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could manage the housework all by himself.
    ‘I think so. It’s always neat as a pin. And he’s always asking me to keep the dust down.’
    ‘But does he change the babies’ nappies often enough?’ asked Irma Nüssbaum, the mother of two adult sons.
    ‘And are their clothes clean?’ asked Helga Barnard, who had raised three daughters.
    ‘Does he test the milk first, to check if it isn’t too hot?’ asked Odette Surmont, grandmother of six.
    ‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you,’ said Florent; ‘that isn’t a man’s business, is it?’
    ‘See what we mean? It can’t be easy for him without having a woman around. The doctor really needs someone to help him,’ they decided.
    One after another, the ladies swiftly made good on their words. Feigned spells of the migraine led to inquiries about whether the doctor needed a housekeeper or a babysitter; he thanked each and every one of them for their kind offer, maintaining that he could manage by himself. He did, however, accept any tips they offered with evident interest - what to do about teething pains, for example.
    ‘Have them chew on a crust of frozen bread, Doctor,’ Odette Surmont advised him, while Helga Barnard swore that in the case of her two daughters raw onion rings had done the trick.
    So it was with some consternation that Irma Nüssbaum, Helga Barnard and Odette Surmont found out from Florent Keuning a few days later that Charlotte Maenhout was going to be looking after the doctor’s brood. The three women, on porch-sweeping patrol late that afternoon, had gathered at the corner of Napoleonstrasse and Kirchstrasse, and there they ambushed the handyman, who had just finished his last day of work at the doctor’s and was on his way to spend his nice big tip at the Café Terminus. The news was dire enough to stop their brooms in mid-air, whereas the ladies themselves exploded in indignation. It was true that, as a former schoolteacher, Frau Maenhout had some experience educating children - she had taught the reception class at the Gemmerich schoolhouse for many years - but she had never had any children of her own, to say nothing of a husband. So how could she be expected to know how to look after a bunch of little tykes?
    Helga asked the handyman if he was absolutely sure, whereupon he told the ladies how that morning, as he had been giving one of the doors a final coat of paint, he had peeked through the crack and seen Dr Hoppe showing Frau Maenhout into the kitchen, where the little boys were seated as usual like rag dolls in their rocking chairs.
    ‘Was it really Charlotte Maenhout?’ Irma promptly broke in. ‘From Aachenerstrasse?’
    Florent nodded confidently, and said he’d recognise Charlotte Maenhout from a kilometre away, which nobody could refute, since there was no other woman in the village with as hefty a build as the sixty-eight-year-old retired schoolteacher who had come to live in Wolfheim three years ago. She was tall - one metre eighty-four - and her broad back was hunched from years of hovering over her young pupils, guiding their inexperienced hands in the art of writing. Her bowed back caused her neck to sink down between her knobbly shoulders, and in order to lengthen it, she always wore her long silver hair in a bun at the nape, or twisted it up with a wooden hairpin. Another conspicuous thing about her was her generous bosom, or, as Florent described it, her ‘stack of wood at the front door’.
    ‘What did she say? What did the doctor say?’ Helga wanted to know.
    ‘First the doctor introduced his children to her,’ the handyman answered, pinching his nose to mimic Dr Hoppe’s voice: ‘This is Raphael. He has the green bracelet. That is Gabriel, with the yellow bracelet. And the one with the blue bracelet is Michael.’
    Florent went on in a normal voice: ‘They have these little plastic bracelets around their wrists. Like newborns in hospital, you know? And then the doctor turned to his sons and told them that Frau