs, genuinely, baring a back tooth.

— Did you get Madame Vilars this morning?

— Madame Vilars?

— The lady from the rue Royale; she comes on Tuesdays at ten, two Modianos, never the same one. She's got a Modiano to buy before the end of spring — that's what she told me last week.

— Didn't see her.

I make a note. Tuesdays, at ten, Madame Vilars, two Modianos. The Institut d'études politiques de Fontainebleau — Sciences Po, as the locals call it — is two steps away. It taught him to sort and classify; but he was already classifying, I think.

I like closing up after Hugo. Checking the shelves, straightening a row, putting away yesterday's envelopes with the folded note, which I slip deeper in, without thinking. At seven, I pull down the shutter, I turn the key. Outside, the air has turned mild. The rue des Sablons breathes, emptied of its last passers-by, like all the streets we've handed back to pedestrians and that the cars have forgotten.

It's at the end of the street, towards the square, that I recognise her. She comes out of a carriage entrance — one of those great apartment-block doors you never notice — and stops on the step to make a call. The coat first. A clean cut, tailored for somewhere else, a touch too dressed for a Fontainebleau street in June. Then the profile, half-turning, the phone held flat in her open palm, turned up to the sky, held by thumb, index and middle finger — that gesture no one makes but her.

Above the door, a discreet sign, the shared-workspace kind, offices by the hour or by the month. I know places like these. You don't walk out of one by chance. You rent a desk there, you go back, you settle in. My eye registers all of it out of old habit, before I've even decided to pay attention.

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

Tonight, I'm not going home by the square.

Wednesday, ten past seven. I slept no better than the night before, except that this time I know the reason, and I spend part of the night convincing myself that I don't.

The coat. It's the coat that did this to me. A clean cut, smart, just a touch too dressed up for a Fontainebleau street in June. But coats like that one come off the train by the dozen, ten to a train — it's even why people come here, to wear Paris in a setting that forgives them for it. And the phone held flat in the open palm, turned up to the sky, steadied by thumb, forefinger and middle finger, that gesture, I've seen it a thousand times. You end up believing a mannerism belongs to someone. It doesn't. Mannerisms get about, the way coats do.

I raise the blinds. I set the sign out on the display table. Last night I went home the other way, the rue des Bouchers and the rue de la Corne, the long way round that avoids the square. This morning I don't make the call. There is, in my old address book, a number I could dial to learn in three words whether she's in Paris this week or somewhere else. And then, to call would mean admitting I'd seen her… My thumb wavers above the phone. I put the phone away under the till, screen face-down against the wood.

There. It was a coat.

At nine o'clock, Monique pushes the door without letting go of it, one hand on the leaf of it, the other holding two cups.

Monique runs the café-tabac next door, the one whose sign creaks when there's an east wind. In three weeks I've worked out that her shop and mine share a wall, a gutter and every last piece of news on the rue des Sablons. She sets one cup on my counter and keeps the other.

— I've made you a long one. You, now, you take it short and strong, anyone can see that. Your aunt took it strong too, and there you are…

She doesn't finish the sentence, which, with Monique, is a turn of phrase. Léonie died of a heart that stopped one Sunday; the coffee had nothing to do with it, but Monique has a theory about everything and she likes it to be known.

— Your cousin from Bourgogne, she asks, did she end up moving?

My cousin from the Yonne. I mentioned her once, in passing, a fortnight ago. Monique files people into pigeonholes and never forgets a single one.

— She's still looking, I say.

— They look and they look. Take yesterday, two Parisians after a longère with beams, fibre and a phone signal. I told them, the beams we've got, the rest you bring yourselves.

She laughs to herself at her own line, pleased with it, then sweeps the shop with a glance, the pile on the table, the wicker basket.

— You ought to put the novels by the door, she says. People come in for a novel, they leave with a novel. Your aunt put the poetry at the front. Nobody comes in for poetry.

— I like it there, myself, on the way in.

— That's you all over, that is.

She nods at a rearrangement she only half approves of, then off she goes, cup in hand, and calls back from the doorway:

— A woman came by last night, after you'd closed. She looked at your window a good while. Not from round here. Have a good day, Iris.

The door closes again. Not from round here. In Fontainebleau that isn't a piece of information, it's half the clientele.

