The Night Manager

NINE

It is mother's day as Jonathan walks into Esperance. His third cement truck in four hundred miles has dropped him on the crossroads at the top of the Avenue des Artisans. The signs as he strides down the sidewalk swinging his Third World air bag read merci maman, bienvenue á toutes les mamans and vaste buffet chinois des meres. The northern sun is an elixir to him. When he breathes, it is as if he is breathing light as well as air. I'm home. It's me.

After eight months of snow, this easy-living gold town in the province of Quebec is hopping in the evening sunshine, which is what the town is famous for among its sister townships strewn along the largest greenstone mineral belt in the world. It hops higher than Timmins to the west in stodgy Ontario, higher than Val-d'Or or Amos to the east, higher by a mile than the dreary white-collar settlements of hydro-electric engineers up north. Daffodils and tulips strut like soldiers in the garden of the white church with its leaden roof and narrow spire; dandelions as big as dollars cover the grass slope below the police station. After their winter's wait beneath the snow, the flowers are as rampant as the town. The shops for the suddenly rich or merely hopeful ― the Boutique Bebe with its pink giraffes, the pizza cafes named after lucky miners and prospectors, the Pharmacie des Croyants, which offers hypnotherapy and massage, the neon-lit bars named after Venus and Apollo, the stately whorehouses after vanished madams, the Japanese sauna house with its pagoda and plastic pebble garden, the banks of every colour and persuasion, the jewellery stores where the high-graders used to melt the miners' stolen ore and occasionally still do, the wedding shops with their virginal wax brides, the Polish delicatessen advertising "films super erotiques XXX" as if they were a culinary event, the restaurants open all hours for shift workers, even the notaries with their blackened windows ― all sparkle in the glory of the early summer, and merci Maman for all of it: on va avoir du fun!

As Jonathan glances into shop windows or gratefully upward at the blue heaven and lets the sunlight warm his hollowed face, motorcyclists with beards and dark glasses roar up and down the street, racing their engines and flicking their leather backsides at the girls who sip their Cokes at outdoor tables on the sidewalk. In Esperance the girls stand out like parakeets. The matrons of stodgy Ontario next door may dress themselves like sofas at a funeral, but here in Esperance the hot-blooded Québécois make a carnival every day, in radiant cottons and gold bracelets that smile at you across the street.

There are no trees in Esperance. With forests all around, the townspeople see open space as an accomplishment. And there are no Indians in Esperance, or not so that you'd notice, unless like Jonathan you spot one with his wife and family, loading a pickup with a thousand dollars' worth of provisions from the supermarché. One of them stays aboard the truck to guard it, while the rest hang close.

There are no vulgar emblems of wealth in the town either, if you discount the seventy-five-thousand-dollar power yachts in the parking lot beside the Chateau Babette's kitchens, or the herds of Harley-Davidson motorcycles clustered round the Bonnie and Clyde Saloon. Canadians ― French or any other sort ― don't care for display, whether of money or emotion. Fortunes are still made, of course, by those who strike it lucky. And luck is the real religion of the town. Everyone dreams of a gold mine in his garden, and a couple of the lucky ones have found just that. Those men in baseball hats and sneakers and bomber jackets who stand about talking into mobile phones: in other towns they would be drug pushers or numbers boys or pimps, but here in Esperance they are the quiet millionaires of thirty. As to the older ones, they eat their lunches out of tin boxes a mile below ground.

Jonathan devours all this in the first minutes of his arrival. In his state of bright-eyed exhaustion, he takes in everything at once, while his heart bursts with the gratitude of a voyager setting foot on the promised shore. It's beautiful. I worked for it. It's mine.

* * *

He had ridden out of the Lanyon at daybreak without looking back, and headed for Bristol for his week of lying low. He had parked his motorbike in a run-down suburb where Rooke had promised to have it stolen, he had taken a bus to Avonmouth, where he found a seamen's hostel run by two elderly Irish homosexuals who, according to Rooke, were famous for not collaborating with the police. It rained all day and night, and on the third day, while Jonathan was eating breakfast, he heard his name and description on the local radio: last seen West Cornwall area, injured right hand, ring this number. While he listened he saw the two Irishmen listening too, their eyes fixed on one another. He paid his bill and took the bus back to Bristol.

