The Steppes of Paris Read Online Free Page A

women, walking briskly like well-finished automatons to work. The few men about looked to him by contrast sorry; Lowry figures, hunched, with bent heads, scurrying. Aware of his own leisure – Henry had actually said to show up atthe office only when it fitted in with his house-hunting – Edward enjoyed the walk. At the corner of the Boulevard Saint Michel, he chose his cafe, bought a paper, and went in, intending to sit for a good ten minutes on the glassed-in terrace, having a soup-bowl-sized cup of coffee and one or maybe even two croissants, while he turned the pages of his paper and watched the smart women snapping past. OK, it was a pose but, stuff it, a harmless one. He hadn’t noticed that most of the terrace chairs were still up-ended on the tables and when he tried to sit down on one of the few which weren’t, a waiter bad-temperedly mopping the floor shouted at him that the only place he could have coffee at that hour was standing up at the bar. Even the minor thrill of noticing that two of the men at the bar were drinking red wine for breakfast and one, for God’s sake, brandy, didn’t make the bar an appealing proposition. The same scene was repeated, although less bad-temperedly, at a second café he tried lower down the boulevard so, as it was after eight o’clock already, he ended up drinking a foul-tasting black coffee standing in a totally Americanised fast-food joint with large illuminated pictures of the hamburgers and milk shakes it served, and caught the Metro at Saint Michel.
    The office was deserted when, at a quarter to nine, he let himself in, with the master key Henry had given him. It wasn’t until gone nine o’clock that he heard another key wrestling with the lock and Marie-Yvette, to whom he had been briefly introduced the day before, fumbled her way in and gave every sign of severe shock at seeing him there.
    In contrast to the sleek, hard-faced women on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Marie-Yvette was anything but smart, and Edward couldn’t help wondering if it were Henry who had hired her. He thought, with a feeling that was very close to the beginning of affection, that it would probably be typical of Henry Hirshfeld to have employed someone so resolutely un-smart.
    Marie-Yvette had short, bedraggled henna-red hair. The day before, she had been wearing jeans and two unironed T-shirts one on top of the other, one navy blue and one white with a slogan. Today they were maroon and black. Edward had already noticed, and faintly reproached himself for noticing,that she had virtually no breasts. As she went through the office, switching on the lights, he also noticed that she was wearing open-toed sandals and not a scrap of make-up. Her pitted skin gleamed a little.
    She was looking him over at the same time. Despite her homespun appearance, she evidently wasn’t at all shrinking. When she had cleared the telephone answering machine of the night’s messages and taken a couple of sheets off the telex, she invited Edward to join her for a cup of coffee, which she began to make at a murky percolator installed in a corner of the main office.
    “Ed-ward?” she pronounced carefully. “Not Eddie, like Murphy?”
    Edward hesitated. He was, he recognised, childishly particular about who used which version of his name. Eddy was only for intimates, for his very closest friends; he was Edward to everyone else. He opened his mouth to reply firmly, ‘Not Eddie, like Murphy or anybody else,’ but found himself instead answering incautiously, “Different people call me different things: I’m Edward, Eddy, Ed, Ted, Teddy, Ned. Take your pick.” He supposed it must be the keenness of the new boy to ingratiate himself on the staffers which made him answer so unguardedly; that, and the unexpected intimacy of sitting drinking a leisurely coffee in an empty office with a girl who turned out to be – it came up in the conversation – exactly his own age and who reminded him, with her scrappy looks and