Eddie Signwriter (34 page)

Inside the shop Madame shuffles through some order forms. Then she gets on the telephone. She begins to sort through the forms, lifting her shoulder and craning her neck to wedge the headset against her ear, so as to free her hands. Out of the corner of her eye she notices that the man across the road has not moved. He has put down his plastic bag and is leaning against the wall. He has a large umbrella of the kind that golf players use. She might normally assume him to be one of the old diplomats from the African embassies, with their impeccable French and their old-world ways, who sometimes walk through the
quartier
during lunch and might stop in on a Friday afternoon to purchase a bouquet for a wife or a mistress, except it is not lunchtime, and such men do not carry plastic bags or stand on street corners.

From across the road the man sees the woman begin talking on the phone. Suddenly she starts sorting through papers on her desk in a great hurry. Some of the papers fall on the ground. She puts down the phone to pick them up. She knocks the phone which pushes some flowers off the other side of the table and overturns a glass of water. She rushes round the table to pick up the flowers, then picks up the
papers, some of which are now wet, sorts through them, seems to find the one she wants, and then picks up the phone again. The man smiles to see the small comedy playing out across the street.

After a while the florist appears to finish her business on the telephone. She puts down the phone. She seems overwhelmed. She shakes water off her hands. She calls out over her shoulder. She is looking for something on which to wipe her hands. Nobody comes. She disappears into the shop.

Kwasi, in one of the back rooms, has not heard her, since he is listening to music with earphones as he sorts through some of the other deliveries of the morning. Madame picks up a cloth and begins wiping her hands. Kwasi takes off his earphones. Madame tells him she has something interesting to show him.

They return to the front of the shop.

Madame asks him if he’s ever seen such things before, again beginning to giggle.

He tells her, “Never, at least not in the flower world.”

“I cannot sell such flowers in this
quartier,”
Madame says. “Why don’t you take them home tonight. I’m sure you two will enjoy them shamelessly.”

He tells her she’s blushing.

Madame knows it.

Kwasi gathers the purple flowers up in a sheet of newspaper, and heads back into the shop to finish off his work.

Madame, looking up, sees the man from outside striding off now down the road in the direction of Rue Saint Didier.

On regular weekdays when deliveries aren’t coming in, Bernadette and Kwasi leave the apartment at the same time, at a little after eight in the morning, so that Bernadette can walk with Kwasi to work. Madame, who has been getting up at five a.m. for twenty-five years, is already in the shop, spraying water onto the leaves of the fleshy plants. Although opening time isn’t until nine she has the music on already. She will already have taken the sheets off the two birdcages, so that the songbirds are hopping against their bars and chirping, and
turned on the water pump so that the fountain in the middle of the central shop floor makes its water noises. The shutters may still be closed, but the slats are angled to let the sunlight in that slices through the fine mist from her spray bottle as she moves from plant to plant. Usually during the day she plays recordings from the half-price Mozart, Vivaldi and Handel box sets, but in the mornings, on her own, she plays the music of her own heart—which in recent weeks has been the piano works of Claude Debussy, and which, as she walks around her shop, makes her feel at the same time happy and wistful.

Some time before eight thirty there will be a knock on the window. She’ll put down her spray bottle and go to the door, and there will be Kwasi and Bernadette in the doorway, and she’ll have to squint her eyes to protect them from the daylight streaming in.

Then Madame will go into the back to get coffee ready, for which Bernadette will join them if it’s closer to eight than eight thirty. Kwasi will start filling buckets of water and unbundle the flowers they expect to sell during the day. Bernadette will have pulled out the high chair behind the cash register, and when Madame joins them with a tray of coffee and a plate of croissants a conversation will already be going and there’ll be hardly a moment to breathe between words, right up until Bernadette leaves some time before nine.

