Chapter 13

William liked women. He was a lucky man: they liked him too. When he caught a woman’s eye, his face lit up and smiled. She would usually look away but the continued presence of his persistent stare almost inevitably made her look back again. The smile would broaden and spread: from him to her.
After the smile, the spiel. With his clear voice and relaxed, open manner, the ensuing good-humoured ‘interrogation’ was easier to go along with than ignore, especially when, by some curious coincidence, he happened to get off at the same station.
In front of the Sorbonne, there’s a row of cafés. Throughout the summer months, the parasols are besieged by tourists, students, loafers and, of course, the odd Casanova like William.
She didn’t exactly walk, she glade or glied or whatever the past participle is. Like some feather-light Balkan dancer, she wove her way between the tables and sat down facing the musicians in the square. Her name was Sophie. She was from the south of France, in Paris looking for a job.
She was beautiful. She had a book. She didn’t look at her watch. She didn’t take her cellphone out. The signs were good.
William changed places.
“Boccherini!” The voice behind sounded as if it were trying to tempt her with a strange variety of Italian ice-cream. She turned and looked into a pair of dark eyes, handsome dark eyes with the corners pulled back in a smile. The look he gave was solid and unwavering. Then he smiled again: “It’s one of the opus 2 string quartets, but,” he nodded towards the musicians, “they’ve dropped a violin and the viola of course.”
She looked at him uncertainly. “Of course...”
He smiled. “I’m cheating! They were explaining just before you arrived.” The last thing he needed was to come over as a know-all.
“Aah!” She exclaimed, relieved, and pulled a wry, clever-clogs smirk on him.
“What’s that you’re reading?” he said, and picked up her book. “Africa? Amazing place! You going there?” Travel is always a good place to start, people like travelling. Sophie wasn’t going anywhere yet, but it’s nice to dream, and William had the charm and stories that dreams were made of.
“May I?” he asked, and moved to her table.
It was a beautiful afternoon, warm and lazy, and it was nice to forget about jobs for a while. William played with his words, making her laugh, thoughtful, comfortable, then laugh again. And on they talked. But, no, Sophie did not like Paris.
“What?” he burst out. And William decided it was time to show her around. “You come with me.”
Chatting, arguing, smiling, they ambled up past the Panthéon, wandering in and out of side-streets, joking, pointing out courtyards, strange windows. It didn’t really matter where. They passed a baker’s where Cartier Bresson (“Oh, so you’re a photographer are you?”) took one of his famous pictures. And then they saw the painted sign of a porpoise and a boy.
“I’m hungry, will you eat with me?”

Bald and lanky, Ares comes out of the kitchen in a maze of mispronunciation and smiles “Aah! Bonsoir! Comment allez-vous, Monsieur? Et la belle demoiselle?” Thirty years in France had still not put a dent in his Cretan accent.
A crafty wink and conniving eyebrow. His eyes dance with delight as he bustles around the table, whisking off old tablecloths, laying knives, forks and glasses in a warm, enveloping welcome.
William feels good here, comfortable in the knowledge of how much it will cost and, even if the rest of the evening turns out a failure, certain of an excellent meal.
Ares never saw the same girl twice. William flitted from one to the next with the compulsion of a butterfly. And if the blossom did not yield its precious nectar, he would simply move on, the meadow was rich.
They sat beneath the cobalt poster of Crete. Saturated skies and immense dark seas. Cliffs of white-washed buildings perched on top of the other.
“Now that’s somewhere I’d love to go.”
“Mmm!”
“Nearest I’ve got to that is the south of France in the middle of summer... place is swarming with bloody tourists!”
“Not everywhere; at least, not where I come from.”
“Oh? Where’s that?”
“Sète.”
“I know, that’s close to Béziers, isn’t it?”
“Umm, not far...”
“Well? Go on, tell me more! Here I am, jabbering away for hours on end and I know nothing about you at all. What do you do?” And his eyebrows crept up as if to say “now we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty”.
“There’s not really much to say really.”
He groaned, smiled a disparaging smile and shook his head in pity.
