White Knight
26 June 2023 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI finally got round to proof-reading/editing this; it was actually complete at the end of April, *before* I even started on What's in a Name, but with the rush to complete the competition entry in time plus the knowledge that there was next to no potential audience for Colette-fic, I didn't have much motivation to work on it. (Plus the dispiriting discovery that the script of the film had apparently used large chunks of the original dialogue verbatim...)
I'm still not quite certain if the irony of the title works better -- or, rather, is more apparent -- if I use "White Knight" or "The White Knight", but I tried it with 'The' and it didn't look quite right, so I'm going back to "White Knight" for now. And at 5,500 words I think it will work as a rather long one-shot... even if "If I Were Vicomte" has *four* chapters in that same length!
White Knight
World-weary Gaston Lachaille sees himself as perfectly positioned to offer a solution to Gigi’s situation. He misjudges things in more ways than one.
When Gaston Lachaille had returned at length to Paris, still nursing his wounded amour-propre and the cuckold’s horns bestowed upon him by the perfidious Liane, it was to find Gigi dressed up like an organ-grinder’s monkey.
He had not, in that first moment, been able to imagine what old Madame Alvarez could conceivably have had in mind to allow it. The contrast between the scapegrace urchin he remembered and the gawky adolescent plucking at the collar of her new-found finery had been too great for anything but an almost physical recoil. Gigi in those unexpected clothes was almost grotesque, like a child masquerading in her mother’s finery — save, he thought bitterly, that he was an old enough friend of the family to be all too well aware that they’d been dressing the girl in Andrée’s cut-downs for years. An outfit such as that had almost certainly not come from Andrée’s wardrobe, unless it was something she had brought home from the theatre.
And he did not suppose for one moment that it had been paid for out of Gigi’s mother’s earnings, either, or even Madame Alvarez’ purse. This was Aunt Alicia at work, and though he knew the two old ladies were in constant unspoken collusion over the upbringing of Gigi, who was to mend the family fortunes, he was conscious only of annoyance that Madame Alvarez had permitted her sister to meddle.
He had fallen insensibly into the habit for years now of regarding the Alvarez apartment in the light of a refuge — his own personal sanctuary from jaded pleasures and cloying feminine wiles. It was a privilege that could be secured, like the favours of a mistress, by gifts of casual largesse: a little luxury contributed here and there for the household larder, gifts of caramels or liquorice to please the insatiable Gigi, a tacit understanding with her grandmother over certain pressing bills... and the door was always guaranteed to be open to Gaston Lachaille whever he chose to call. It was, as he had often had cause to reflect, an arrangement a good deal less costly on the purse than the attentions one paid to a grande horizontale such as Liane d’Exelmans, and a great deal less fraught.
And Gigi herself, the pert gamine who had not the least compunction over defeating him at cards or insulting the deficiencies of his appearance, to whom considerations of his wealth and his sugar-factories were alike immaterial, and who rejoiced in his visits with a quite unaffected pleasure, had formed —he knew that now— a great part of the respite and attraction that her grandmother’s home had always held for him. He’d taken it for granted that things would never change. Well, he’d been a fool.
Obvious, with hindsight, but it stung nonetheless. He’d spent six weeks on the Riviera, evading the gossip-columns and Liane’s antics, and called in upon Madame Alvarez on his return in the expectation of camomile tea and the reassurance of routine normality. Instead, he had found Gigi parading around in a dress that was, as she proudly informed him, some four metres twenty-five in circumference, and which bore every sign of having left an expensive dressmaker only to be ornamented by a crude and inexpert hand.
Presented with this unwelcome spectacle to greet him, he’d told her precisely what he thought. Gigi, incensed, had promptly retorted in kind.
They’d hurled the most childish of insults at one another with the utmost good humour for years, but she had never flung his notoriety in his face before. Stung by an unreasoning sense of betrayal, he’d turned on his heel with a sharp word and walked out.
But morning had brought bright sunshine, and consciousness of the absurdity of his own attitude. Gigi was growing up, that was all; it was bound to happen, and it could not be helped. One could not expect Madame Alvarez to keep her in short skirts forever, and indeed it was incumbent upon him as a family friend to help the girl spread her wings a little. Basking in magnanimity, he attired himself in a well-cut linen suit and sallied forth with the intention of inviting Mademoiselle Gilberte Alvarez out to lunch.
