Breaking and Entering (6 page)

He waited his turn, then explained the child's symptoms, breaking off now and then to ask Penny for more details, or translate the questions for her. It was all a bit of a rigmarole – switching from one language to the other, repeating the instructions and advice – but it was finally sorted out, and the medicine entrusted to him. He felt a nudge from Penny and looked round to see her handing him a battered scarlet purse.

‘The money's double Dutch to me, but just help yourself from here.'

‘Don't worry, I'll take care of it.'

‘No, really, that's not fair. You've already given up your time, so I can't possibly expect you to pay, on top of everything else.'

He laughed to hide his embarrassment, loathed discussing money. ‘My good deed for the day.'

‘But you've already done one good deed.'

‘Well, my good deed for tomorrow, then.' He picked up a jar of vitamin C, the brand on display in the window, asked the man to take for that as well. If the kid was existing on sugar-lumps, then she could do with what they were advertising as a
tonique anti-infections
.

He passed the package to Penny, pocketed his change. ‘I'm afraid I'll have to leave you – I'm late for work as it is. But I'll put you in a taxi, so you don't get lost again. What's the name of your hotel?'

Extraordinary how her face could change. There was panic in it now, not just disappointment, and he could see her mouth trembling; the eyes beginning to brim again. Oh God, he thought, don't cry.

‘It's … it's called the … the Manchester,' she said, her voice dangerously unsteady. ‘I can't think why, in Paris. But that's where Phil comes from – Manchester, I mean. I thought it was a good omen and that it might help to bring him back.'

‘Well, let's hope it does,' he smiled. He must harden his heart, find an empty cab. His mother had always taught him to put the general good before the individual. His report concerned the fate of several thousand illiterates, not two feckless females.

‘Taxi!' he shouted, flagging down a white Mercedes, and handing Penny a clutch of twenty-franc notes. The morning was proving expensive, and jobs like his didn't pay that well. Still, money was so relative, and these two were truly skint.

He asked the driver if he knew the Hotel Manchester, received a surly nod in reply. Pippa at least seemed thrilled by the prospect of a taxi-ride: she climbed in with alacrity, and started bouncing on the seat. Penny followed slowly, still trying to detain him. Did he work round here? How would she repay him?

‘There's nothing to repay.'

‘But …'

He blessed the discourteous driver, who was already pulling away, cutting off her words. He stood waving from the pavement, watching the cab manoeuvre through the traffic. Framed in the back window, two pale faces gazed at him, the larger one dabbing at her eyes.

Oh hell, he thought, she
is
crying. He fumbled for his cigarettes, lit one angrily, then turned on his heel and strode towards the office.

Daniel closed his office door and walked briskly down the stairs. His report had been extremely well received. Even the pernickety Jean-Claude was clearly impressed, and had actually lingered afterwards to offer his personal congratulations on all the time and effort he'd put in. And his mother was much better: up and dressed, and working herself, or at least catching up on her post. All her work was voluntary now: beavering away for charities, sitting on innumerable committees. He'd phoned twice to see how she was, warning her not to overdo it, and saying he'd be round there in the lunch-hour. The weather was still glorious; the sun throwing golden swathes across the stair-carpet, burnishing the yellow leaves outside. He paused a moment to look out of the window, admire the row of chestnut trees at the far end of the square. He was lucky to have an office which overlooked a green oasis, in contrast to the rackety roads on two sides of the building. His mother was less fortunate. The only view from her poky flat was of other bricks and mortar. But she did have a minuscule balcony, which she had enlivened with some flowering plants and a primitive wooden sculpture she had brought back from Lusaka. Perhaps it would be warm enough to sit out there at lunchtime – pretend it was July, forget the sombre fact that the days were drawing in.

‘Hey, Daniel, it's us again!'

Abruptly he swung round, returning from July to late September. There, in the foyer, not a dozen feet away from him, stood the two English carrot-heads. He stared in disbelief. How in God's name had they traced him to his office? Nervously he carried on downstairs, stopping three steps from the bottom, as if afraid to come too near.

‘I've brought your change back,' Penny said, diving towards him with a wad of grubby notes. ‘You gave us far too much, and I shouldn't have taken it anyway, when you'd already been so decent.'

