Selected Stories

It couldn’t possibly have been Anthony, of course it couldn’t. Even assuming that Anthony is alive, why would he be employed as a kitchen worker in Paris? ‘Yes, I’m afraid we fear the worst,’ his father said on the telephone, years ago now. ‘He sent a few belongings here, but that’s a good while back. A note to you, unfinished, was caught up in the pages of a book. Nothing in it, really. Your name, no more.’

In rue du Bac there is a window Wilby likes, with prints of the Revolution. The display has hardly changed since he was here last: the death of Marie Antoinette, the Girondists on their way to the guillotine, the storming of the Bastille, Danton’s death, Robespierre triumphant, Robespierre fallen from grace. Details aren’t easy to make out in the dim street-light. Prints he hasn’t seen before are indistinguishable at the back.

At a bar he has another calvados. He said himself when people asked him – a few had once – that he, too, imagined Anthony was dead. A disappearance so prolonged, with no reports of even a glimpse as the years advanced, did appear to confirm a conclusion that became less tentative, and in the end wasn’t tentative at all.

In rue Montalembert a couple ask for directions to the Métro. Wilby points it out, walking back a little way with them to do so, as grateful for this interruption as he was when the woman at the traffic crossing caught his interest.

‘Bonne nuit, monsieur.’ In the hall of the Hôtel Merneuil the night porter holds open the lift doors. He closes them and the lift begins its smooth ascent. ‘The will to go on can fall away, you know,’ Anthony’s father said on the telephone again, in touch to find out if there was anything to report.

Monsieur Jothy shakes his head over the pay packet that hasn’t been picked up. It’s on the windowsill above the sinks, where others have been ignored too. He writes a message on it and props it against an empty bottle.

At this late hour Monsieur Jothy has the kitchen to himself, a time for assessing what needs to be ordered, for satisfying himself that, in general, the kitchen is managing. He picks up Jean-André’s note of what he particularly requires for tomorrow, and checks the shelves where the cleaning materials are kept. He has recently become suspicious of Jean-André, suspecting short-cuts. His risotto, once an attraction on the menu, is scarcely ever ordered now; and with reason in Monsieur Jothy’s opinion, since it has lost the intensity of flavour that made it popular, and is often dry. But the kitchen at least is clean, and Monsieur Jothy, examining cutlery and plates, fails to find food clinging anywhere, or a rim left on a cup. Once he employed two dish-washers at the sinks, but now one does it on his own, and half the time forgets his wages. Anxious to keep him, Monsieur Jothy has wondered about finding somewhere for him to sleep on the premises instead of having the long journey to and from his room. But there isn’t even a corner of a pantry, and when he asked in the neighbourhood about accommodation near rue Piques he was also unsuccessful.

The dishcloths, washed and rinsed, are draped on the radiators and will be dry by the morning, the soup bowls are stacked; the glasses, in their rows, gleam on the side table. ‘Très bon, très bon

,’ Monsieur Jothy murmurs before he turns the lights out and locks up.

Wilby does not sleep and cannot read, although he tries to.

‘A marvel, isn’t it?’ Miss Davally said, the memory vivid, as if she’d said it yesterday. You wouldn’t think apricots would so easily ripen in such a climate. Even on a wall lined with brick you wouldn’t think it. She pointed at the branches sprawled out along their wires, and you could see the fruit in little clusters. ‘Delphiniums,’ she said, pointing again, and one after another named the flowers they passed on their way through the garden. ‘And this is Anthony,’ she said in the house.

The boy looked up from the playing cards he had spread out on the floor. ‘What’s his name?’ he asked, and Miss Davally said he knew because she had told him already. But even so she did so again. ‘Why’s he called that?’ Anthony asked. ‘Why’re you called that?’

‘It’s my name.’

‘Shall we play in the garden?’

That first day, and every day afterwards, there were gingersnap biscuits in the middle of the morning. ‘Am I older than you?’ Anthony asked. ‘Is six older?’ He had a house, he said, in the bushes at the end of the garden, and they pretended there was a house. ‘Jericho he’s called,’ Anthony said of the dog that followed them about, a black Labrador with an injured leg that hung limply, thirteen years old. ‘Miss Davally is an orphan,’ Anthony said. ‘That’s why she lives with us. Do you know what an orphan is?’