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“Would you care to join us?” he ventured. “There’s plenty of room.” At my hesitation his smile grew charming. “We’re quite well-behaved, I promise. It’s only that we’ve been traveling together for four months, now, and we’re tired of hearing each other talk. Please,” he urged me, indicating the vacant seat across from him. “Let us buy you a drink.”
His companion sent me a vague but pleasant smile as I took the offered seat, reminding me a little of a chap I’d known at school—he, too, had worn tie-dyed shirts and let his hair grow straggling to his shoulders, and he’d carried with him something of the same distracted aura of a young man who has chosen to remain young, like the hippies of the sixties. The dark-haired lad, by contrast, was cleaner-cut, conservative, and better-schooled in manners. He raised his hand to get the bartender’s attention. “You’re new at the hotel, aren’t you?” he asked me. “I haven’t seen you before.”
I nodded, trying without success to place his accent. Not Provençal, I thought—it was lighter than that. Not Breton, either, but something decidedly rustic, rather loose about the vowel sounds…
“I’ve only just arrived,” I said, “this afternoon. From England.”
He lowered his hand and grinned. “You’re English?” he said, in my own language. “I should have known. Every time I try to start up a conversation with someone—”
“Good heavens,” I cut him off, astonished. “You’re American.”
The long-haired youth winced visibly. “Canadian, actually,” he corrected me. It was the sort of stubborn, pained response that Hercule Poirot made in the detective books, when someone called him French instead of Belgian.
His friend forgave me my mistake. “The accent sounds the same, I know.”
“The hell it does.” The hippie grinned. “We don’t sound like the Whitakers.”
“Well, true. But then, they’re from the Deep South, so that’s hardly surprising.” The dark young man glanced over at the gleaming oak-topped bar, where a middle-aged couple sat in conversation with the young bartender.
Middle-aged, I decided upon closer examination, was perhaps the wrong label for them. The woman would certainly have resisted it. She was quite pretty, in a brittle sort of way, with artfully arranged auburn curls and fluttering hands that glittered with rings. At first her husband looked much older, until one noticed that his silver hair was not matched by his tanned and vital face.
“I’m sure you’ll meet them,” the long-haired youth assured me. “Garland likes to keep up to date on new arrivals. She’s kind of… well, kind of unique.”
“Her husband’s really nice,” the dark one added. “His name’s Jim.” Which reminded him he hadn’t yet introduced himself. “I’m Paul, by the way. Paul Lazarus. And this is my brother Simon.”
“Emily Braden.” I shook hands with each of them in turn, relaxing back into the thick cushioned seat. Dark-haired Paul, I decided, was the younger of the two, despite appearances. I’d found that between siblings there was always a clear pattern of interaction, of deference and command, that set the first-born apart. Simon Lazarus might look the less mature but he was restless, more aggressive, and now that our conversation had switched to English he assumed the role of spokesman for both of them—assumed it with a natural ease born of long familiarity and habit.
He sent me a friendly grin. “We’re doing the Europe thing. Paul finished university last spring and neither one of us could find a job, so we decided to squander our savings instead. We’re planning to go all the way around the world, if the money holds out. And if I can ever get Paul away from this place.” Simon grinned wider. “I had a hard enough time dragging him out of Holland, and now here we are,” he told me, “stuck again.”
Paul smiled and would have said something, but he wasn’t given the chance. The bartender, having excused himself from the American couple, descended upon us in a whirl of youthful vigor.
Seen at close range, the bartender appeared even younger than I’d first suspected. He couldn’t have been above twenty, but it was easy to see how I’d been deceived. Only in France, I thought, could a teenager look suave, even worldly. He would break a lot of hearts, this one. He probably had already.
I watched in open admiration as he exhaled the expressive “pouf” of breath that was so undeniably French, muttered some brief comment about les américains, and winked conspiratorially at Paul Lazarus. “What can I bring you?” he asked, in flowing English.
“Thierry will tell you,” Simon said positively, his accent anglicizing the bartender’s name so that it came out sounding like “Terry.”
“Thierry, tell Miss…”
“Braden,” Paul supplied.
“Emily,” I said, over both of them.
“…tell Emily what the difference is between Canadians and Americans.”
The bartender looked down at me with a serious expression. “The Canadians, Madame, are much more difficult,” he confided. “They are impossible. This one,” he pointed at Simon, “makes always the curtain in his room to fall down, and always I must get the ladder to replace it.”
“Twice,” Simon defended himself. “I’ve only done it twice. And it’s your own fault for putting a curtain in front of that window to begin with. Windows like that are meant to be opened, to be enjoyed. I can’t help it if your stupid curtain rod gets in the way.”
“You see?” Thierry winked again. “Most difficult, these Canadians. But you, Madame, you are not Canadian?”
“Worse.” I smiled up at him. “I’m English.”
“Non!” He clapped a hand to his heart in mock agony, but his eyes twinkled at me. “You would like a café au lait, Madame? All the English, they enjoy the café au lait.”
Only, I thought, because that’s what we learned to say at school. Until I’d lived in France I hadn’t known there were so many different kinds of coffee, from thickly fragrant café on its own, to the decadent richness of café crème. I considered my options. “Could I have a crème instead, please?”
“Bien sûr,” he said. “With pleasure.”