He ignored the money, confounded by a flash of cleavage. She had changed her clothes and was now wearing tight blue jeans and a low-cut top in a violent shade of cyclamen which quarrelled with her hair.

‘I hope I'm not being a pain, but I felt I had to come and thank you. I mean, not many men would have taken all that trouble. ‘Pippa! Blow, don't sniff.' She rummaged for a hankie, wiped her daughter's nose, then planted herself at the bottom of the stairs, effectively blocking his getaway.

‘We watched you as the cab drove off,' she told him. ‘But then you disappeared – turned the corner out of sight, and I felt so … well, just terrible. I suppose it suddenly dawned on me that the only person we knew in the whole of Paris had just vanished into thin air. So I shouted to the driver to turn round and catch you up. He didn't understand at first, and by the time he'd done a U-turn and crawled through all the traffic, I'd resigned myself to losing you again.' She paused for breath, sounded puffed and flustered, as if still dashing in pursuit of him.

‘Then clever Pippa spotted you, running up the steps and through this door. I banged on the taxi window, but you didn't seem to hear, and though we scooted across the road and straight into this building, there was no sign of you at all. I knew you'd told us you were late, so I didn't like to ask if they could find you.' She inclined her head to indicate the receptionist, sitting in her cubbyhole further down the foyer. ‘That lady there speaks almost perfect English, and when I said a tall good-looking Englishman called Daniel, with brown eyes and dark straight hair, she said oh yes, Daniel Hughson, and you'd just that minute gone into a meeting, which would probably last till lunchtime. We were back here on the dot of twelve – and didn't even get lost. Well, I bought a map this time, and made a special effort to notice all the places we were passing, and actually it's not that far, so Pippa had a sleep first, and she's already taken two lots of her medicine …'

‘It was yuk,' the child put in, screwing up her face. She was sprawling on the floor beside her mother, a gap of naked flesh around her midriff. She too wore different clothes: scarlet leggings with a blue and purple jersey. These two seemed to go in for colours as eccentric as their lives.

‘Yuk maybe, but it did the trick. You're much better, aren't you, pet?'

‘Good,' said Daniel lamely. He was still reeling from the flood of words and from the shock of seeing them again. He had assumed it was a one-off meeting, and had dutifully removed them from his mind, so as to devote his full attention to educational programmes in Kakuma. But now he was confused – on his guard, self-conscious, yet experiencing a peculiar excitement. ‘A tall good-looking Englishman,' she'd said. Had she really meant good-looking, and why should she notice his looks at all when she was so preoccupied with her husband?

He fought an urge to retreat back up the stairs. Her body was disturbingly close, and it was more or less impossible not to look down between her breasts when he was standing directly above her. The tiny buttons on the hot-pink top were straining at their fastenings, the top two undone, unnerving.

She ran an anxious hand through her hair, then slumped against the banisters. ‘I know it sounds awfully sort of pushy, but I wondered if you could spare us any time? I mean, if you're free for lunch, perhaps you'd let me buy you a sandwich. You see, I've made a list of things I need to say in French, and if you could possibly write them down for me, then all I'll have to do is pass the piece of paper across and point to the right one.'

He was taken aback, unused to women inviting him out and invariably disconcerted when he had to change his plans. He stalled and played for time. ‘But … but how will you understand when people reply?'

‘Oh, shit! I hadn't thought of that.'

And anyway I've got a prior engagement with my mother. Somehow he couldn't say it. She looked too crestfallen as it was.

‘Well, all right,' he offered hesitantly. ‘I suppose we could have lunch … I'll have to make a phone-call first, but I can do that from the restaurant.' He didn't want to leave them with the receptionist. If they'd arrived here on the dot of twelve, then they'd already been waiting an hour for him, and Penny had probably regaled Marie-Thérèse with the whole elaborate saga, Arab girl and all. He dismissed thoughts of errant husbands and turned his mind to lunch instead; running through the names of nearby restaurants and trying to come up with one where he wouldn't meet his colleagues and where the food would suit a four-year-old, yet still impress her mother. Though why the hell should he care about impressing her? Earlier that morning, on their way to the pharmacy, she had spotted a branch of McDonald's, and her spontaneous whoop of delight had revealed her as a Big Mac fan. No, he drew the line at burgers, eaten with their fingers out of a polystyrene coffin, amidst the smell of grease and onions. After the exertion of his meeting and the paean from Jean-Claude, he deserved to lunch in style. He'd had nothing for breakfast beyond a gulp or two of coffee, and it would be a snack meal this evening with his mother.

