Odette

On Sundays I have lunch at my grandmother's. It's a tradition that has survived everything: my sulky teenage years, my student years in Brussels, my six years with Thomas, who felt that Odette “spoke to him like a pupil who hadn't practised his scales”. He was right. It is, I believe, the only thing Odette and Thomas ever agreed on.

Odette Marchal is eighty-four, and for sixty years she has lived in the same narrow house on rue des Brasseurs in Namur, a stone's throw from the Sambre, a house so thin it looks as though it's standing sideways to let the others past. There are three floors, a staircase where every step creaks on a different note, doilies on every piece of furniture and, in the ground-floor sitting room, the piano.