Bernadette’s route to the Trocadero metro stop will take her down Rue des Belles Feuilles, where she will pass the Monoprix store in which Mamadou used to work, and in which she still knows some of the cashiers, although she’s had little reason to stop in since Mamadou left, and hardly ever did when he worked there, as it’s only since she started accompanying Kwasi to the flower shop that this particular route to the metro has become the shortest option—or so Kwasi tells her; she still believes it would be quicker to return up Avenue Victor Hugo, pass the apartment and continue up the avenue to catch the metro at Metro Kleber.

She’s the one who actually does the walking, she tells Kwasi, but Kwasi is insistent.

“It’s a waste of time to double back,” he tells her.

She says, “Not if it’s quicker.”

He says, “I think it’s quicker to keep on walking.”

She says, “It only seems that way.”

“If it seems that way then it is,” he says.

She smiles.

Though she still thinks he’s wrong she walks his route. She makes a point to him that she does it because she loves him, not because she thinks he’s right.

He laughs and tells her she’s a very stubborn girl, but he forgives her.

She scoffs with incredulity.

She thinks he probably knows he’s wrong. She thinks that it’s most likely a point of principle. Not turning back. Though it’s never just one thing. Ever. He likes the idea of her walking past the place where Mamadou worked, she thinks—to keep up some of the associations of the past, even if he doesn’t do it himself.

“You’re definitely an acquired taste,” she tells him, reflecting one afternoon on all the crazy games he makes her play.

“You talk too much about life,” he tells her.

“You think too much about it,” she says back.

That makes
him
smile.

Well, he’s my acquired taste
, she is thinking as she turns off the avenue and into Rue des Belles Feuilles.

As she walks over the cross streets the sunlight comes out from in between the buildings and warms her face.

The shopkeepers have come out onto their pavements with brooms and buckets and are cleaning away the dust and debris of the week. Water is flowing down the sides of the road, channeled into the drains by rolls of green matting, taking it away into the pipes beneath the city.

She passes a chemist’s with its green fluorescent sign, the pattern of the light expanding and contracting like a concertina.

She passes the pavement terrace of a restaurant, lined with a herbaceous border made of plastic saplings in concrete bases with wood chips for soil. From inside comes the sound of a pinball machine, just burst into jingles, its paddles flapping and lights flashing, a teenager in jeans and a vest, back to the window, leaning over it menacingly.

Just before she gets to the end of the road she passes by the
entrance of the one-star Hotel Anton, which now that summer is in has its side windows open. Taking breakfast in the small tiled dining area to the side of the reception (with its faux-impressionist sketches of Paris monuments, and its lace-covered table bearing fruit, cereal in plastic jars, a milk jug and a stack of yoghurt pots) is the large tired-looking man who appears to have been staying there now for more than a week, who takes his breakfast always at the same time, and who looks up from his newspaper just as she passes, and smiles at her kindly—a face that for no immediately apparent reason seems both knowing and familiar.

Until the reason comes to her early the next morning while she’s getting dressed, and without explaining anything to Kwasi she rushes over to the Hotel Anton, and there waits for three hours until ten a.m. for the man to take his breakfast; except this morning the man does not appear in the dining room, and still she is waiting as the waiters start clearing the plates away and the tables are washed down, and it is then that she goes into the hotel to ask.

The hotel manager is friendly.

A very nice gentleman, she remembers in response to Bernadette’s enquiries, who she believes has been visiting relatives in the
quartier
, although she can’t be sure since her English is not so good. How long has he stayed? Almost three weeks, she tells Bernadette, although now she believes he’s gone home, or at least checked out.

“Which was when?” Bernadette asks.

“Only today,” says the hotel manager.

Bernadette returns immediately to the apartment. Kwasi has gone to work. He has left footprints of water next to the sink, where he’ll have washed himself with a sponge and a towel because the shower down the corridor was occupied. She’s about to get down on the floor and mop up the water with the damp towel hanging over the back of a chair, but then doesn’t. She goes to the phone and calls Denis’s number in Lille. Denis picks up. She hears the sounds of the garage in the background. Denis is his usual friendly self. Nothing in his voice indicates that more than a month has passed without a call from
Bernadette. He tells her that the man who came looking for Kwasi eventually left. That he stayed maybe ten days or so, each day of which he returned to the garage at closing time in the evening to learn if Denis had news for him, and each day of which Denis continued to tell him that his efforts to locate Kwasi had failed.