‘Gosh, thanks,' the girl was saying. ‘You are an absolute angel!' She suddenly lunged forward and gave him a brief impulsive hug. It threw him totally. Her private smells of breath and sweat were jangling at his senses, clashing with the whiff of strawberry hair; his whole body stirred by this contact with her own. She pulled away, rubbed her nose, made some odd remark to Pippa in a casual tone of voice. How the devil could she sound so cool? He glanced down at his suit, amazed that it looked no different. Those two startling seconds pressed against her breasts should have left some imprint, surely?

‘And please do take this money,' she urged, brandishing the notes again.

His embarrassment was doubled now. He mumbled something fatuous, and managed to squeeze past her to the doorway, where he pretended to be checking on the weather. ‘The … the sun's so bright, we ought to make the most of it. Let's get out of this dark hall and find somewhere to eat.'

They followed with no further prompting, Pippa gambolling down the chipped stone steps, then racing to the top again, so she could jump off the last two.

‘It's left here,' he informed them as they turned into the street. Gradually he was recovering his composure; his flushed cheeks sallow-pale again, his voice less agitated. And he'd just had a brainwave. There was a Café Pénélope which had opened only recently in the square behind his office. The food was good, by all accounts, and Penny would be tickled by the name, yet it was not the sort of place to attract either Georges or André – too offbeat, too lively.

He slowed for Pippa, who was collecting fallen leaves. ‘There's a new restaurant round the corner which might be worth a try.'

‘Oh, we don't want a full-scale meal,' said Penny. ‘I'm afraid I can only run to a sandwich, and it's not fair for you to pay again.'

He saw her reaching for her purse. She had just put those wretched notes away, but any minute he would be refusing them a third time. ‘No, please, that's quite okay,' he said, forestalling any argument by adding, ‘You can always buy me a drink, if you insist. And then let's call it quits.'

‘Can
I
have a drink?' asked Pippa, discarding her leaves and pulling at her mother's hand.

‘Yes, 'course you can,' said Penny. ‘I'm so rich you can have two!'

‘Something fizzy?'

‘Yes.'

Let's all have something fizzy, Daniel thought, as he turned the corner and Penny's arm brushed his. He couldn't explain it in the slightest, but instead of being irritated that his lunch-hour was disrupted, he was almost willing to celebrate the fact.

‘Another P,' said Penny, lolling back in her chair and surveying the crowded café. Every table was full; the pink walls barely visible beneath posters, pictures, playbills; the steamed-up windows mobbed by climbing plants.

“What is?' Daniel asked.

‘That blonde girl at the bar. I just heard the waiter call her Pascale. D'you think there's a real Penelope as well?'

‘Bound to be – a fat Madame, oozing cream and garlic, who bosses all the staff about.'

‘I want my drink,' wailed Pippa.

‘Well, you'll have to wait, they're busy.' Penny watched the waiters charging to and fro; other frustrated customers trying to catch their eye with no success. ‘What d'you fancy – orange?'

‘No, Pepsi.'

‘P for Pepsi!' Penny opened the menu, exclaiming at its length – a list of fifty-odd dishes scrawled by hand in purple ink. ‘
I
know!' she said suddenly, leaning forward and raising her voice above a snort from the espresso machine. ‘Let's have all Ps. I mean, everything we eat and drink has got to start with a P, okay?'

‘Why, Mummy?'

‘Because today is P-Day, isn't it, Dan?'

Daniel nodded, hardly objecting to the shortening. Her previous Dan had been ‘a really super guy', and yes, it
was
a P-day: peculiar, preposterous, and really rather puzzling. He couldn't understand why he was actually enjoying being in a restaurant where the service was deplorable, the noise level horrendous, and the menu looked both pricey and pretentious. Two more Ps, he noted wryly, scanning the wine list for a drink which fitted Penny's rule.