(apologies to Nabokov)

Can I make you think, now, of Mrs Carshalton. Absurd as it would seem, every morning she commutes from the centre of London to the centre of Paris in a series of neat navy two-pieces, to attend to business at the embassy and then to déjeuner in the same brâsserie every day at 12.50, an establishment that frowns on sparrow-feeding. Still, surreptitiously, she tends to let crumbs gather in her napkin and then fall discreetly when she finishes around 1.30, stands up knees together like a lady - she is no great animal lover, I think, but she is full of that misplaced English verve for charity.

Where once it might have been in some suburban way glamorous to commute in such a daily fashion, now it is merely cumbrous: Paddington is sweaty and cold at once, full of languorous adolescents sitting slack-legged on rucksacks, and the metro is not for anyone wishing to shield from reality their cinematic memories of romantic Paris - but when there are children involved (two boys: six and a half and nine), apparently it is bad to uproot them with a move abroad and there are still some people (Mr Carshalton) who believe in an English education. (Ms Kopfker - but I am getting ahead of myself - nods in feigned sympathy.)

It is probably more than I should tell you, but this watering-hole that Clara Carshalton visits every lunchtime with such uncharacteristic regimentality (the final click of her knife and fork coincides more times than she knows with the cha-cha-kung of the black waitress' afternoon-shift punch card), is called Café Pic-nic. On the off-road where it can be found, it is the only cafe left out of six where the smoking and sharing of nicotine proliferates unrestrained, which explains Clara's relatively aged presence (38) in the decidedly youthful Cafe Pic-nic; Clara, as her American lunch partner puts it, smokes like it's going out of fashion.

"You smoke," says Elaine Kopfker, a 'brassy' redhead with lots of 'personality' to make up for front teeth of over-arching stalactites, "like it's going out of fashion."

And Clara will smile lamely and respond in all the right ways to Elaine's 'comic' self-deprecations weirdly crafted to do just the opposite (" tell you that darling man doesn't give a damn about this poor-old-cherie, but then he's so easily threatened…") and they will intend on fruit-salad, but then get the cheesecake, turn each other's ankles over in the sunlight to respectively admire any new shoes and it goes on and goes on, Paris turns its seasons like a nonchalant kaleidoscope, and I see Clara has perfected the art of glimpsing at watches imperceptibly.

So: on the face of it (1.27pm), Mrs Carshalton appears to be (and certainly from where I was sitting - table 12 - unquestionably was) an insipid, menopausal, bore of a woman from that dour little island, intent on a tumour of the lung, whose civil instinct stretched to Parisian flying vermin but did not indulge in the notion of higher taxes for the poor on its own doorstep.

Maybe, this is a little harsh, but I tend to be. It is hard enough to have any interest in women of a certain age. When they are not handsome (Clara) or not human (Elaine), c'est très difficile.

I was not, at first, interested in Clara. I had, at first, only faint suspicions. So when the chapter and verse of it, the face and the bottom of it, the dirty little gun, the lover, the corner, accomplices and grubby francs in our Juliette's palms - when it all came out in that smudge of local newspaper print - I was somewhat surprised. I am so rarely mistaken.That occasional, oh-so-rapid eye movement over the horrific Ms Kopfker's left shoulder I had mistaken as Clara's boredom. It was quite the opposite - it was Clara's interest.

We sat in a kind of unintentional quadrangle; Juliette, myself, the Clarelaine creature and The Boy. Juliette sat always in the corner, pawing her long, stringy brown hair (she has grown it just to spite me), and putting centimes in the period jukeboxes. Because she claims I broke her heart, we must all suffer Are You Lonesome Tonight? and Que-Sera-Sera in a seemingly eternal loop, watch her chew her gnarly yellow fingernails to a reddish pulp. It is most rude, I feel, and unpleasant.

"Oh, but Alexi is too, too unfair!" whining in her horrible English to our Senegalese waitress as if there was an "unfair" that I could have been that would have been more satisfactory. You come at the wrong time, reader - the end of a love affair - to hear any fair words of Juliette.

I sit diametrically along from Juliette at my table. Cafe Pic-nic offers the privileges of the proverbial 'regular' on a ratio of tips not time. (Oh yes, new money does fine at Cafe Pic-nic.) I tip heavily because I know these African staff are given everything diluted (soup, wages), besides which Ellie makes my coffee just-so, though she is still unsure whether to address me as Madame or Monsieur (it is Alexi, Alexi).