Vile cloud rolled over the wrecked industrial landscape. Hand in pocket ― he had reduced the dressing to a simple adhesive bandage ― he walked the damp streets. Seated in a barber's chair, he glimpsed his picture on the back of someone's evening paper, the photograph that Burr's people had taken of him in London: a likeness deliberately unlike, but still a likeness. He became a ghost, haunting a ghost town. In the cafes and billiard halls he was too white and separate, in the smarter streets too ragged. The churches, when he tried to enter them, were locked. His face when he checked it in mirrors scared him with its hostile intensity. Jumbo's faked death was like a goad to him. Visions of his supposed victim unmurdered and unhunted, carousing serenely in some secret haven, taunted him at all odd moments. Nevertheless, in his other persona, he determinedly shouldered the guilt of his imaginary crime. He bought a pair of leather gloves and threw away his bandage. To buy his air ticket he spent a morning inspecting travel agents before he chose the busiest and most anonymous. He paid in cash and made the booking for two days later, in the name of Fine. Then he took the bus to the airport and changed his booking to the flight that same evening. There was one seat left. At the departure gate a girl in mulberry uniform asked to see his passport. He pulled off a glove and gave it to her with his good hand.

"Are you Pine or Fine then?" she demanded.

"Whichever you prefer," he assured her, with a flash of the old hotelier's smile, and she grudgingly waved him through ― or had Rooke squared them?

When he reached Paris he dared not risk the barrier at Orly, so he sat up in the transit area all night. In the morning he took a flight to Lisbon, this time in the name of Dine, for on Rooke's advice he was trying to stay one jump ahead of the computer. In Lisbon he again made for the docks and again lay low.

"She's called the Star of Bethel, and she's a pig," Rooke had said. "But the skipper's venal, which is what you're looking for."

He saw a half-bearded man trailing from one shipping office to another in the rain, and the man was himself. He saw the same man pay a girl for a night's lodging, then sleep on her floor while she lay on her bed and whimpered because she was afraid of him. Would she be less afraid of me if I slept with her? He didn't stay to find out but, leaving her before dawn, walked the docks once more and came upon the Star of Bethel moored in the outer harbour, a filthy, twelve-thousand-ton coaling vessel bound for Pugwash, Nova Scotia. But when he asked at the shipping agent's, they said she had a full complement and was sailing on the night tide. Jonathan bribed his way aboard. Was the captain expecting him? Jonathan believed he was.

"What can you do, son?" the captain asked. He was a big, soft-spoken Scot of forty. Behind him stood a barefoot Filipino girl of seventeen.

"Cook," said Jonathan, and the captain laughed in his face but took him as a supernumerary on condition he worked his passage and the captain pocketed his pay.

Now he was a galley slave, sleeping in the worst bunk and receiving the insults of the crew. The official cook was an emaciated Lascar, half dead from heroin, and soon Jonathan was doing duty for them both. In his few hours of sleep he dreamed the lush dreams of prisoners, and it was Jed without her Meister's bathrobe who played the leading role. Then a sunny morning dawned and the crew were patting him on the back and saying they had never been better fed at sea. But Jonathan would not go ashore with them. Equipped with rations he had set aside, the close observer preferred to make himself a hideaway in the forward hold and lie up for two more nights before sneaking past the dock police.

Alone in an immense and unfamiliar continent, Jonathan was assailed by a different kind of deprivation. His resolve seemed suddenly to drain into the brilliant thinness of the landscape. Roper is an abstraction, so is Jed and so am I. I am dead and this is my afterlife. Trekking along the edge of the uncaring highway, sleeping in drivers' dormitories and barns, scrounging a day's pay for two days' labour, Jonathan prayed to be given back his sense of calling.

"Your best bet is the Château Babette," Rooke had said. "It's big and sloppy, and it's run by a harridan who can't keep staff. It's where you'd naturally hole out."

"It's the ideal place for you to start looking for your shadow," Burr had said.

Shadow meaning identity. Shadow meaning substance, in a world where Jonathan had become a ghost.