Gigi had been every bit as enthusiastic as he’d known she would be at the prospect of a proper grown-up outing. It was her grandmother who, much to his surprise and irritation, had forbidden the expedition entirely, on the purported grounds of propriety.
“You must understand, Gaston”—Madame Alvarez’ weary dark eyes had veiled themselves with the same feigned modesty she had no doubt deployed upon her clients, back in his father’s day—“that you are known to attract a certain... attention from the Press. For a girl such as our Gilberte, inexperienced and unprotected in the world, to be seen to dine alone in your company—”
“A girl I’ve known since her infancy and whom no-one else has ever heard of? Do you suppose that would raise so much as a flicker of interest?” Lachaille snapped back, annoyed at the aspersion cast on his act of generosity. “Can you seriously credit, Madame, that I would ever so much as lift a finger to harm Gigi’s reputation, even if I could? That it could conceivably ruin her merely to be seen with me?”
It was a little rich of Inez Alvarez, of all people, to try to cast him in the rôle of roué and seducer of innocents. As if there were not photographs enough and elderly gentlemen still prepared to sigh over the Incomparable Inez, and the favours she and her sister had deigned so expensively to bestow...
He brushed aside her protests. “Oh, don’t trouble yourself — I’m not going to argue. Things have changed around here, I can see that. Believe me, I’ve no intention of dragging that precious scarecrow urchin of yours into my own unsavoury circles; you’re quite at liberty to preserve her purity as you see fit. No doubt she will be snapped up by some honest workman who will keep her barefoot and constantly pregnant... I can’t say when I shall call again. I have a great deal of business on hand at present. You understand, no doubt?”
But it was all too clear, he reflected angrily later, what was going on. Coltish and ungainly as she was, Gigi had reached an age to become a marketable property, and her grandmother had every intention of inducting her into the family business. Presently she would pass from protector to protector, flitting between those who could afford her and learning the languorous tricks of Liane and the other women of the demi-monde — and assisting her grandmother’s household, no doubt, out of a portion of what she received. Her innocence was of value precisely until it could be auctioned off, and no doubt he, Gaston Lachaille, would make as inviting a target as any. They’d had her ready and waiting when he came back from Monte Carlo, hadn’t they, after all — the poor little brat?
For the moment, caught between resentment at the perceived trap and an unexpected indignation on Gigi’s behalf, he had quite forgotten the comfortable welcome he had received for so long in that household in favour of a vision of the old lady as a grasping harridan ready to hawk her own flesh and blood at his expense. Then reason returned.
It was not, after all, as if anyone had suggested that Gigi should walk the streets. No doubt the girl had been brought up to aspire to the tales of her grandmother’s conquests, of lovers sent packing and jewels laid by. And there was scarcely any danger that he himself would fall victim to that particular snare, after the opulent charms of Liane and the various predecessors with whom, over the years, he had come to a similar arrangement.
He had resolved, firmly, that he would wipe the dust of the Alvarez household from his feet, and for several days was able to adhere to that resolution. But the echo of his angry words came back with increasing force to haunt him: the image of his own easy-going bachelor circles as a louche and dangerous place, and of Gigi adrift on those treacherous shoals utterly unprepared. Of Gigi up for sale to the highest bidder, and trying and failing disastrously to pull off the tricks of a seasoned coquette. The Lianes of that world would eat her alive, and not a soul would stretch out a hand to help.
He could bid for her himself. Lachaille did not know from where the idea had first taken possession of him, but once lodged it would not let him go. Madame Alvarez would not demur, he knew that well enough. He could step in to give Gigi the armour she would need, and forestall others more jaded and less scrupulous. On his arm, she could learn her way about the world, and gain the confidence to do so. She could toy with the feminine arts of caprice and flirtation at his expense, and try out her claws without consequences. And when the time came, he told himself, by her behest and not before, he would watch her leave for the man of her choice, heart-whole and fancy free, and possessed of precisely as much experience as she might desire of him, and no more.
Only as the days wore on the shadow of that smiling unknown became ever more intolerable, and the camomile tea sent up by his excellent chef tasted of dust in comparison to that of Madame Alvarez.
