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“Yeah. I think the receptionist, Gabrielle, is helping him.”
“Oh, I see.” I smiled back, as comprehension dawned.
“I’m supposed to whistle if I want anything.”
He had to whistle twice, in fact, before we heard a stirring from the room behind the bar, and a slightly muffled voice said: “Ho-kay, just a moment.”
Across from me, Paul struck a match to light another cigarette, his eyes faintly apologetic. “Chain-smoking, I know. My mother would have a fit. But I have to enjoy it while I can, before Simon gets back.”
I bit my lip, thinking. “Paul…”
“Yes?”
“You won’t tell anybody, will you, about my cousin’s coin?” If he’d asked “why not?” I would have had a devil of a time explaining. One couldn’t very well explain a feeling. And that was all it was—a feeling, an irrational suspicion that things were not quite what they seemed to be among my fellow guests. I’d felt it that first night at dinner, and again last night, here in the bar—that sense of something darker running underneath the surface, some troubled current that I couldn’t understand. It reminded me of the time, years ago now, when my father had taken us to London to see a play, only he’d read the tickets wrong and we arrived just as the second interval was end
ing. I’d sat through the final act in absolute confusion, with the motivating plot-lines of the characters long since laid out and set in motion, so that while I felt their conflict and the atmosphere of tension, I had no idea what was going on.
But whatever the cause of the atmosphere of tension here at the Hotel de France, it didn’t seem to have touched Paul Lazarus. “Of course I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “Not if you don’t want me to.”
“Not even Simon?”
“Not even Simon.”
“Thanks,” I told him. “You’re an angel.”
Smiling, he balanced his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and leaned back in his seat, arms folded complacently across his chest. “I do my best.”
“Aha!” Simon, coming round the bar door, skewered Paul with a smugly triumphant look. “I knew I’d catch you at it sooner or later, I just knew it!”
I couldn’t resist. I reached innocently across for the lit cigarette and raised it to my own lips, inhaling with perfect nonchalance. “Catch him at what?” I asked Simon.
His face fell, and even Paul looked faintly shocked, but I managed to hold the innocent expression long enough to convince Simon.
“Nothing,” he said. He glanced uncertainly at Paul. “I only thought…”
He wasn’t allowed to finish telling us what he thought. Behind him in the entrance hall the front door blew open and shut and I braced myself as the Whitakers came into the bar, shattering what little remained of the companionable peace that had settled between Paul and myself.
“Why, Emily!” Garland raised her eyebrows in a calculated arc and widened her eyes. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
I didn’t, actually. I had given it up three years ago, as part of my more responsible approach to life, and I was somewhat relieved to find it tasted awful, but I sent Garland an almost cheerful shrug. “Well, we all have to have one vice, don’t we? That’s what my father says.”
“Only one vice? Darling, how boring!” She sank gracefully onto the soft chair nearest the door and gave a tiny, self-satisfied sigh. “I won’t be able to get up again, now,” she pronounced. “We must have walked a hundred miles.”
“Just over the river and back, actually,” Jim Whitaker put in, as he joined us by the window, “but my wife’s not used to walking. And those shoes don’t help.”
Garland lifted one delicately arched foot, the better to examine her tight Italian pumps. “I know. I really must invest in a pair of sensible shoes like yours, Emily,” she said, sending me a smile designed to soften the cutting compliment. “You English always wear such practical clothes.”
Paul’s eyes laughed at me as he positioned the ashtray nearer me, closing his unfinished book and pushing it aside. He looked at Simon, curious. “And where did you take off to, this afternoon?”
“Oh, nowhere in particular,” Simon answered, swinging his lanky frame into the chair beside me. He whistled a snatch of something through his teeth and looked around. “Where’s Thierry, by the way? Isn’t he working?”
“He’s in the back, doing paperwork.” The lie came easily in Paul’s unhurried voice. “He knows we’re here, though. He’ll be out in a minute or two.”
“Thank God,” said Garland. “I could certainly use a drink after all that marching around. I prefer places we can drive the car to, you know. What about you, Emily?”
“Oh, I don’t mind walking.” I smiled politely, folding what was left of the cigarette into the ashtray with exquisite care. “I rather enjoy it, actually.”
Garland smiled. “Like Neil. Honestly, he makes me tired just watching him. Up and down those stairs all day, and he never even breathes hard. It’s disgusting. Jim used to be fit like that, didn’t you darling? When I first met you. The Army,” she sighed, “does wonderful things to a man’s body. Oh, there you are, Thierry, we were beginning to think you’d disappeared.”
