A letter slowly disgorged itself from the printer. Yvonne was looking at him, and he saw the left side of her face in naked detail: the straight, untamed eye, her father's Slavic brow and uncompromising jaw, the silk-fine hairs on the cheekbone, and the side of her strong neck as it descended into her shirt. She was wearing her key chain like a necklace, and as she straightened herself the keys settled with a clink between her breasts.
She stood up, tall and at first glance mannish. They shook hands; it was her idea. He felt no hesitation. Why should he, Beauregard, new to Esperance and life? Her palm was firm and dry. She was wearing jeans, and again it was her left side that he noticed by the light of the desk lamp: the tight denim creases that stretched from the crotch across her left thigh. After that it was the formal precision of her touch.
You're a retired wildcat, he decided, as she calmly returned his glance. You took early lovers. You rode pillion on Harley-Davidsons while you were high on pot or worse. Now at twenty-something you've reached a plateau, known otherwise as compromise. You're too sophisticated for the provinces but too provincial for the city. You're engaged to marry someone boring, and you're struggling to make him more. You are Jed but on a downward slope. You are Jed with Sophie's
She dressed him, with her mother looking on.
* * *
The staff uniforms were hung in a walk-in airing cupboard on the half-landing one flight down. Yvonne led the way, and by the time she opened the cupboard door he knew that for all her outdoor manners, she had a woman's walk ― neither the swagger of a tomboy nor the watch-me roll of a teenager, but the straight-hipped authority of a grown and sexual woman.
"For the kitchen, Jacques wears white and only white, and laundered every day, Yvonne. Never the same clothes from one day to the next, Jacques; it is a rule of my house, as everybody knows. At the Babette, one is passionately conscious of hygiene.
While her mother chattered, Yvonne held first the while jacket against him, then the elastic-topped white trousers. Then she ordered him to go into room 34 and try them on. Her brusqueness, perhaps for the benefit of her mother, had an edge of sarcasm. When he came back, her mother insisted that the sleeves were long, which they were not, but Yvonne shrugged and took them up with pins, her hands brushing indifferently against Jonathan's and the warmth of her body mingling with his own.
"You are comfortable?" she asked him as if she didn't give a damn.
"Jacques is always comfortable. He has inner resources,
Madame Latulipe wished to know about his extramural preferences. Did Jacques like to dance? Jonathan replied that he was prepared for anything but not perhaps quite yet. Did he sing, play an instrument, act, paint? All these pastimes and more were available in Esperance, Madame Latulipe assured him. Perhaps he would like to meet some girls? It would be normal, said Madame Latulipe: many Canadian girls would be interested to hear of life in Switzerland. Courteously prevaricating, Jonathan heard himself say something mad in his excitement:
"Well, I wouldn't get far in these, would I?" he exclaimed, so loudly that he nearly broke out laughing, while he continued to hold out his white sleeves to Yvonne. "The police would pick me up at the first crossroads, looking like this, wouldn't they?"
Madame Latulipe let out a peal of the wild laughter that is the signature tune of humourless people. But Yvonne was studying Jonathan with a bold curiosity, eyes on eyes. Was it tactic or was it my infernal calculation? Jonathan wondered afterwards. Or was it suicidal indiscretion that in the first few moments of our meeting I told her I was on the run?
* * *
The success of their new employee quickly delighted the elder Latulipes. They warmed to him with each new skill that he revealed.