Carshalton and Kopfker would sit outside by the menu-board nomadertheweather, and The Boy, parallel to them on the other side.

I'd been aware of The Boy for sometime before I traced him as the disappearing point of Clara's wayward gaze. I knew him because he was always, to use an Americanism, taking my action. He was prolific. Beautiful (it says here), but not Butch.

He was Persian or Iranian or something, though in Paris one can only be an 'Arab' with such skin colour. His name was Lori or Louie or Loli or some such, I could never remember, and mentioned him in my journal when I had cause to mention him, as Cleopatra.

Clara herself can describe better than I what he looked like - as I say, I couldn't see it - a scrap of serviette which she carelessly misplaced and couldn't find when she returned (panicked) ten minutes later (it was in my pocket), shows us that these things are the product of the personal, obsessive eye of the beholder:

Patra: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Curls at the basebottom nape of his neck, sensuous, sensuous! My teddy-bear and Prince!
Today: V-neck (brown)

CLEOPATRA EYES: pools of light brown-green, swamps, beautiful, beautiful bogs! Possibility always of thunderous brow. Belly Laugh.But he is nothing, nothing until he stares and I am struck down.
My boy, surrounded, as ever.

Clara may have hidden depths but they were not literary. Bogs. But I suppose when I found Juliette 'beautiful' I could find no other word but that to repeat and repeat until people tried casually to start other conversations. You can always count on love to ruin your prose. (Whatever will be, will be.)

It is true, too, that he was always surrounded. And not only by the young student femme-fatales in their black polo-necks and severe glasses, but by fey boys, grown men, waitresses, Old Jeremiah father of Young Jeremiah from the photographic studio opposite, Young Jeremiah, two Russian taxi-drivers, friends, mothers of friends, the odd drunk, and the local maniac who clapped his hands loudly and without warning in front of your face then walkedaway chuckling to himself.

It was really a bore.

He told me I looked like Elvis once in his lilting American French and invited me over to his coterie (dictionary def. says set, clique, usually literary. I don't know whether his was literary) for coffee; but it is a fool who gives in gracefully to the new competition. At the time of that incident, I could see Clara's bird-face almost incredulous (Elaine was singing the praises of electrolysis and did not notice) as if it were insanity that anyone could refuse him in anything. Leave her to baver like a girl-child and suffer over him - I resumed my seat.

I stared coldly at him. I was, I guess, a little petulant. I stared at him. And I can admit that it is a feat to scan red-checked tablecloth, Ellie's rusty shins, pavement crack, table leg, leg - you just keep coming back (collar, maroon) to stare at him.

Leave her, to dribble like a girl and suffer. But Mrs Carshalton, against all expectations, did more than this.

I saw her. I saw her just in the next road, Rue de la Seraph, around five thirty one April day; she had followed him on his way to a seminar and pressed a grey coloured note-pad into his hand. "Read it," she said in a pigeon-French (I am an excellent lip-reader), "it says it better than for me I couldn't." He looked confused (is French syntax so impossible for you people?), but she turned and dashed back where she had came (in a manner women of that age really shouldn't), before he could instruct her on the basics of French grammar or anything else.

I saw Ms Kopfker in a hideously unflattering yellow like a pustule on the horizon, and felt sure Clara would tell her that she'd just run to catch the last post. Elaine was no-one to confide in.

I wonder when they became (or if they became in the proper sense), lovers, during that Summer. Certainly they never sat with each other, but body language, unlike prose, is readable up to a distance of fifteen feet, sometimes more. I saw that they indulged in the waitress-serviette-note game (who could play it like Juliette and I once did!), but I could never get Ellie, a trustworthy little thing, to reveal one of these furtive billet-douxs. She could be tipped and not bribed.

In desperation I turned to Juliette, who, when not indulging herself in a Monochrome Musicverse of Misery, was on the peripheries of Cleopatra's court.

"I am not clear as to what is going on," she said with that once adorable pout (how drained my Julietta!), "but I have decided to blackmail her or him or both of them." I pointed out to the ridiculous twit that it is not possible to blackmail an unmarried, beautiful boy on account of a love affair, which she conceded tearfully. She told me that the Lady Carshalton, in a note, had expressed a desire to be ravished in an alley and "I cannot say…" (Juliette blushed which is absurd), "taken from, pardon, behind, Alexi, comme un chien, Alexi!" I told her not to listen to the gossip of the gutter.

