Now I remembered not just her but the whole situation. I had gone to Paris with a burning ambition to become a writer. I had sent a letter to my father, asking him to buy a typewriter and send it to me. I promised I would earn enough money through my writing to be able to pay him back. I didn’t think for a moment that he would actually do it, but one day I was summoned to the French customs office. And it was indeed the woman sitting opposite me who had allowed me to take away the pale blue typewriter in its black case without paying the import duty.
‘How can you possibly remember that?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know. I just saw you and I knew exactly who you were. You pleaded with me; you were young and poor. Was it Ireland you came from?’
‘Sweden.’
‘How did things turn out for you? Did you become a writer?’
‘I became a doctor.’
‘And what happened to the typewriter?’
‘I sold it a few years later when I ran out of money.’
She nodded and got to her feet.
‘Sometimes people do meet again,’ she said. ‘I’m glad I inherited my mother’s ability to recognise faces.’
She smiled and went back to her table. I was astounded. She didn’t seem to be telling her husband what had transpired.
I left the bistro; my legs were no longer aching, my footsteps felt light. For a while I was an old man allowing myself to forget about my burned-out house.
The club was exactly where I thought it was. I paid and went in. It was still early. My memories from all those years ago involved going down the stairs to a cellar bar late at night; now it was only eleven o’clock. The staircase and the cellar bar were the same, but when I reached the bottom step I realised I should have taken a closer look at the poster outside to see what kind of music was on tonight. The instruments and amplifiers arranged on the stage in the far corner told me it wasn’t going to be either modern or trad jazz. When I glanced around in the semi-darkness I could see that a reggae band was taking a break; there were dreadlocks and brightly coloured Rasta hats everywhere. However, there were plenty of older men and women with greying dreads sitting at the tables; I wasn’t the only person of my age.
I went to the bar and ordered a glass of Calvados. When the music burst into life behind me, I felt a wave of warmth flood my body.
I stayed by the bar and carried on drinking. The compact dance floor was soon packed; everyone seemed to be dancing with everyone else. Small, almost imperceptible movements of the legs and hips. The gentle sway made me think of the smooth swell of the sea.
A woman wearing a colourful turban was standing next to me at the bar. I asked if she would like to dance; I was astonished at my own courage. She said yes. We shuffled onto the floor. I learned the basics of dancing when I was at school, but on the few occasions when I danced with Harriet I was embarrassed by my ineptitude. Now, even though the floor was so crowded, I felt at more of a loss than ever. My partner noticed at once; I was moving as if I had hooves. Her disappointment was obvious; she looked at me as if I had deceived her, then walked away and left me there. Total humiliation.
I went up the stairs, followed by the sound of reggae music, and out onto the street.
I had almost reached my hotel when I took out my phone for some reason. It hadn’t rung, but I discovered that there was a text message from Louise: Where are you?
I tried to call her, but I still couldn’t get through.
‘I’m here,’ I said out loud to myself. ‘I’m actually here.’
Chapter 16
I hated the woman who had left me on the dance floor. With every step I took towards my hotel, I subjected her to increasingly vicious attacks in my head.
On a dark street just before I reached the Gare Montparnasse a drunken man came up to me and asked for cigarettes. I told him I hadn’t smoked for thirty years.
I was afraid he might attack me, but the tone of my voice clearly made him think again, and he staggered away.
I had difficulty sleeping that night. The incident in the club hurt; I was still embarrassed. I lay awake for a long time. I thought I could hear the guests in neighbouring rooms starting to make preparations to leave, and a cleaning trolley trundled past. I wondered if it was Rachel, starting work at this early hour.
It was five o’clock by the time I managed to doze off in my brown room. At eight my mobile rang; it was the embassy, a man who introduced himself as Olof Rutgersson. I wasn’t sure I understood his title.
‘We still haven’t managed to locate your daughter,’ he said.
He had a nasal voice; I’m sure it wasn’t his fault that it gave his tone an air of arrogance.
‘What happens now?’
‘We will definitely find her. After all, Paris is a city not a continent. She’s probably under local arrest, but that does mean the search will take time. I’ll be in touch as soon as I have something further to communicate on this matter.’
I wanted to protest at the way he expressed himself: ‘something further to communicate on this matter’?! But I said nothing; I needed him.
There were hardly any guests in the breakfast room, where the gigantic head of a kudu with large curly horns hung on the wall next to etchings of bridges over the Seine. Monsieur Pierre had once again been replaced by Madame Rosini, while a short Vietnamese girl took my order for coffee.
There was a bottle of sparkling wine in an ice bucket, and I couldn’t resist the temptation. My anger towards the woman who had abandoned me on the dance floor dissipated.
After breakfast I took a short walk to the railway station and bought a Swedish newspaper. When I got back to the hotel I sank down in a worn leather armchair in reception.
I liked the hotel. Lisa Modin had made a good choice. Before I started reading the paper, I asked Madame Rosini if they had received a booking for a Swedish lady. They hadn’t. She must have decided to stay somewhere else.
I leafed through the paper; it was half past ten. Rachel came down the stairs carrying a basket of cloths and cleaning products. She smiled before making a start on the glass door.
My phone rang; it was the man from the embassy.
‘Good news,’ he said. ‘We’ve found your daughter. She’s at a police station in Belleville.’
‘What on earth is she doing in that part of the city?’
‘I can’t answer that, but I’ll come and pick you up.’
Exactly one hour later a chauffeur-driven car with diplomatic plates pulled up outside the hotel. I got in beside Olof Rutgersson. He was aged about fifty and rather thin. His face was grey, colourless.
As we drove off I asked him to tell me what he knew.
‘I haven’t got much to report,’ he said. ‘We found her through our usual channels and the extraordinarily poor computer system used by the French police. That’s all I know. The important thing now is to assess her position so that we can work out how to proceed.’
‘You’re talking about my daughter as if she were a ship,’ I said.
‘It’s just words,’ Olof Rutgersson replied. ‘By the way, I suggest you let me do the talking when we arrive. I have diplomatic status. You don’t.’
He made a few calls; I noticed he had a small tattoo just above his wrist. It said MUM.
We were in a traffic jam, and Rutgersson was talking on his phone when I recognised the street, one of Haussmann’s wide boulevards.
I knew where I was. One day almost fifty years ago I had come up from the Metro exactly where our car was currently stuck in a queue of impatient drivers. It was during the period when I was working illegally, sitting in a little workshop in Jourdain repairing clarinets under the quiet guidance of Monsieur Simon. I don’t remember how I got the job, but it didn’t pay well. The workshop was in a backyard, and it was cramped and dirty. Apart from Monsieur Simon, who was a kind man, there was another young man working there who was fat, short-sighted and downright unpleasant. As soon as Monsieur Simon was out on some errand, he would start having a go at me, telling me that I was a burden because I had clumsy fingers and always arrived late in the mornings. I never argued with him, I simply despised his cowardice and wished he would drop dead among his saxophone valves.