For her silence she tells Denis that she is sorry. She admits to him that she has not passed to Kwasi the message of the visitor’s arrival. She knows she should have, but that she was afraid. It was a mistake, though one she will have to make amends for in her own way, and can she count on Denis not to preempt her. She can, Denis tells her, and that as far as he is concerned this is a matter between her and Kwasi. She thanks him for his loyalty. His loyalty she can take for granted, Denis tells her, but that others may not have been so loyal—that the visitor was determined, and that he had money. This does not surprise Bernadette, but she does not mention this to Denis, asking only whether the man in question was a large man or a short one.

A large one, Denis tells her.

After she has put down the telephone she walks over to the flower shop. She briefly greets Madame, who is with a client and only has time to raise her eyebrows in acknowledgement. Without looking for Kwasi she goes directly to the back of the shop, gets the key from its hiding place in the cupboard where the mugs are kept, and lets herself into the Refuge.

The light coming in from the shop is enough to see a little way in, beyond which the images on the walls recede into darkness, though she doesn’t need the light; she knows each panel so well by now.

The image she is looking for is close to the door, before which she now stands—a big yellow taxi, the driver leaning back in the seat, body expanding around the seat belt, large forearm resting on the window frame, head cocked—Festus Ankrah, oversized, square-jawed and implacable.

A shadow falls across the floor and the wall, obscuring Festus Ankrah’s face. Bernadette looks up. Madame is standing at the bottom of the stairs.

“What is going on today?” Madame asks, sounding flustered.

“It’s hard to explain,” Bernadette says.

“It is,” Madame says, sitting down now on the bottom stair. She’s wearing a large, loose-fitting floral dress resembling in shape a collapsed parachute. Its folds stretch over her knees, making a hammock in which she rests her hands.

She sighs.

“Kwasi suddenly leaves with a strange man … You arrive suddenly …”

She sounds perplexed.

“What strange man?” Bernadette asks.

The strange man that came in an hour ago or so, Madame explains, although perhaps not so strange, since Madame has seen him a few times in the
quartier
over the last few weeks, but this for the first time in her shop. He came in, and smiled at her—they both recognized each other—but said nothing, and just nodded when Madame asked if she could help him. And so Madame left him to browse, and in fact almost forgot about him until Kwasi came into the front foyer, at which point things took a turn for the bizarre, to say the least, Madame explains breathlessly now, because obviously Kwasi and the man knew each other. The man called Kwasi by his name, and started speaking to him in an African language Madame could not understand.

“Twi,” Bernadette tells her.

“Yes, Twi,” Madame says, “perhaps this is what it was”—at least it sounded to her like the kind of language that might be called Twi, she says, laughing nervously. In any event, she says, for a moment Kwasi was speechless when the man spoke to him, but then he started talking back to the man, and clearly Kwasi was not happy, Madame could tell. Madame has never seen Kwasi in such an agitated state before, frankly. But the man spoke quietly, he calmed Kwasi down. He seemed kind and patient to Madame, who had taken a few steps back towards the hallway but all the while was watching these exchanges she did not understand. At some point Kwasi turned from the man to Madame, and tried to explain something to her, but he was so agitated that he was still speaking Twi to Madame, who obviously did not understand, though she could work out the gist, and
began walking forward to introduce herself to the man, but before she could take more than a few steps towards them Kwasi told her, this time in French, that he would have to take the morning off and then he and the man simply left, walked out, and does Bernadette have any idea of what all this was about?

“Some,” Bernadette replies. “Which way did they go?”

“Left, down Victor Hugo,” Madame says, and is about to say something else, but Bernadette is already past her and running towards the door.

Two men sit on a green wooden bench in a small gravel-covered square overlooking the Museum of Mankind.