“How old are you?” He looked at her face, did a quick calculation and took off five for safety. “About twenty-three, twenty-four? And you say ‘nothing much!’ Do you really expect me to believe that?”
She laughed.
“Wait a minute, let me do it, I’ll tell you, give me your hand!”
“What on earth for?” she said, and a wary now-what’s-he-up-to? expression crept across her face.
“Don’t argue, just give me your hand, your right one.”
Sophie moved her hand between the bottle and glasses.
“Let me see if I can penetrate the mysteries of your past,” he uttered in a gruff, deep-throated stage-rumble. “Hmm, so your mother was a trapeze artiste was she?…”
Sophie laughed. “No she was not! She was a perfectly ordinary mother and housewife who...”
“Yes! That’s what they all say...”
“Utter rubbish!”
“Let me continue!” And he stroked her palm with his thumb, following the lines and playing his finger-tips across her warm pink hand. She looked at him with mixed feelings, part aware he was having her on, and part unsure about what his game of palmistry (chiromancing?) really concealed... but enjoying the ambiguous flirting, the game of subtle seduction. He did have beautiful eyes: dark brown with an ever so slightly rascally glint, but the pupil was fathomless, bathed in jet black reflections, an inviting pool into which you just lay back and floated, soft, warm, comforting, and sensual, so sensual.
“Let me continue,” he repeated softly, and told her a future of fabulous wealth, foreign countries and five children…
“Five!” she laughed, regretfully pulling her hand away, delighted by his nonsense. “Where on earth do you dig it all up?”
“Sorry, I get a bit carried away sometimes. Maybe I should have been an actor, that’s what I’d have really liked to be.” He paused. “You know, it’s strange, but the more I look at you, the more I feel I’ve seen you somewhere before...”
“Oh yes?...” she quizzed, expecting another outburst of unlikely gibberish.
“No, seriously! There’s something about you... Ah! I know. There’s a painting in the Musée d’Orsay of an extraordinarily beautiful woman called I can’t remember what. You look just like her, especially the eyes. And the...” he stopped and looked intently into her face.
“Go on, flattery will get you everywhere!” Spoken as a jest, it belied her inner nervousness. The passage from gangly school-girl to the fullness of adult femininity had not been accompanied by total self-assurance.
He muttered something under his breath, “... remarkably beautiful...”
Her face warmed. They sat in silence for a few moments.
He smiled gently at her. Across the table, Sophie toyed with her glass. She sipped, and William watched her lower lip press against the rim. She replaced the glass on the table and dabbed her mouth with the napkin. She was aware of his eyes on her lips.
Again she studied his face. He was handsome, in an unusual sort of way. At times, his face would cloud over and a furrow would set in between the eyebrows. Then his eyes lit up again and the furrow and two lines on his forehead vanished. He had a multitude of expressions.
“Umm,” she mused, “he would make a good actor.” And she believed in this as apart from his immediate behaviour. She liked him. Behind all his claptrap, she discerned a profoundly human person. He was somebody she felt she could trust, his jokes were so obviously jokes, his humour so utterly shareable, that the complicity she felt seemed perfectly natural. She looked at his hands, they were...
“You’re dreaming!” he called out in a soft sing-song voice.
“Oh, sorry, I was just thinking about...” But did not finish. William had made an abrupt movement with his head. Sophie turned round. Malinka and her little sister had arrived, two delicious gypsy girls of about eleven and eight all dressed up in their brightly-coloured rags and finery. He always spoiled them. If he was unaccompanied when they came in, he bought them ice-cream or one of Ares’s delicious honey-yoghurts. Malinka would tease him for being alone and flirt outrageously. She was a very intelligent and quick-witted girl, what they call ‘street-wise’, only in her case, the epithet fit. She did not mix business with pleasure.
She approached William with a little-girl smile.
“Buy a beautiful rose for the beautiful lady, Monsieur.”
“Hmm...” He glanced cursorily over the flowers, then looked into Sophie’s eyes as she tried to shake her head and look elsewhere. “Let me see.” And Malinka moved up closer to the table. She peered timidly at the beautiful lady, her big eyes full of wonder (and strongly resenting her own lack of breasts). William was leaning over, sniffing delicately at the half-opened buds.