Gaston Lachaille walked in unannounced one hot afternoon on the first day of June, and came upon Gigi perched schoolgirl-fashion upon a high stool, whitening a pair of shoes. Her face had floated so often before his mind’s eye of late that for a moment he found he could do nothing but take in the reality of her; the barely parted lips and generous curve of the mouth in all its promise, the lashes longer than he remembered, framing wide-set eyes that did not know their power to enchant and compel, and the mass of fair hair that forever troubled her, tumbling unruly into her eyes or escaping from its ribbon. How glorious it would look dressed high above the slim, strong column of her throat...
It was not until her cheeks flushed that he became aware that he was staring. Lachaille dropped his gaze, conscious all at once of the unaccustomed disarray of his own appearance. He had dressed with care before he came out, but the best-cut suits in the world could not conceal the straggle of locks left untrimmed or the ravages wrought by the sleepless nights and loss of appetite that in the end had driven him here. In consequence —as Gigi, full of interest, promptly observed, with a complete lack of reverence— he looked little short of haggard.
She did not, as Liane might have done, express any coaxing desire to soothe the troubled brow. But her eyes were bright with curiosity, and this was one conversation he did not want to have in front of her, not here, not right now...
“Losing weight doesn’t suit you,” Gigi was busy informing him solicitously. “It makes your nose stick out even more—”
And suppose, after all, that the girl were to find him repulsive? The thought came in to join his other qualms. He was no oil painting, he knew that well enough, and Gigi was the one female in the world who would not be dazzled by his inheritance. It was one of the things he had always sought out in her company... but now, under that same candid gaze, his nerve failed.
“Get to your room, Gigi,” he broke in abruptly. “I need to talk to your grandmother.”
When an indignant Gigi had gone, protesting, he looked after her for a long moment, barely conscious of the old lady’s twitterings at his elbow. It would have to be a cold-blooded transaction. She was too young, he knew that; knew better than to tell himself she saw him as anything more than a beloved family friend. But he could not bear to think of her in the grasp of some brute who would force her to his own pleasure... and he, Gaston Lachaille, could wait. He would wait as long as it took, he would treat her like a queen, demanding no more than she was happy to give, but he could not let her slip out of his life into another man’s arms.
She would, he thought ruefully, no doubt twist him round her little finger. It was a prospect he was more than willing to face.
If Gigi was up for auction, then he would make his bid. Her grandmother understood the rules of the game very well — had, in her time, written them herself. No doubt she would drive a hard bargain... and, to give the old lady her due, he believed she did genuinely love her granddaughter and wished to assure herself that Gigi would be cared for.
Well, he could guarantee that, at least. The fortune that had brought him little save a youth of jaded discontent would serve, if he knew Madame Alvarez, as the most cogent of arguments — and she, in her turn, had known him long enough to trust that Gigi would come to no kind of harm, if he could help it.
“Let’s keep this brief, Madame.” He cut off her babble with a ruthless hand. “I have a proposition to make...”
With the other women in his life, there had been at least a gesture at romance, however openly pragmatic the arrangement or cynical its ending. He’d caught Maryse stealing his papers; Liane had cuckolded him shamelessly, then staged an overdose in a bid to win back the advantage. But there had been a show of courtship before he took up with each; a feigned dance of desire and costly gifts.
One way or another he’d showered Gigi with presents across the years, from caramels and other souvenirs brought back from the Côte d’Azur to a card-case of his own, forfeited along with other possessions in the course of fiercely-contested games of piquet or bézique. In the wake of Liane’s defection, he had rendered Gigi most indignant by absent-mindedly consuming an entire box of liquorice, and had been obliged to replace it on her behalf. The difference was that —until now— he’d never so much as expected anything from her in return.
It was one thing to bestow an embossed music-case on the impish brat with whom you had the habit of trading insults; it was another to buy your way beneath a woman’s skirts as a matter of bald commerce. Making his claim for the position of Gigi’s first client was, where Madame Alvarez was concerned, a matter more of market haggling than sentiment. It was the family business, after all, and nobody could be more aware than she of the value of this initial asset. He’d expected it, and set himself to make the deal with her accordingly. What he hadn’t for one moment dreamed of was that Gigi’s grandmother would proceed to inform the girl, in precisely the same fashion, of every word that had passed between them, and every brutally pragmatic aspect of what might occur.
Gigi had had twenty-four hours to think it over. She’d asked to see him alone. Madame Alvarez and Aunt Alicia had been complaining between them for years that their little Gilberte was a hopeless innocent. But she was not —could not have been, in that household of faded courtesans and gossip-columns— as naive as all that. She understood only too well.