But Mrs Carshalton seemed to get more and more dishevelled on one side of the bar as Patra grew stubble (he grew those whiskers with an ease impossible for me!) on the other. Her two-piece was sometimes the same, two, three, days in a row, and he missed classes because he had, in his leather case, yesterday's books.

I said earlier that "I was aware of The Boy," and now I wonder if that was quite honest. Is it possible to be merely aware of an astounding beauty (that word again), merely aware of a passionate affair? Other people's beauty and passion seem to implicate one somehow.

Try every avoidance. Check a perfect duck-tail quiff in the Coca-Cola mirror, check for any unwanted feminine 'curves', smile at the femmes as they walk in in skirts and boots, trace Ellie's mazey trail through table, chair, thank-you madam, certainly monsieur, trace every gaze in the room, follow the haze of smoke, table-leg, leg, ("I asked my mother, what will I be…?") and I am staring at him again.

Meanwhile, Juliette made her money. Clara paid-up through her bird-nose, Juliette threatening her with notes, photographs etc, things Juliette was too hopelessly disorganised to have ever actually obtained, something which Clara was too foolish to realise. And so it became autumn, and all the tables were moved inside. The quadrangle became a smaller square.

Around this time, Juliette sent me a note:

Alexi (my deserting love),
The game has changed. Now she
wants me to kill him now.
bisoux, Juliette XX

I sent a note back:

Juliette (you foolish whore),
Why does she want to kill him?
Alexi.

She replied:

Alexi,
He was caught in a side alley.
It is a metaphor, I am not foolish ( - you must be
confusing me with some other fast article).
Juliette XX
P.S. Forty thousand francs.

I replied once more, against my better judgement:

Machette,
I presume you mean he is having another affair.
What on earth does the old hag expect? But, my little viper, first degree murder is very much not the vogue in our New Europe.
Alexi.
P.S. If it were 80 thousand, it would be different.

Ellie tipped coffee over the next one so it was illegible, and further notes became impossible after the witch Kopfker spotted us and gave a speech to Clara (I presume she believes I cannot speak her sordid tongue), about "how the whole gay thing here seems so, you know, romantic, compared to back in the States…"
 

I knew Juliette could not do it. Not for 40, not for 80 not for 100. She had told me (yes I knew more, much more than it has been wise for me to say), that she could not damage such a face, so it must be through the back - so not to wound it, so not to look at it. You forget his body; no easier, no easier Juliette, to put an ugly hole through.

On December 1st (Clara wanted it done before the holidays), Juliette followed him, a little pistol in her knee socks. I saw her put it there in the toilets, and I saw its faint outline underneath her schoolgirl skirt as she walked, because I followed her, in the same manner, 200 yards between and silent, that she followed him.

I saw that she could not do it, I was aware before. I saw her slip into his room, the wrestling for the gun, the quiet subduing, then finally that peculiar form of love making that The Boy favoured. Patras' beautiful, solid brownness moving infinitely softly backwards and forwards: no eyes that way. You could only be struck down, paralysed, made immobile by those eyes. I know because I stood still.

Of course it is clear to me now what our Juliette, finding herself in this curious position, did next. The moment I read the paper I understood it. She had worn gloves he had not. How easy to shoot Clara right between the eyes outside the Embassy, clad in Patras' familiar duffel-coat and then let the prints do the rest.

Ms Kopfker gave a spirited performance for the cameras: No, she had not known of the quiet, unassuming Englishwoman's (why are they always 'unassuming'?) connection with the blackmailing Arab. No, Clara had not mentioned removing eighty thousand francs (well done, Juliette! ) from the Embassy's accounts. But yes, oh yes, they were the closest of friends.

Clever Juliette.

She left me a note with Ellie before she left:

Alexi, you bad girl!
Hush-hush, now,
Juliette.
P.S. Who would have thought it!

All over dingy newspaper that didn't deserve it; the skin, the eyes, the eyes, coming off on my hands, that face. The insolent school-girls would cut him out like a movie-magazine idol and stick him to their lunch-boxes on sunny days.

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