* * *

The Château Babette roosted like a tattered old hen amid the razzmatazz of the Avenue des Artisans. She was the Meister's of the town. Jonathan spotted her at once from Rooke's description, and as he approached her he remained on the opposite pavement so that he could take a better look at her. She was tall and timbered and decrepit and, for a former whorehouse, stern. A stone urn stood at each corner of her hideous porch. Flaking naked maidens cavorted on them in a woodland setting. Her hallowed name was blazoned vertically on a rotting wooden board, and as Jonathan started across the road, a sharp east wind made it clatter like a railway train, filling his eyes with grit and his nostrils with smells of frites and hair spray.

Striding up the steps, he confidently pushed the ancient swing doors and entered the darkness of a tomb. From far away, as it seemed to him at first, he heard male laughter and caught the stink of last night's dinner. Gradually he made out an embossed copper postbox, then a grandfather clock with flowers on its face that reminded him of the Lanyon, then a reception desk littered with correspondence and coffee mugs and illuminated by a canopy of fairy lights. The shapes of men surrounded him, and it was they who were doing the laughing. His arrival had evidently coincided with that of a bunch of raunchy surveyors from Quebec, who were looking for a little action before taking off next day for a mine up north. Their suitcases and kit bags were flung in a heap at the foot of a wide staircase. Two Slavic-looking boys in earrings and green aprons picked sullenly among the labels.

"Et vous, monsieur, vous etes qui?" a woman's voice yelled at him above the hubbub.

Jonathan made out the queenly form of Madame Latulipe, the proprietress, standing behind the desk in a mauve turban and cake makeup. She had tilted her head back in order to quiz him and she was playing to her all-male audience.

"Jacques Beauregard," he replied.

"Comment, cheri?"

He had to repeat it above the din: "Beauregard," he called, unused to raising his voice. But somehow the name came easier to him than Linden.

"Pas d'bagage?"

"Pas de bagage."

"Alors, bon soir et amusez-vous Men, m'sieu," Madame Latulipe yelled back at him as she handed him his key. It occurred to Jonathan that she had mistaken him for a member of the surveyors' party, but he saw no need to enlighten her.

"Allez-vous manger avec nous a'soir, M'sieu Beauregard?" she called, waking to his good looks as he started up the stairs.

Jonathan thought not, thank you, madame. Time he got some sleep.

"But one cannot sleep on an empty stomach, M'sieu Beauregard!" Madame Latulipe protested flirtatiously, once more for the benefit of her raucous guests. "One must have energy to sleep if one is a man! N'est-ce pas, mes gars?"

Pausing at the half-landing, Jonathan bravely joined the laughter but insisted nonetheless that he must sleep.

"Bien, tant pis d'abord!" cried Madame Latulipe.

Neither his unscheduled arrival nor his unkempt appearance disturbed her. Unkempt is reassuring in Esperance, and to Madame Latulipe, the town's self-elected cultural arbiter, a sign of spirituality. He was farouche, but farouche in her book meant noble, and she had detected Art in his face. He was a sauvage distingue, her favourite kind of man. By his accent she had arbitrarily ruled him French. Or perhaps Belgian. She was not an expert; she took her holidays in Florida. All she knew was, when he spoke French she could understand him, but when she spoke back at him he looked as insecure as all Frenchmen looked when they heard what Madame Latulipe was convinced was the true, the uncorrupted version of their tongue.

Nevertheless, on the strength of these impulsive observations, Madame Latulipe made a pardonable error. She placed Jonathan, not on one of the floors convenient for receiving lady guests, but in her grenier, in one of four pretty attic rooms that she liked to hold in reserve for her fellow bohemians. And she gave no thought to the fact ― but then why should she? ― that her daughter, Yvonne, had made her temporary refuge two doors down.

* * *

For four days Jonathan remained in the hotel without attracting more than his share of Madame Latulipe's consuming interest in her male guests.

"But you have deserted your group!" she cried at him, in mock alarm, when he appeared next morning late and alone for breakfast. "You are not a surveyor anymore? You have resigned? You wish to become a poet perhaps? In Esperance we write many poems."

Seeing him return in the evening, she asked him whether he had composed an elegy today, or painted a masterpiece. She suggested he take dinner, but he again declined.

