Paris Requiem Read Online Free PDF Page B

for your Parisian holiday, Jim.’
    James studied him. Raf had changed. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but there was a quickness to his movements, a kind of contained determination, where before there had been cocky languor. He had always had an abundance of charm, been almost excessively handsome, but his features now seemed sharper, more defined, edged with drama. The dark eyes, once sleepy, darted with an intelligence he had failed previously to notice in them. They made him feel big and slow and somehow inert in comparison. The longer fall of hair, the sweep of moustache were incidentals. It was more that Raf seemed to have been put into a firm and foreign mould and had turned out successfully – had turned into a man. He wondered what, aside from time itself, had wrought the change.
    ‘I hadn’t intended exactly a holiday.’
    ‘No, of course. You’re here to urge the return of the prodigal . And his hapless sister. We mustn’t forget her. Have her letters been complaining about me?’
    ‘Not in the least.’
    ‘Well, that’s something. Not that I believe you.’
    The hostility in Raf’s voice was a surprise. His younger siblings had always been so close. A mere woman couldn’t have produced this animosity. There had been women in Raf’s life before. Plenty of women.
    ‘It’s just that Mother …’ James began again.
    ‘Wants me back.’ Raf finished for him.
    ‘Yes.’
    Plates had arrived brimming with fries and slabs of steak. Raf dug into his meat. ‘Her letters have hardly been unclear on that point. They make my own virtually impossible.’
    ‘She’s ailing.’
    ‘Aren’t we all!’ His voice had grown grim. ‘Look, Jim, to be perfectly blunt, I can’t think about all that now. I’ve got rather more pressing business.’ He looked at his plate and pushed it abruptly aside.
    ‘The dead girl … Now that … that she’s gone, why is she your business?’
    Raf didn’t answer. He was staring into the distance, his knife and fork forgotten.
    ‘I met her father earlier,’ James continued. ‘Not altogether a prepossessing figure.’
    ‘What do you know about it, Jim?’ Raf stabbed the air with his fork. ‘You think the man’s had the advantages of our alma mater. Not to mention the grandparental millions.’
    James persisted with a kind of perverse stubbornness. ‘Mother has been worrying about the company you keep.’
    ‘So that’s it, is it? The gossips have been at it. Worrying her about the fact that Olympe is Jewish. Well, the dear woman must worry about something.’
    ‘She thinks,’ James invented brashly, ‘that this whole Dreyfus matter you’ve been so immersed in also influenced your choice of … of women.’
    Raf glared at him. ‘Let her think what she will. It hardly matters now.’
    ‘So you’ll come home?’
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Jim.’
    Silence covered them, edged with animosities, old and new. At least he had got it out, James thought. He had hardly presumed, whatever the circumstances, that Raf would be instantly amenable. But what next? He hailed the waiter andasked for another round, just to cut through the thickness of the atmosphere.
    Raf fixed him with an intractable gaze indicating that he was willing to talk, but not about coming home.
    ‘How did you happen on Monsieur Arnhem?’
    ‘He came to Madame de Landois’s home. She was excessively kind.’
    ‘Hardly surprising. Narrowness is not one of Marguerite’s characteristics.’ He paused, waiting for James to take in the comparison, then asked softly, ‘What did he say?’
    ‘He was hoping to have some news of his daughter. He was worried. Rightly as it turns out.’
    ‘Some forms of parental worry are more justified than others.’
    James nodded equably enough, despite Raf’s ready provocation . ‘How did you come to be … to be involved with the girl?’
    Raf didn’t seem to have heard him. He looked tormented, as if Olympe’s lifeless body were once again before