Gaston Lachaille had told himself that, if nothing else, he could protect her from the realities of what the transaction would mean. Now, in the presence of that clear-eyed gaze, the prospect of hearing the whole thing repeated back in all its sordid detail was abruptly more than he could bear.
“Don’t, Gigi, I beg you—”
“If you don’t want to hear it, then you shouldn’t have said it,” Gigi observed frankly, and Lachaille flinched afresh. He was conscious of her as never before, and yet there was a newly-made gulf between them, widening at every moment, and the worst was that he himself had set it there.
She’d made an excuse to wear her old tartan pinafore today, instead of the sweeping skirts of her grown-up gown. He had thought at first, a little shame-faced, that she had done so because he had expressed a dislike of the other dress. But that, too, he saw now, had been a delusion — one more piece of self-deceiving folly. She had worn the old tartan not in hopes to please, but to armour herself against his unwanted advances.
“Grandmama says that you are offering me a great opportunity.” Gigi’s face was resolute. “And she says that you are a man of the world, and I must understand—”
“I don’t want to hear what Grandmama says!” It burst out of him with the force of an oath. Just what had those two old women seen fit to tell her? There had been Maryse, and Liane, and that foreign divorcée who had tried to make a scandal... “All that’s over. It’s a past that has nothing to do with you and me—”
Helpless, he tried to reach out a hand; was shrugged off with composure.
“All over... until it starts again. It’s how you live. It’s not your fault. I understand.” For the first time, she faltered. “Only... only I can’t do it. I can’t be like Madame Liane, and wave to people at the races, and be photographed, and have everyone write about it when we fight. I can’t make scenes and then walk away with another gentleman once you— once you have had enough. I know it’s a great opportunity, because Grandmama says so and you say so too. It’s not for me, that’s all.“
She had sprung to her feet, and was pacing up and down the room. Lachaille, sick at heart, watched her agitation. Despite the firmness of her last pronouncement she was wringing her hands.
“But of course, if—” She swallowed, and did not look at him. “All the same, I—”
“I’m not an ogre, Gigi.” He could bear it no longer. “If the mere idea of being with me revolts you that much, then all you have to do is say so!”
Gigi caught at that almost eagerly. “Oh, but I love to be with you, you know I do. All I want is—”
She broke off.
“Anything,” Lachaille said at once, seizing on the opportunity with feverish haste. “You can have anything you want, if it makes you happy.”
“Truly?” Her face had brightened, and something turned over in his breast.
“Truly. Just tell me — please.”
“Then... can’t you just come here to see me? Like you used to, only more often? You’re a family friend, so no-one would notice, or talk... and you could bring me birthday presents and champagne, and we’d play terrific games of cards against each other, and have such fun. And there wouldn’t be any silly business about suicide, or scenes, or sleeping in your bed with the whole world having to know—”
“Oh yes, a wonderful life,” Lachaille broke in bitterly. “Such tremendous fun... except for one little thing: that I happen to be in love with you!”
He did not know where the words had come from. Had not known, until the moment they burst from him, that they were true.
All these years of ennui, of arrangements in the demi-monde with women who sold their souls to fill their jewellery-box — and now at last the great wave had broken across him with blinding force, and left him bruised and helpless in its wake. And it was for no glittering coquette, no demure demoiselle on the marriage market with eyes cast down and quivering allure, but for her, Gigi; Gilberte, on whom he had bestowed the casual unthinking affection he might have afforded a dog or a small sister.
Only she was not a sister. She was not that child any more and very much not a sister, and he had not seen his feelings for what they were.
“In love?” Gigi was staring at him in disbelief and accusation. “But you never said anything about that!”
It had not entered into the bargain. And he knew very well that it would be reckoned by Madame Alvarez only as a helpful weakness on his part.
“Well,” he managed feebly, “I’m telling you now.” But he could imagine nothing more disastrously unromantic than this current situation, and neither, by her stormy expression, could Gigi.
“How dare you?” She caught her breath. “How dare you come now and say you love me, when all you want is to take me away and abandon me in a world I hate, full of people I hate, where they write hateful things? How dare you say you love me, when you want me to run away with other gentlemen, and shoot you with a pistol, and try to k-kill myself?”