"You have eaten somewhere else, m'sieu?" she demanded in mock accusation.

He smiled and shook his head.

"Tant pis d'abord," she said, which was her habitual reply to almost everything.

Otherwise he was room 306 to her, no trouble. It was not until Thursday, when he asked her for a job, that she subjected him to closer scrutiny. "What kind of job, man gars?" she enquired. "You wish to sing for us in the disco perhaps? You play the violin?"

But she was already on the alert. She caught his glance and renewed her impression of a man separate from the many. Perhaps too separate. She examined his shirt and decided it was the one he had been wearing when he arrived. Another prospector has gambled his last dollar, she thought. At least we haven't been paying for his meals.

"Any job," he replied.

"But there are many jobs in Esperance, Jacques." Madame Latulipe objected.

"I've tried them," said Jonathan, looking back on three days of Gallic shrugs or worse. "I tried the restaurants, the hotels, the boatyard and the lake marinas. I tried four mines, two logging companies, the cement works, two gas stations and the paper mill. They didn't like me either."

"But why not? You are very beautiful, very sensitive. Why do they not like you, Jacques?"

"They want papers. My social insurance number. Proof of Canadian citizenship. Proof I'm a landed immigrant."

"And you don't have these? None? You are too aesthetic?"

"My passport's with the immigration authorities in Ottawa. It's being processed. They wouldn't believe me. I'm Swiss," he added, as if that explained their incredulity.

But by then Madame Latulipe had pushed the button for her husband.

Andre Latulipe had been born not Latulipe but Kviatkovski. It was only when his wife inherited the hotel from her father that he had consented to change his name to hers for the sake of perpetuating a branch of the Esperance nobility. He was a first-generation immigrant with a cherub's face and a broad, blank forehead and a mane of premature white hair. He was small and stocky and as fidgety as men become at fifty when they have worked themselves nearly to death and start to wonder why. As a child, Andrzej Kviatkovski had been hidden in cellars and smuggled over snowy mountain passes at dead of night. He had been held and questioned and released. He knew what it was to stand in front of uniforms and pray. He glanced at Jonathan's room bill and was impressed, as his wife had been, that it comprised no extra charges. A swindler would have used the telephone, signed tabs at the bar and in the restaurant. The Latulipes had had a few swindlers in their day, and that was what they did.

The bill still in his hand, Latulipe looked Jonathan slowly up and down, much as his wife had done before him, but with insight: at his wanderer's brown boots, scuffed but mysteriously clean; at his hands, small and workmanlike, held respectfully to his sides; at his trim stance and harrowed features and the spark of desperation in the eyes. And Monsieur Latulipe was moved to kinship by the sight of a man fighting for a toehold in a better world.

"What can you do?" he asked.

"Cook," said Jonathan.

He had joined the family. And Yvonne.

* * *

She knew him immediately: yes. It was as if, through the agency of her appalling mother, signals that might have taken months to exchange were transmitted and received in a second.

"This is Jacques, our very latest secret," said Madame Latulipe, not bothering to knock but flinging open an attic bedroom door not ten yards along the passage from his own.

And you are Yvonne, he thought, with a mysterious shedding of shame.

A desk stood at the centre of the floor. A wooden reading lamp lit one side of her face. She was typing, and when she knew it was her mother she continued typing to the end, so that Jonathan had to endure the tension of looking at a mop of untidy fair hair until she chose to lift her head. A single bed was shoved along the wall. Stacked baskets of laundered bed sheets took up the remaining space. There was order, but there were no keepsakes and no photographs. Just a sponge bag by the handbasin, and on the bed a lion with a zipper down its tummy for her nightdress. For a sickening moment it reminded Jonathan of Sophie's slaughtered Pekingese. I killed the dog too, he thought.

"Yvonne is our family genius, n'est-ce pas, ma chère? She has studied art, she has studied philosophy, she has read every book that was ever printed in the world. N'est-ce pas, ma chèrie? Now she is pretending to be our housekeeper, she is living like a nun, and in two months she will be married to Thomas."

"And she types," said Jonathan, God alone knew why.