A woman in front of my window, one evening, after closing. Nothing to make a drama of. I tell myself as much, and at the same time I know I'm busy making one, out of a coat, a carriage entrance and a time of day.

Where I come from, no one ever asked a question without already knowing what they'd do with the answer. That was her speciality. The soft question, all innocence, the trap already sprung while you're still hunting for your words. If I ring this morning to track her down, she wins, from a distance, without knowing it. I'd rather believe in a coat.

I know the script, having lived it. One morning I was told, in well-chosen words, that my role was evolving, that it was an opportunity. I nodded, because I will never forget that smile while they move you, with a stroke of the pencil on the org chart, with a note scrawled on an Excel sheet printed off in a hurry. It took me three months to work out whose hand had held the pencil. And the pencil, perhaps, this morning, is making its way up a street in Fontainebleau, phone in hand, palm to the sky.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps I'm lending a passer-by the outline of the one person I don't want to see here. I pour myself more coffee. It's gone cold. So much for the coffee.

The woman arrives gone eleven. I know her before she speaks, by the way she holds the door open a second too long, the way you hesitate to step into a room where you've left something behind. It's the woman from Massy. Six boxes, her father's library, cleared out one Saturday. That day she'd taken the cash without counting the notes and left without taking off her sunglasses, in a hurry to be done with it. Today she has taken her glasses off, and she has all the time in the world.

— I was wondering, she says. My father's books. Do you still have them?

— Some of them. I've sorted through. The rest is over there.

I point to the table. She doesn't go over to it, she looks at the piles from a distance, the way you look at a photograph of someone you'd rather not see again up close.

— My father used to slip things inside his books, she says. Bits of paper. He'd jot things down, fold them, forget them. We found a shopping list in a Montaigne.

She says it looking not at me but at the wall behind me, where Léonie's shelf of personal stock runs along. Barely a second. But I've learned to recognise a sentence that seems to come at random and has in fact been weighed. The true detail, the shopping list, laid down there to make the rest ring true. And a gaze that aims over my shoulder while I'm being told about something else.

She smiles, and the smile doesn't hold.

— If I come across any sheets, I'll put them aside, I say. I do it for everyone.

— Have you found any?

The question comes quickly, sharper than anything she's said so far. I think of Léonie's note, folded in the drawer. But that sheet doesn't come from Massy. It comes from my great-aunt's personal stock, from a Mérimée that has never left this shop.

— Not in your boxes, I say. Not yet.

She looks at me a second too long, she does too.

— No, she says. No, of course not.

She lets a moment go by, then, in the same light tone:

— She noted everything down, your aunt. In the margins, on index cards. Did she leave you her notebooks?

— I'm still sorting, I say. Things turn up every day.

— Things always turn up.

She takes a few steps. Not towards the table where her father's books lie sleeping. Towards the wall, towards the shelf of personal stock, the one where the Mérimée had been sleeping. She stops in front of it, hands behind her back, touching nothing.

— It's a lovely thing, what your aunt kept there, she says.

I never said that shelf was set apart. Nothing on it carries a price, nothing carries a stamp, and you have to know the house to know it.

— You knew Léonie, I say.

It isn't a question. She turns, and for the first time she looks at me properly, for a long moment, the way you weigh up what the other person has already grasped.

— Everyone knew your aunt, she says. She was a bookseller.

She picks up her bag again and makes for the door.

— I'll come back for the sheets, she says. If there are any.

On the threshold, her back already turned, she adds:

— You look like her, your aunt. It's funny.

And she's outside before I can think of anything to say.

The door shuts with a small click, and only then do things fall into place, with the usual delay. She didn't look once at her father's boxes. She came for the wall, for Léonie's shelf. The rest was small talk, to keep up appearances, the way you do when you want to throw someone off the scent.

I open the ledger where I note down who sells, who deposits, who'll be back. On the line for the first day, in place of the name, I'd written Massy, followed by a blank, the way you leave a space for someone who's bound to turn up in the end. Three weeks the space has been waiting, and this morning I understand it isn't an oversight on my part. It's she who never gave it. You give a town so as not to give a name, the way you talk about a father and his books so as not to talk about a shelf and a dead woman.

The line stays blank where the name should be. I close the ledger. Tomorrow, either I go down to the square to see whether the coat comes by again, or I write a name on that line. Tonight I don't even know which of the two frightens me more.