“But I—” She had stamped her foot and begun to sob, and, completely at a loss, he tried to take her in his arms and comfort her. But the girl twisted away almost violently and fled.
“But Gigi, what I want— Don’t you see, I would never do anything to hurt you?”
“Well, you have!” She was crying in earnest now, in choking, incoherent gasps. “You’ve ruined everything, and I hate you, and I’ll never speak to you again—”
Yes, prepared for a career she did not want, Lachaille thought now bitterly, tugging painfully at the points of his moustache, and for attentions he himself had never intended to force upon her. She would have been as safe with him as with her own family. He set his teeth. Safer by far, that was clear.
A groan broke free against his will, and Liane d’Exelmans, seated opposite at the table, leaned forward in a perfumed show of concern. “Gaston darling... are you quite sure you are feeling well?”
All around them in the restaurant conversation ebbed and flowed, and glasses and cutlery chinked. Waiters came and went, soft-footed and discreet; Rambertin’s prided itself upon excellent service. Gaston Lachaille could, if he had wished, have reserved a back room or even an entire establishment for his exclusive use, even here in the fashionable quarter of Paris. Had been known to do just that, in the past, when the fancy took him to entertain guests with a circus-rider or two, or throw a glittering and highly select party. To do so tonight and dine alone at the expense of all those with prior bookings would have raised more than an eyebrow or two, to be sure. But it lay well within his means, and if by such a gesture he could have relieved the smart of his ignominious exit as Gigi’s suitor he would have given way to it without a second thought.
Aching, angry and humiliated, however, the very last thing he’d wanted had been the solitude of his own company. Liane was back in town from her self-imposed Monte Carlo exile; he’d walked in quite cynically on one of her legendary little gatherings here at the Café Rambertin, secure in the knowledge that she had yet to find a suitably generous replacement.
Another hostess might have turned the cold shoulder on her gate-crashing guest. Liane had simply smiled, raised languorous long-lidded eyes to sweep him from head to toe, and called for another place to be set. For him to come crawling back to her was a feather in her cap, and they both knew it. To get him back into her bed when she had cuckolded him openly would be a triumph. No, Liane was not going to turn him away.
The familiar sweet opium of her caresses could bring him oblivion, if he would let it. If anything could do so.
Up and down the table and to either side, bright barbs of conversation flew to fill the silence; Julie Barthiaume of the Comédie-Française traded wit with Julius Hirsch of Hirsch & Ekelmann, and Martine Alvèry let out a braying crack of laughter at some piece of scandal whispered by her neighbour to the right. His friends and acquaintances. His world... from which Gigi’s clear gaze stripped away all its gilt and artifice, and recoiled.
No doubt Hirsch and the old Baron de Guilmes were already laying bets on whether Liane would succeed in reeling him in. She would be as aware of it as he was, but she gave no sign. The perfect hostess, as always, attentive to all her guests, constantly ready to intervene should the flow of conversation flag or to smooth ruffled feathers if some malicious quip went too far; he had seen her weep and heard her storm with rage, and known even then that both tears and fury were for calculated effect. Somewhere beneath the surface, perhaps, there was still some trace of unguarded feeling — but if that woman existed, she had never permitted Lachaille nor any other lover so much as a glimpse of her presence.
Oh, but Gigi —Gigi!— was blunt and impudent and everything that other women were not, and he could not endure the circling thought that he would never see her again. He had not known just how much she had come to mean to him until now, when he had lost everything by his own stupidity. Even if he were to go back, to jump eagerly at that pathetic plea of hers that they should ‘just be friends’ (and how much that rejection, in all its innocence, had hurt!), things could not be the same.
She would always be nervous of his intent; he would be constantly conscious of her. The old easy banter between them was shattered beyond recall, and it was he who had done it with one blurted admission, as if he were a schoolboy of sixteen and not a man of the world.
In Gigi’s mouth those words had rung as accusation. Grandmama says —he flinched still at the memory— you are a man of the world, and I must understand...
He’d spent ten years on the town, courted by all and sundry for the fortune acquired by his father’s industry and not his own, a young man growing older and more jaded by the day. He’d made acquaintances by the dozen, and not one friendship he could trust. He was of an age now —all but a year or two— with Gigi’s own mother, who had eloped at sixteen with her music master.