A letter slowly disgorged itself from the printer. Yvonne was looking at him, and he saw the left side of her face in naked detail: the straight, untamed eye, her father's Slavic brow and uncompromising jaw, the silk-fine hairs on the cheekbone, and the side of her strong neck as it descended into her shirt. She was wearing her key chain like a necklace, and as she straightened herself the keys settled with a clink between her breasts.

She stood up, tall and at first glance mannish. They shook hands; it was her idea. He felt no hesitation. Why should he, Beauregard, new to Esperance and life? Her palm was firm and dry. She was wearing jeans, and again it was her left side that he noticed by the light of the desk lamp: the tight denim creases that stretched from the crotch across her left thigh. After that it was the formal precision of her touch.

You're a retired wildcat, he decided, as she calmly returned his glance. You took early lovers. You rode pillion on Harley-Davidsons while you were high on pot or worse. Now at twenty-something you've reached a plateau, known otherwise as compromise. You're too sophisticated for the provinces but too provincial for the city. You're engaged to marry someone boring, and you're struggling to make him more. You are Jed but on a downward slope. You are Jed with Sophie's gravitas.

She dressed him, with her mother looking on.

* * *

The staff uniforms were hung in a walk-in airing cupboard on the half-landing one flight down. Yvonne led the way, and by the time she opened the cupboard door he knew that for all her outdoor manners, she had a woman's walk ― neither the swagger of a tomboy nor the watch-me roll of a teenager, but the straight-hipped authority of a grown and sexual woman.

"For the kitchen, Jacques wears white and only white, and laundered every day, Yvonne. Never the same clothes from one day to the next, Jacques; it is a rule of my house, as everybody knows. At the Babette, one is passionately conscious of hygiene. Tant pis d'abord."

While her mother chattered, Yvonne held first the while jacket against him, then the elastic-topped white trousers. Then she ordered him to go into room 34 and try them on. Her brusqueness, perhaps for the benefit of her mother, had an edge of sarcasm. When he came back, her mother insisted that the sleeves were long, which they were not, but Yvonne shrugged and took them up with pins, her hands brushing indifferently against Jonathan's and the warmth of her body mingling with his own.

"You are comfortable?" she asked him as if she didn't give a damn.

"Jacques is always comfortable. He has inner resources, n'est-ce pas, Jacques?"

Madame Latulipe wished to know about his extramural preferences. Did Jacques like to dance? Jonathan replied that he was prepared for anything but not perhaps quite yet. Did he sing, play an instrument, act, paint? All these pastimes and more were available in Esperance, Madame Latulipe assured him. Perhaps he would like to meet some girls? It would be normal, said Madame Latulipe: many Canadian girls would be interested to hear of life in Switzerland. Courteously prevaricating, Jonathan heard himself say something mad in his excitement:

"Well, I wouldn't get far in these, would I?" he exclaimed, so loudly that he nearly broke out laughing, while he continued to hold out his white sleeves to Yvonne. "The police would pick me up at the first crossroads, looking like this, wouldn't they?"

Madame Latulipe let out a peal of the wild laughter that is the signature tune of humourless people. But Yvonne was studying Jonathan with a bold curiosity, eyes on eyes. Was it tactic or was it my infernal calculation? Jonathan wondered afterwards. Or was it suicidal indiscretion that in the first few moments of our meeting I told her I was on the run?

* * *

The success of their new employee quickly delighted the elder Latulipes. They warmed to him with each new skill that he revealed.

In return, Jonathan the more-than-good soldier gave them his every waking hour. There had been a time in his life when he would have sold his soul to escape the kitchens for the elegance of a manager's black jacket. No longer. Breakfast began at six for the men coming back from night shift. Jonathan was waiting for them. An order of twelve-ounce sirloin steak, two eggs and frites was nothing out of the way. Spurning the sacks of frozen chips and ill-smelling catering oil favoured by his patroness, he used fresh potatoes, which he peeled and parboiled, then fried in a blend of sunflower and peanut oils, only the best quality would do. He got a stockpot going, installed an herb chest, made casseroles, pot roasts and dumplings. He found an abandoned set of steel knives and sharpened them to perfection ― no one else must touch them. He revived the old range that Madame Latulipe had variously ruled insanitary, dangerous, ugly or too priceless to be used. When he added salt, he did it in the true chef's way, hand raised high above his head, raining it down from a height. His bible was a tattered copy of his beloved Le Repertoire de la Cuisine, which to his delight he had stumbled upon in a local junkshop.

