Part 2 (1/2)

'Absolutely not, no alcohol outside the house.'

'Lemonade?'

'OK.'

'What would Mademoiselle like?' asked the waiter.

'Fresh lemonade, two ice cubes, a slice of lemon and a straw.'

'Certainly, Mademoiselle,' replied the waiter, exchanging a look with Laurent.

Chloe glanced quickly down the street, then turned back to her father.

'Are you waiting for someone?'

'No, no, why do you ask?' She was immediately defensive.

'No reason ... I made a pot-au-feu.'

'Great! I love your pot-au-feu. Bertand often makes it in winter, and he always ruins it, he's such a d.i.c.k.'

'Please don't talk like that.'

Chloe said nothing and turned towards the lycee again. Bertrand was the new man in Claire's life. He was a photographer but only took photos of food. His clients ranged from the best delicatessens to the frozen food industry. Bertrand had no doubt dreamt of becoming the next Richard Avedon or Guy Bourdin, of having celebrities and models in front of his lens; but he had to make do instead with roast beef and forest chanterelle mushrooms or maybe fillet of hake with beurre blanc. But he had set up his own company employing six people, and he earned a good living, having cornered the market in high-end food photography. He never read a book, either fiction or non-fiction; all he read were articles on photography or food.

Laurent looked at his daughter: at the discreet make-up on her impeccable profile, the bridge of her nose p.r.o.nounced without being too dominant almond-shaped eyes, delicately drawn brows and shapely mouth. She had become a very pretty young woman. And she had Claire's hands, long and slender, with wrists so small that most watchstraps had to have extra holes put in them. 'You've got new bracelets?' remarked Laurent.

'You noticed? They're so pretty, they're from this really cool new website. I'm so happy with them.'

Two blonde girls with long hair, in miniskirts and Converse, backpacks over their shoulders, were walking up towards the cafe. The waiter ceremoniously presented the gla.s.s of lemonade with two ice cubes, a slice of lemon on the rim and a pink straw.

'Fab,' said Chloe, pulling her chair closer to her father. 'Lovely to be here, together,' she said, snuggling up to him ostentatiously.

'I'm always very happy to be with you; I'm proud of you too,' said Laurent, smiling.

The two girls stopped right beside their table. Chloe looked up at them. The girls gazed silently at her then turned to Laurent.

The girl with the shorter hair asked in an arrogant little voice, 'You're Chloe's dad, aren't you?'

At that moment, under the table, the pointed heel of a suede boot landed on Laurent's right foot. He froze, then felt a sudden pang. He turned to look at his daughter. He knew her too well not to grasp what the eyes fixed on his face were expressing: panic and pleading. 'Yes, I'm her father. And to whom do I have the honour of speaking?' was obviously not the desired response. In the fraction of a second he still had to answer, and as the heel was refusing to relinquish the pressure, Laurent had time to tell himself that surely his daughter would not dare ... And yet a little voice inside him replied: Yes, she would, Laurent. You know your daughter; that's exactly what she would do. What else could this mean?

So he turned slowly to the girls and, smiling coldly, replied, 'Why do you ask that, Mesdemoiselles?'

'Well, uh ... because ...' stuttered the girl with the longer blonde hair.

'He's not my dad, he's my boyfriend,' announced Chloe proudly. 'Perhaps we could be left on our own now?' she went on, pretending to be irritated, and withdrawing her boot from her father's shoe. The two girls both took a step back, without taking their eyes off Laurent.

'Very sorry,' murmured the longer-haired girl.

'Sorry,' added the other, who had turned pale, 'we're leaving.'

Then they hurried across the road, side by side. Laurent watched them walking away on the opposite pavement. They were talking agitatedly and then one pushed the other in rage. 'I've never been more embarra.s.sed in my life,' she screeched up at the darkening sky.

'They'll be slas.h.i.+ng their wrists tonight,' Chloe said sardonically.

