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pretended to browse among racks of paint brushes until Gauthier was free. Then he said:
    ‘M. Gauthier! How goes it?’ Jonathan extended a hand.
    Gauthier clasped Jonathan’s hand in both his own and smiled. ‘And you, my friend?’
    ‘Well enough, thank you…. Ecoutez’ I don’t want to take your time – but there is something I would like to ask you.’
    ‘Yes? What’s that?’
    Jonathan beckoned Gauthier farther away from the door which might open at any minute. There was not much standing room in the little shop. ‘I heard from a friend – my friend Alan, you remember? The Englishman. At the party at my house a few weeks ago.’
    ‘Yes! Your friend the Englishman. Alain.’ Gauthier remembered and looked attentive.
    Jonathan tried to avoid even glancing at Gauthier’s false eye, but to concentrate on the other eye. ‘Well, it seems you told Alan that you’d heard I was very ill, maybe not going to live much longer.’
    Gauthier’s soft face grew solemn. He nodded. ‘Yes, m’sieur, I did hear that. I hope it’s not true. I remember Alain, because you introduced him to me as your best friend. So I assumed he knew. Perhaps I should have said nothing. I am sorry, it was perhaps tactless. I thought you were – in the English style – putting on a brave face.’
    ‘It’s nothing serious, M. Gauthier, because as far as I know, it’s not true! I’ve just spoken with my doctor. But —’
    ‘ Ah, bon! Ah well, that’s different! I’m delighted to hear that, M. Trevanny! Ha! Ha!’ Pierre Gauthier gave a clap of laughter as if a ghost had been laid, and he found not only Jonathan but himself back among the living.
    ‘But I’d like to know where you heard this. Who told you I was ill?’
    ‘Ah – yes!’ Gauthier pressed a finger to his lips, thinking. ‘Who? A man. Yes – of course? He had it, but he paused.
    Jonathan waited.
    ‘But I remember he said he wasn’t sure. He’d heard it, he said. An incurable blood disease, he said.’
    Jonathan felt warm with anxiety again, as he had felt several times in the past week. He wet his lips. ‘But who? How did he hear it? Didn’t he say?’
    Gauthier again hesitated. ‘Since it isn’t true – shouldn’t we best forget it?’
    ‘Someone you know very well?’
    ‘No! Not at all well, I assure you.’
    ‘A customer.’
    ‘Yes. Yes, he is. A nice man, a gentleman. But since he said he wasn’t sure – Really, m’sieur, you shouldn’t bear a resentment, although I can understand how you could resent such a remark.’
    ‘Which leads to the interesting question how did the gentleman come to hear I was very ill,’ Jonathan went on, laughing now.
    ‘Yes. Exactly. Well, the point is, it isn’t true. Isn’t that the main thing?’
    Jonathan saw in Gauthier a French politeness, and unwillingness to alienate a customer, and – which was to be expected – an aversion to the subject of death. ‘You’re right. That’s the main thing.’ Jonathan shook hands with Gauthier, both of them smiling now, and bade him adieu.
    That very day at lunch, Simone asked Jonathan if he had heard from Alan. Jonathan said yes.
    ‘It was Gauthier who said something to Alan.’
    ‘Gauthier? The art shop man?’
    ‘Yes.’ Jonathan was lighting a cigarette over his coffee. Georges had gone out into the garden. ‘I went to see Gauthier this morning and I asked him where he’d heard it. He said from a customer. A man. – Funny, isn’t it? Gauthier wouldn’t tell me who, and I can’t really blame him. It’s some mistake, of course. Gauthier realizes that.’
    ‘But it’s a shocking thing,’ said Simone.
    Jonathan smiled, knowing Simone wasn’t really shocked, since she knew Dr Perrier had given him rather good news. ‘As we say in English, one must not make a mountain out of a molehill.’
    In the following week, Jonathan bumped into Dr Perrier in the Rue Grande, the doctor in a hurry to enter the Société Générale before it shut at twelve sharp. But