He sat back and his eyes darted from Sophie to the flowers and back again, looking at her lips, her dress, her neck and the soft gulley in the middle, comparing the colours with those of the roses. At last, he picked out three and held them to his nose. He closed his eyelids, and his nostrils quivered. Then his face relaxed and a smile of satisfaction creased the corners of his eyes.
“This one, how much?” he demanded.
“Two euros, Monsieur” came the meek reply.
“Two euros!” he cried, “for this?”
Sophie started. Her face fell, she was flabbergasted. The last thing she would have imagined was him being mean, and here he was arguing over a miserable rose with a child who ought to be in bed at that time of night. She was furious.
“Alright,” said the little gypsy girl, “three.”
She must have misheard.
“No, you’re going to have to do better than that,” he ordered.
Sophie still couldn’t work out what was going on. Why on earth did he insist on embarrassing her with this miserly haggling?
“OK, you asked for it: five!”
“Ah! That’s better! Five it is then.” And the whole charade dawned on her. She breathed a more than obvious sigh of relief.
William slipped a folded-up note into the girl’s fist.
“Merci, Monsieur!” she exclaimed in a somewhat exaggerated tone, then impishly stuck the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, a closing riposte, and was off, dragging her sister behind.
“You little witch!” he thought, “I’ll get you for that!” then smiled and raised his eyes to Sophie’s.
“You bastard!” she hissed, “you utter bastard, doing that to me, I’ve never felt so... oooh...” and let out the steam.
A huge smirk was plastered all over his face. He simply sat there, gently twirling the rose over his lips as he basked in the glow of a highly successful baiting session.
“Finished?” he asked, eyebrows aloft. Sophie’s face was a mixture of livid delight tinged with reluctant admiration. He raised the rose once more and took a final sniff. He leaned forward over the table and beckoned her with his finger. She moved forward cautiously. He beckoned a second time and their faces came within a foot of each other. Holding the rose by the top of the stem, he began softly rubbing the tips of the petals against her neck, below the ear. Sophie took in a deep breath through her nose. His fingers barely touching, he drew her chin a few inches nearer, leaned over and searched out the scent. Too little. He pulled back a petal, let his forefinger slip in and squeezed it, rubbing the dark pink surface. Still touching her chin, he placed his fingertip on the spot he’d been stroking with the rose, and massaged a small area of skin. This time, when he smelled, he let his nose touch. Sophie closed her eyes for a second.
Sitting back and watching her closely, he started snapping off thorns from the middle of the stem, standing them on the table one by one like a column of sharks closing in on their prey. He placed the rose lengthways in front of her lips. She parted her teeth in a gleaming flamenco smile, and bit.

“Shall we go?” He got up and went to the counter to settle the bill and avoid the ugly undertones of payment, then fetched her jacket. As he wrapped it round her shoulders, he bent down and placed his head near her neck. “You smell nice.”
Sophie did not reply. Be cool.
They stepped out into the evening air. The street was lit and shop-windows bathed them in a friendly glow of warmth. They walked down the road in silence. At the corner, he stopped and took her by the arm. They stood facing one another. Sophie was uneasy, she glanced down at her feet. His hand rose and lifted her head. He smiled softly, almost sadly. Once more, the glint in his eye appeared and he leaned over and kissed her on the temple, then lifted a wisp of hair and stroked it behind her ear. She smiled sheepishly, momentarily distraught by the indecisiveness of the situation, longing to throw her arms around his neck, hold and be held.
He fixed his gaze on her, searching her face; his eyebrows knitted slightly and a questioning frown formed for a second or two. Sophie watched his eyes as they moved over her face, flickering from eyes to lips, from forehead to chin, to her cheeks and back into her own gaze. He placed his hands on either side of her head and gently drew her to him, kissing her on the lips, pressing the soft flesh to his own, feeling the delicate pressure where the upper lip meets the skin above, sensing the unsteady movements from within.

The next morning, he kissed her one last time, and said good-bye. She never saw him again. ¶ 1:57 AM