Pa.s.sing her father off as her boyfriend! Chloe had gone too far. But as they drove home, all Laurent's arguments were rebuffed one by one by Chloe: he had no idea; in Laurent's day everything had been different. Laurent's ideas were prehistoric; back in his day there were no mobile phones and you had to be rung up on your parents' phone; boys were terrified of pretty girls and the worst they ever did was get hold of Playboy and goggle at the double-page spreads of naked women in suspenders in s.e.xy poses. It was nothing like that now. To listen to his daughter was to imagine that, apart from her best friend Charlene, her school was entirely populated by narcissistic b.i.t.c.hes, who only ever talked about painting their nails. As for the boys, they were just a bunch of psychopaths who spent their entire time watching hardcore p.o.r.n on the internet and then offering to practise what they'd watched on Chloe. But the scene in the cafe had rendered Chloe 'untouchable'; no one would dare proposition her now; she would be left in peace. The news, now verified, that she had a handsome, much older boyfriend would be all over the lycee in seconds in fact, it was probably already on Facebook.

Yes, people had asked her who he was, on the few occasions he had come to collect her from school. Yes, one day she had said he was not her father; yes, she had asked him to sit in that exact spot in the cafe on purpose so that those b.i.t.c.hes would see her with him. No, she hadn't thought they would actually dare speak to them. And thank you for going along with it, you're awesome.

'Awesome,' grumbled Laurent.

Then when he heard, 'Anyway, you should be super flattered,' he was torn between slapping her and forgiving her. In the interests of a pleasant evening, he opted for the latter.

'What on earth is all this?'

Laurent had gone into the kitchen to heat up the pot-au-feu and Chloe was at the card table.

'The contents of a handbag,' said Laurent from the kitchen, before joining Chloe in the sitting room. 'I found it in the street.'

'I'd love to have that lipstick, but Maman won't buy it for me,' murmured Chloe. 'And that mirror, so pretty!'

'It was stolen. There's no ID, just the personal items they're all there.'

Chloe was running her hands over everything, touching the keys, the dice, the Pariscope, the heap of stones. She opened the red notebook at random.

More things I like: Summer evenings when it gets dark late.

Opening my eyes underwater.

The names 'Trans-Siberian Express' and 'Orient Express' (I'll never travel on either).

Lapsang Souchong tea.

Haribo Fraises Tagada.

Watching men sleep after making love.

Hearing 'Mind the gap' on the Tube in London.

'I'd like to find her,' Laurent announced. 'And the only clue I have is that,' he said, indicating the dry-cleaning ticket. Laurent had thought quite a lot about the issue of the dress. He had come to the conclusion that he would have to visit all the dry-cleaners' within a radius of about a kilometre. His thinking was as follows: Laure had had her bag stolen; the man had run off with it, then, once he was a few streets away, he'd rummaged in it, removing the purse, the bank card and the ID, which could be sold. He'd also grabbed the mobile phone, and perhaps one or two other items of value, and then abandoned the bag on top of the bin, before making off. Laurent had found the bag in the morning, so the theft must either have happened shortly before, or in the night. If that a.n.a.lysis was correct, there were then two possibilities. Either Laure had been pa.s.sing through the area, or she lived there. She would presumably have gone to a dry-cleaner's relatively near her home, perhaps a dry-cleaner who knew her name. So if she lived in the area, the dry-cleaner's would be nearby.

'Look at the things, Chloe. You're a woman what do you see that I've missed? Perhaps there's something there that could lead me to her.'

'You really know nothing about her yet?'

'I know her name is Laure.' In the kitchen the pressure cooker began to hiss. 'I'll be back,' he said. The pot-au-feu was beginning to bubble. In a few minutes he would add the vegetables he had part-cooked the night before: carrots, potatoes, leeks, turnips, celery, and two marrow bones.

'It's signed!' cried Chloe.

Laurent smiled as he took the plate of vegetables out of the fridge. He had introduced his daughter to reading from a young age. They had progressed from Marcel Ayme's Des Contes du Chat Perche to Harry Potter, and from there to Edgar Allan Poe's short stories and then on to poetry Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Prevert, eluard before returning to fiction and Proust, Stendhal, Camus, Celine and others before finally tackling contemporary authors. If he had achieved one thing with Chloe's education, it was to instil in her a love of literature. Now Chloe made her own literary discoveries without his guidance. Recently she had been on a 'Mallarme trip', declaring his epic poems 'better than Alain Baschung'.