All this Madame Latulipe observed in him at first with an adoring, not to say obsessive, admiration. She ordered new uniforms for him, new hats, and for two pins she would have ordered him canary waistcoats, lacquered boots and cross-garters. She bought him costly pots and double boilers, which he did his best to use. And when she discovered that he employed a common labourer’s blowtorch to glaze the sugar surface of his crème brulee, she was so impressed by the blending of the artistic with the mundane that she insisted on marching her bohemian ladies into the kitchen for a demonstration.

"He is so refined, our Jacques, n'est-ce pas, Mimi, ma chère? He is reserved, he is handsome, he is skilful, and when he wishes he is extremely dominating. There! We old ladies may say such things. When we see a fine man, we do not have to blush like little girls. Tant pis d'abord, Helene?"

But the same reticence that she so admired in Jonathan also drove her to distraction. If she did not own him, who did? At first she decided he was writing a novel, but a reconnaissance of the papers on his desk yielded nothing but draught letters of complaint to the Swiss Embassy in Ottawa, which the close observer, anticipating her interest, had composed for her discovery.

"You are in love, Jacques?"

"Not that I am aware, madame,"

"You are unhappy? You are lonely?"

"I am blissfully content."

"But to be content is not enough! You must abandon yourself. You must risk everything every day. You must be ecstatic."

Jonathan said his ecstasy was his work.

When lunch was over, Jonathan could have taken the afternoon off, but more often he went down to the basement to help hump crates of empties into the yard while Monsieur Latulipe checked takings: for God help the waiter or bar girl who smuggled in a private bottle to sell at disco prices.

Three evenings a week Jonathan cooked family dinner. They ate it early round the kitchen table, while Madame Latulipe made intellectual conversation.

"You are from Basel, Jacques?"

"Not far from Basel, madame."

"From Geneva?"

"Yes, nearer to Geneva."

"Geneva is the capital of Switzerland, Yvonne."

Yvonne did not raise her head.

"You are happy today, Yvonne? You have spoken to Thomas? You must speak to him every day. When one is engaged to be married, it is normal."

And at around eleven, when the disco hotted up, Jonathan was once more there to lend a hand. The shows before eleven were mere displays of nudity, but after eleven the acts became more animated and the girls gave up putting on their clothes between turns, except for a tinselly apron for their cash and maybe a gown they didn't bother to fasten. When they opened their legs for you for an extra five dollars ― a personal service performed at your table, on a stool that the house provided for the purpose ― the effect was of a furry burrow belonging to some artificially illuminated night animal.

"You like our floor show, Jacques? You find it cultural? It stimulates you a little, even you?"

"It's very effective, madame."

"I am glad. We should not deny our feelings."

Fights were seldom and had the sporadic quality of skirmishes between puppies. Only the worst of them ended in expulsion. A chair would shriek, a girl would skip back, there was the smack of a fist or the strict silence of two men wrestling. Then out of nowhere Andre Latulipe was between them like a little Atlas, holding them apart until the company settled again. The first time this happened, Jonathan left him to handle matters in his own way. But when an oversized drunk started to take a swing at Latulipe, Jonathan locked the man's spare arm behind him and led him to the fresh air.

"Where did you learn that stuff?" Latulipe asked as they were clearing bottles.

"In the army."

"The Swiss have an army?"

"It's obligatory for everyone."

One Sunday night the old Catholic cure came, wearing a soiled dog collar and a patched frock. The girls stopped dancing and Yvonne ate lemon pie with him, which the cure insisted on paying for out of a trapper's purse bound with a thong. Jonathan watched them from the shadows.

Another night a mountain of a man appeared, with cropped white hair and a cuddly corduroy jacket with leather elbows. A jolly wife in a fur coat waddled at his side. One of Latulipe's Ukrainian waiters gave him a table by the floor; he ordered champagne and two plates of smoked salmon and watched the show with fatherly indulgence. But when Latulipe looked round for Jonathan, to warn him that the superintendent would not expect a bill, Jonathan had vanished.

