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man, who inclined his headand smiled as though a private joke had been made.
    ‘
I am of no little beauty
,’ the cigarette-man read out loud, ‘
and have memorised the principal roles of the theatrical oeuvre.
’
    He sat back and folded his arms. My hair stuck damp to my forehead.
    ‘Shall I start?’ I asked, finally.
    The fat man put his fist to his throat and cleared it, a loud, amused
harrumph
: ‘Please do, Mademoiselle.’
    Halfway through my speech, the audition room had faded into a castle shuddering in high winds, its walls spongy with moss. Crows tottered on the battlements; ambitious servants whispered behind cupped hands. The curly-haired man was the one I had chosen to fix upon as my nerveless husband; he watched me back, but with an expression that I couldn’t read.
    I shuddered to a close.
    The curly-haired man had sat back away from the light so that his face was invisible. The thin man stubbed his cigarette indifferently into a saucer. The fat man’s face was stretched in a yawn. ‘No,’ he said. The material of his waistcoat strained as he sat forward to the table. ‘No, André,’ he said to the curly-haired man, ‘it won’t do. What was all this business with the hands?’
    He moved his arms in a grotesque windmill, and swivelled to stare at me crossly. ‘Don’t tell me you can see her playing the Absinthe Fairy.’
    None of the other men spoke.
    ‘Our old faces do us perfectly well,’ he said, drawing a line in ink on his notes – which could only be my name, being crossed off a list – ‘no need for any new ones.’
    I made a twitching movement towards the door, and nobody tried to stop me.
    The sky was speckled with early stars; when I reached the exit Ilaid my forehead on the stones of Pathé’s gatepost and thought of Mathilde’s thin smile.
    It was only vaguely that I heard the sound of purposeful steps coming towards me, and my eye caught the flicker of a coat-tail; then the curly-headed man was leaning against the wall next to me.
    His eyes were very fine: amused, smoky-grey, with pupils which extended far into the iris.
    He smiled widely. ‘I am André Durand and, as I think we have established, you wrote me a letter.’
    I tossed my head. Had he come to humiliate me further?
    ‘You may know we have just set up a department of seamstresses for our larger productions. We need a costumière for the
Fée Verte
film.’
    There was a twang in his accent –
kos-toom-iaire
– a tiny imperfection that gave him away: not French.
    ‘Steady work with prospects,’ he said. His gaze travelled brazenly up over my best dress as far as my throat. ‘Anyone can see you are interested in couture.’ (
Koo-toor
.)
    My one chance had slipped through my fingers, and now this man was offering me a job handling cloth. Was it mockery?
    But André gave me the gentlest of reassuring nods.

5. avril 1913
    ALL THAT NIGHT I thought about him; about the point of his chin and the way his voice sandpapered over its vowels.
    The very next morning, I appeared at the Pathé gates, a quivering vision in my best shawl, certain that André would be waiting for me, craning my neck to look for him as I was bumped along by the waiting crowd; listening in rising irritation to the creak of the gates and the complaining siren. He would appear out of nowhere, take my elbow and smile an apology:
Yesterday was a travesty. Chances like you don’t come up very often
; then usher me into my own dressing room, the pressure of his fingertips warm on my forearm.
    But when the crowd cleared, instead of André a lumpen young woman stood in the courtyard, her hands folded officiously over her apron. Where her flesh met her blue uniform it stuck in great damp patches; her waist was thickish, her feet flat. When she saw me she attempted a smile: a crooked thing, more than half dislike.
    ‘I’m Elodie, the head costumière. M. Durand sent me to show you where we work.’
    I returned the smile in the spirit it had been given.