Madame Alvarez, recounting the story, had been eloquent in bemoaning her daughter Andrée’s folly; rather more reticent on the present whereabouts of Gigi’s father. Andrée had been left disillusioned, trailing an unwanted child and the remnants of a third-rate singing career.
He was a man of the world, and such stories were common enough. Perhaps he himself might not frequent the company of opera singers or of married Society ladies, but many of his acquaintance did so. Indeed, Madame Alvarez as a family friend had counselled just such a change to console him after Liane’s defection. But the fact remained that he was still young, and Andrée with a grown daughter was dwindling into middle age...
And what had he to show for those years he had known the family? Only a life that had long since lost its savour, sated with sophisticated pleasures that brought no joy, and through the shoals of which he had deluded himself he could at least help to guide Gigi.
Guide Gigi? What arrogance — what folly, when it was with Gigi that he had always sought refuge from that same society in the midst of which he was now trying to forget her!
Lachaille thrust aside the plate he had barely touched, and reached for the wine, tossing down the choice vintage of Rambertin’s providing that might as well have been dishwater. Julie Barthiaume, to his left, had just addressed some remark in his direction; he registered the sound of her voice belatedly, but not the sense of the words. Forcing a laugh, he found a reply almost at random. It did not matter in any case what one said to Julie. All she cared about was the chance to sparkle in front of an audience.
Liane, far more astute, was watching him with a frown. “Is the lobster not to your liking, Gaston? Or is there something amiss? Perhaps I might—”
He had the sensation of a band tightening and tightening about his forehead, behind his eyes, and a sudden vision of Liane’s cool fingers moving at his temples, soothing, insinuating, securing the device... A bilious wave swept up from his stomach, and he came blindly to his feet.
“Forgive me— I—”
He must have looked really ill, for there were waiters twittering about him; offers of cold water and expressions of concern. Lachaille brushed them all aside, blundering for the door. Someone proffered his coat. The door gaped before him, a symbol of escape, and outside under the streetlamps there was rain, and the rattle of traffic, and the sharp hiccough of a motor-car passing by.
His own De Dion-Bouton stood by the kerb in all its glory, but he plunged into the night air on foot and in haste, as if he were a hunted man. It was not until he had gone quite three blocks, breathing hard, that his head began to clear, and it dawned on him that for the second time that day he had not only made a disastrous exit but left without his hat.
He could afford a dozen new silk hats and straw boaters. Had half a dozen more of each at home, for that matter. But Gigi would never let him hear the last of it...
Only there would be no more Gigi. The loss of that hit him afresh, jolting his mind from the old familiar track in which it had unthinkingly begun to run. There would be no more teasing and rivalry from Gigi. There would be no more dawning beauty in Gigi. There would be no more refuge of any kind in the Alvarez household, where he had no place now save as a customer, to pick over the goods for sale — and in that role, whatever bargains her grandmother might drive, Gigi herself had made it all too clear he was unwelcome. He could not go back. He had to go back. Not to do so was unthinkable — unbearable.
There would be a rich heiress and marriage in his future, nights spent at home by the family hearth... and no Gigi. He had long since had a surfeit of Liane and her ilk, and he did not suppose domesticity would be any great sacrifice — but those carefree afternoons in Gigi’s company had been the one thing of any real value in this town, out of the whole of that vast fortune that hung around his neck.
Lachaille set his teeth. He had made a very great fool of himself, and had been put in a quite impossible position. He was furious with her, with her grandmother, and the whole family, from Aunt Alicia, who gave lessons in entrapping men, to Andrée and her all too belated virtue. It was over and he wanted nothing more to do with any of them. A spatter of rain cut across his cheek like icy tears.
Having resolved he would not think of Gigi again, he found himself walking faster and faster to outpace those same thoughts. The solitude of his rooms had not helped; the presence of witty company had not helped. Midnight’s chill and sheer physical exhaustion finally brought a numbness of sorts. A quarter-bottle of brandy, consumed over a dying fire in his dressing-room after changing his soaked garments, brought oblivion.
He dreamed of marriage, and playing piquet on the hearth-rug, and woke late and with an ache behind his eyes. That afternoon at half-past three he found himself hovering, indecisive, on Madame Alvarez’ doorstep, one hand on the bell.
He had come to retrieve his boater, that was all. If Gigi was there or if she was not, it was completely immaterial. After all, he had resolved to look for a wife.