"You got something against police?"

"Until my passport comes back, yes."

"How come you knew he was police?"

Jonathan smiled disarmingly but offered no reply that Latulipe could afterwards remember.

* * *

"We should warn him," Madame Latulipe said for the fiftieth time as she lay sleeplessly in bed. "She is provoking him deliberately. She is up to her old tricks."

"But they never speak. They never look at each other," her husband protested, putting down his book.

"And you don't know why? Two criminals like them?"

"She's engaged to Thomas, and she will marry Thomas," said Latulipe. "Since when was no crime a crime?" he added gamely.

"You are speaking like a barbarian, as usual. A barbarian is a person without intuition. Have you told him he mustn't sleep with the disco girls?"

"He shows no disposition to."

"There you are, then! Perhaps it would be better if he did."

"He's an athlete, for Christ's sake," Latulipe burst out. his Slav temper getting the better of him. "He has other outlets. He goes running. He treks in the bush. He sails. He hires motorbikes. He cooks. He works. He sleeps. Not every man is a sex maniac."

"Then he is a tapette," Madame Latulipe announced. "I knew it the moment I saw him. Yvonne is wasting her time. It will teach her a lesson."

"He's not a tapette! Ask the Ukrainian boys! He is entirely normal!"

"Have you seen his passport yet?"

"His passport has nothing to do with whether he is a tapette! It has gone back to the Swiss Embassy. It has to be renewed before Ottawa will stamp it. He is being tossed back and forth between bureaucracies."

" 'Back and forth between bureaucracies'! Such words always! Who does he think he is? Victor Hugo? A Swiss doesn't talk that way!"

"I don't know how Swiss talk."

"Ask Cici, then! Cici says Swiss are crude. She was married to one. She knows. Beauregard is French, I am certain of it. He cooks like a Frenchman, he speaks like a Frenchman, he is arrogant like a Frenchman, he is cunning like a Frenchman. And decadent like a Frenchman. Of course he is French! He is French, and he is a liar."

Breathing heavily, she stared past her husband at the ceiling, which was sprinkled with paper stars that glittered in the dark.

"His mother was German," said Latulipe, attempting a calmer tone.

"What? Nonsense! Germans are blond. Who told you?"

"He did. Some German engineers were in the disco last night. Beauregard spoke German with them like a Nazi. I asked him. He speaks English too."

"You must talk to the authorities. Beauregard must be regularised, or he must go. Is it my hotel or his? He is illegal, I am sure of it. He is too conspicuous. C'est bien sur!"

Turning her back to her husband, she switched on her radio, then contemplated her paper stars in fury.

* * *

Jonathan collected Yvonne on his Harley-Davidson from the Mange-Quick on the highway north, ten days after Yvonne had dressed him in his whites. They had met in their attic corridor by seeming accident, each having heard the other first. He said it was his day off tomorrow; she asked what he would do with it. Hire a motorbike, he replied. Maybe I'll take in a few lakes.

"My father keeps a boat at his cottage," she said, as if her mother did not exist. Next day she was waiting as arranged, pale but resolute.

The scenery was slow and majestic, with rolling blue forest and a drained sky. But as they pressed north the day darkened and an east wind turned to drizzle. It was raining by the time they reached the cottage. They undressed each other, and a lifetime passed for Jonathan in which for a long while there was no appeasement and no release as he made up for months of abstinence. She fought him without taking her eyes from him except to offer him a different attitude, a different woman.

"Wait," she whispered.

Her body sighed and fell again, then rose, her face stretched and became ugly but did not burst. A cry of surrender escaped her, but from so far off it could have come from the drenched forests that surrounded them or the depths of the grey lake. She mounted him and they began the climb again, peak to peak until they drowned together.

He lay intently beside her, watching her breathing, resenting her repose. He tried to work out whom he was betraying.

Sophie? Or just myself as usual? We're betraying Thomas. She rolled onto her side, turning her back to him. Her beauty added to his loneliness. He began caressing her.

* * *

"He's a good man," Yvonne said. "Into anthropology and Indian rights. His father's a lawyer working with the Cree. He wants to follow in his footsteps." She had found a bottle of wine and brought it back to bed. Her head was resting on his chest.

