"Et vous, monsieur, vous etes qui?" a woman's voice yelled at him above the hubbub.
Jonathan made out the queenly form of Madame Latulipe, the proprietress, standing behind the desk in a mauve turban and cake makeup. She had tilted her head back in order to quiz him and she was playing to her all-male audience.
"Jacques Beauregard," he replied.
"Comment, cheri?"
He had to repeat it above the din: "Beauregard," he called, unused to raising his voice. But somehow the name came easier to him than Linden.
"Pas d'bagage?"
"Pas de bagage."
"Alors, bon soir et amusez-vous Men, m'sieu," Madame Latulipe yelled back at him as she handed him his key. It occurred to Jonathan that she had mistaken him for a member of the surveyors' party, but he saw no need to enlighten her.
"Allez-vous manger avec nous a'soir, M'sieu Beauregard?" she called, waking to his good looks as he started up the stairs.
Jonathan thought not, thank you, madame. Time he got some sleep.
"But one cannot sleep on an empty stomach, M'sieu Beauregard!" Madame Latulipe protested flirtatiously, once more for the benefit of her raucous guests. "One must have energy to sleep if one is a man! N'est-ce pas, mes gars?"
Pausing at the half-landing, Jonathan bravely joined the laughter but insisted nonetheless that he must sleep.
"Bien, tant pis d'abord!" cried Madame Latulipe.
Neither his unscheduled arrival nor his unkempt appearance disturbed her. Unkempt is reassuring in Esperance, and to Madame Latulipe, the town's self-elected cultural arbiter, a sign of spirituality. He was farouche, but farouche in her book meant noble, and she had detected Art in his face. He was a sauvage distingue, her favourite kind of man. By his accent she had arbitrarily ruled him French. Or perhaps Belgian. She was not an expert; she took her holidays in Florida. All she knew was, when he spoke French she could understand him, but when she spoke back at him he looked as insecure as all Frenchmen looked when they heard what Madame Latulipe was convinced was the true, the uncorrupted version of their tongue.
Nevertheless, on the strength of these impulsive observations, Madame Latulipe made a pardonable error. She placed Jonathan, not on one of the floors convenient for receiving lady guests, but in her grenier, in one of four pretty attic rooms that she liked to hold in reserve for her fellow bohemians. And she gave no thought to the fact ― but then why should she? ― that her daughter, Yvonne, had made her temporary refuge two doors down.
* * *
For four days Jonathan remained in the hotel without attracting more than his share of Madame Latulipe's consuming interest in her male guests.
"But you have deserted your group!" she cried at him, in mock alarm, when he appeared next morning late and alone for breakfast. "You are not a surveyor anymore? You have resigned? You wish to become a poet perhaps? In Esperance we write many poems."
Seeing him return in the evening, she asked him whether he had composed an elegy today, or painted a masterpiece. She suggested he take dinner, but he again declined.
"You have eaten somewhere else, m'sieu?" she demanded in mock accusation.
He smiled and shook his head.
"Tant pis d'abord," she said, which was her habitual reply to almost everything.
Otherwise he was room 306 to her, no trouble. It was not until Thursday, when he asked her for a job, that she subjected him to closer scrutiny. "What kind of job, man gars?" she enquired. "You wish to sing for us in the disco perhaps? You play the violin?"
But she was already on the alert. She caught his glance and renewed her impression of a man separate from the many. Perhaps too separate. She examined his shirt and decided it was the one he had been wearing when he arrived. Another prospector has gambled his last dollar, she thought. At least we haven't been paying for his meals.
"Any job," he replied.
"But there are many jobs in Esperance, Jacques." Madame Latulipe objected.
"I've tried them," said Jonathan, looking back on three days of Gallic shrugs or worse. "I tried the restaurants, the hotels, the boatyard and the lake marinas. I tried four mines, two logging companies, the cement works, two gas stations and the paper mill. They didn't like me either."
"But why not? You are very beautiful, very sensitive. Why do they not like you, Jacques?"
"They want papers. My social insurance number. Proof of Canadian citizenship. Proof I'm a landed immigrant."
"And you don't have these? None? You are too aesthetic?"
"My passport's with the immigration authorities in Ottawa. It's being processed. They wouldn't believe me. I'm Swiss," he added, as if that explained their incredulity.
But by then Madame Latulipe had pushed the button for her husband.
Andre Latulipe had been born not Latulipe but Kviatkovski. It was only when his wife inherited the hotel from her father that he had consented to change his name to hers for the sake of perpetuating a branch of the Esperance nobility. He was a first-generation immigrant with a cherub's face and a broad, blank forehead and a mane of premature white hair. He was small and stocky and as fidgety as men become at fifty when they have worked themselves nearly to death and start to wonder why. As a child, Andrzej Kviatkovski had been hidden in cellars and smuggled over snowy mountain passes at dead of night. He had been held and questioned and released. He knew what it was to stand in front of uniforms and pray. He glanced at Jonathan's room bill and was impressed, as his wife had been, that it comprised no extra charges. A swindler would have used the telephone, signed tabs at the bar and in the restaurant. The Latulipes had had a few swindlers in their day, and that was what they did.
The bill still in his hand, Latulipe looked Jonathan slowly up and down, much as his wife had done before him, but with insight: at his wanderer's brown boots, scuffed but mysteriously clean; at his hands, small and workmanlike, held respectfully to his sides; at his trim stance and harrowed features and the spark of desperation in the eyes. And Monsieur Latulipe was moved to kinship by the sight of a man fighting for a toehold in a better world.
"What can you do?" he asked.
"Cook," said Jonathan.
He had joined the family. And Yvonne.
* * *
She knew him immediately: yes. It was as if, through the agency of her appalling mother, signals that might have taken months to exchange were transmitted and received in a second.
"This is Jacques, our very latest secret," said Madame Latulipe, not bothering to knock but flinging open an attic bedroom door not ten yards along the passage from his own.
And you are Yvonne, he thought, with a mysterious shedding of shame.
A desk stood at the centre of the floor. A wooden reading lamp lit one side of her face. She was typing, and when she knew it was her mother she continued typing to the end, so that Jonathan had to endure the tension of looking at a mop of untidy fair hair until she chose to lift her head. A single bed was shoved along the wall. Stacked baskets of laundered bed sheets took up the remaining space. There was order, but there were no keepsakes and no photographs. Just a sponge bag by the handbasin, and on the bed a lion with a zipper down its tummy for her nightdress. For a sickening moment it reminded Jonathan of Sophie's slaughtered Pekingese. I killed the dog too, he thought.