Madame Herault apologized and went to kneel to pick the pieces up, but Barclay was already down on his knees, his fingers trying to lift the tiny pieces without them splintering further.
And that was the scene which presented itself to Dominique when she entered the room. The crumbs collected, more or less, Barclay got to his feet and helped Madame Herault to hers. Dominique had changed into a knee-length skirt, showing off legs which, even in the dim light of the apartment, Barclay could see were tanned and smooth. She had a jacket slung over her shoulder and wore a crisp white blouse with a small gold cross on a chain around her neck.
“Drinking in the middle of the day?” she chided him. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do, Michael, remember?” Then she said something in a rush of French to her mother, and her mother replied in an even faster rush, her cadences soaring and plummeting. He finished his drink while the conversation went on, noticing Dominique glancing towards him from time to time. When he made to replace the empty glass on the tray, she signaled, with the slightest jerk of her head, that it was time to go. This was actually hard to achieve, since Madame Herault seemed to have a lot she still wanted to say to him, and there were hands to be shaken, cheeks to be kissed.
“Oui, Mama, oui,” Dominique kept saying, her exasperation increasing. Finally, they were at the front door, and with a final push from Dominique herself Barclay found himself on the stairs and starting his descent. But Madame Herault came to the stair head and continued to call down instructions to her daughter.
“Oui!” Dominique called back. “Bien sûr! D’accord. A ce soir, Mama! Ce soir!”
The street, the dull claustrophobic street, seemed suddenly a huge and necessary release, a refuge. Even Dominique sighed and fanned her face with her hand before getting back into the car. She didn’t say anything as she keyed the ignition, checked behind her, and started off along the street. But, edging out into the traffic at the end of the road, she remarked simply, “That was my mother.”
“Really?” replied Barclay.
His irony escaped her. “Yes, really.”
“She was charming, so like her daughter.”
She pursed her lips. “I should have warned you.”
“Yes, you bloody well should have.”
She laughed. “Tell me, Mr. Michael Barclay, what were you thinking?”
“When?”
“When I led you up the stairs.”
“I was wondering why the stairwell smelled like the London Underground.”
The answer surprised her. She glanced at him. “Really?” she asked.
He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking,” he said. And he kept his eyes on the windscreen, well away from her bare tanned legs as they worked brake, clutch and accelerator.
“Mama kissed you twice,” Dominique mused. “I think you made an impression of her.”
“An impression on her,” Barclay corrected.
“Well, anyway,” Dominique added with a smile, “you made an impression.” And she laughed, suddenly and brightly.
By a strange twist of fate, Jean-Claude Separt’s apartment-cum-studio was the sort of place Barclay had imagined Dominique’s apartment would be. It was obvious that cartoonists, even (especially?) left-wing cartoonists, could live very comfortably in France. The apartment took up the whole top story of a sandblasted block near Odéon.
“Très cher, très chic,” Dominique kept saying as they made their way up in the lift to the penthouse. They’d spoken about Separt on the way to Paris, talking about the garret he would inhabit, vermin-ridden and with unsold tracts and pamphlets piled to the ceiling. Preconceptions were there to be broken. Here was the second (only the second?) shattered preconception of the day.
Barclay knew his place. He was Dominique’s colleague, a police officer from England (but not London; nowhere as important as London) on an exchange program and spending the day with Dominique, who was herself a lowly police officer, a trainee in one of the administrative departments. They were here to interview Monsieur Separt regarding the theft of his motor vehicle, for a scheme called, as far as Barclay could work it out, the Vehicle Repatriation Register Survey. Well, something like that. Dominique had prepared some questions and had written them down on a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. She looked the part, he decided. Her clean, efficient clothes were just a bit too clean and efficient — the sort of outfit a trainee would wear when wanting to impress with the notion that they wouldn’t stay a trainee forever. And she’d got rid of her lipstick, so that her face was a little plainer. It was perfect.
So was Separt’s apartment. He was fat and graying with cropped hair and a grizzled beard. He wore faded denims, baggy at the knees and ankles, but tight at the stomach. He wore a short-sleeved striped shirt, and his eyes glinted from behind thick-lensed glasses. A strong yellow-papered cigarette either hung from his mouth or else from his fingers. And he lit a new cigarette with the dying embers of each old one.
Having ushered them in, Separt flapped back to his working desk. “I won’t be a second,” he said. “Just the finishing touches to a face...”
The bulk of the apartment was taken up by a single, huge thick-carpeted room. At one end stood a series of architect’s tables over which hung adjustable lamps. Here, Separt worked on his cartoons. On shelves behind him along the walls were various tools, old comic books, magazines, disparate newspaper cuttings. Pinned to the walls were photographs of politicians, some of them subtly and tellingly altered by the cartoonist. Barclay laughed at one of his country’s own Prime Minister, showing the premier emerging from a bowl of soup. Written at the bottom was “Prime Minestrone.”
Separt seemed inordinately pleased at Barclay’s response. He chuckled and went back to inking some wild hair on his latest caricature.
There was a computer close by, which Barclay studied, too. He thought maybe it would be a Paintbox, one of those extraordinary machines used by some artists and graphic designers. But it was just a plain old personal computer.
At the other end of the room, Dominique had already settled on the extremely long sofa. Empty wine bottles and beer bottles were strewn around the floor, and ashtrays brimmed with cigarette ends and the roaches from several joints. Separt, who had known from their intercom conversation that two police officers were on their way up, didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. Two walls of the room were made up of windows, one side opening onto a small rooftop patio. The view of the city was breathtaking.
“How can he work with a view like that in front of him?” Barclay marveled. Dominique translated the question, and Separt, who had thrown down his pen with a flourish, beamed again before saying something.
“He says,” Dominique replied, “that he no longer sees the view. It is something for visitors, that’s all.” Separt and Barclay shared a smile, and Separt motioned for his English guest to sit on the sofa beside Dominique. Barclay did so, and Separt, ignoring the spare chair, flopped onto the floor in front of his visitors, resting with legs out, one foot over the other, hands stretched behind him so he sat up. He had an impish look, as though every moment of his life was both revelation and opportunity for humor. But Barclay noticed that Dominique pressed her knees together and kept them like that, and he wondered if there were some more sordid reason for Separt’s choice of seat...
His French was coming on fast, and he understood most of the dialogue which followed.
“Your car was stolen, monsieur,” Dominique began, her pen held above the clipboard.