"I'm sure I'd like him very much," Jonathan said politely, picturing an earnest dreamer in a Fair Isle pullover penning love letters on recycled paper.

"You're a lie," she said, distractedly kissing him. "You're some kind of lie. You're all truth, but you're a lie. I don't understand you."

"I'm on the run," he said. "I had a problem in England."

She clambered up his body and put her head beside his. "Want to talk about it?"

"I've got to get hold of a passport," he said. "That stuff about being Swiss is junk. I'm British."

"You're what?"

She was excited. She picked up his glass and drank from it, watching him over the brim.

"Maybe we can steal one," she said. "Change the picture. A friend of mine did that."

"Maybe we can," he agreed.

She was fondling him, eyes alight. I've tried everything I could think of, he told her. Explored guest bedrooms, looked in parked cars. No one carries a passport round here. Been down to the post office, got the forms, studied the formalities. Visited the town graveyard looking for dead men of my own age; thought I might apply on their behalf. But you never know what's safe these days: maybe the dead are already in some computer.

"What's your real name?" she whispered. "Who are you? Who are you?"

A moment's wonderful peace descended over him as he made her the ultimate gift. "Pine. Jonathan Pine."

* * *

All day they lived naked, and when the rain cleared they took the boat out to an island in the centre of the lake and swam naked from the shingle beach.

"He's turning in his thesis in five weeks," she said.

"And then?"'

"Marriage to Yvonne."

"And then?"

"Working with the Indians in the bush." She told him where. They swam a distance.

"Both of you?" he asked.

"Sure."

"How long for?"

"Couple of years. See how it goes. We're going to have babies. About six."

"Will you be faithful to him?"

"Sure. Sometimes."

"Who's up there?"

"Cree mainly. He likes Cree best. Speaks it pretty well."

"What about a honeymoon?" he asked.

"Thomas? His idea of a honeymoon is McDonald's and hockey practice at the arena."

"Does he travel?"

"Northwest Territories. Keewatin. Yellowknife. Great Slave Lake. Norman Wells. Goes all over."

"I meant abroad."

She shook her head. "Not Thomas. He says it's all in Canada."

"What is?"

"Everything we need in life. It's all here. Why go further? He says people travel too much. He's right."

"So he doesn't need a passport," Jonathan said.

"Fuck you," she said. "Get me back to shore."

But by the time they had cooked supper and made love again, she was listening to him.

* * *

Every day or night they made love. In the small hours of morning when he came up from the disco, Yvonne would lie awake waiting for his brushing signal against her door. He would tiptoe to her and she would draw him down on her, her last long drink before the desert. Their lovemaking was almost motionless. The attic was a drum, and every movement clattered through the house. When she started to call out in pleasure, he laid his hand over her mouth and she bit it, leaving teeth marks in the flesh around his thumb.

If your mother discovers us, she'll throw me out, he said.

Who cares, she whispered, gathering herself more tightly round him. I'll go with you. She seemed to have forgotten everything she had told him about her future plans.

I need more time, he insisted.

For the passport?

For you, he replied, smiling in the darkness.

She hated his leaving, yet dared not keep him with her.

Madame Latulipe had taken to looking in on her at all odd hours.

"You are asleep, cocotte? You are happy? Only four weeks to your wedding, mon p'tit chou. The bride must have her rest."

Once when her mother appeared Jonathan was actually lying beside Yvonne in the darkness, but by a mercy Madame Latulipe did not switch on the light.

They drove in Yvonne's baby-blue Pontiac to a motel in Tolerance, and thank God he made her leave their cabin ahead of him, because as she walked to her car, still smelling of him, she saw Mimi Leduc grinning at her from the next-door parking space.

"Tu fais visite au show?" Mimi yelled, lowering her window.

"Uh-huh."

"C'est super, n'est-ce pas? T'as vu le little black dress? Tres low, tres sexy?"

"Uh-huh."'

"I bought it! Toi aussi faut I'acheter! Pour ton trouss ― eauuu!"

They made love in an empty guest room while her mother was at the supermarket, and in the walk-in airing cupboard.

She had acquired the recklessness of sexual obsession. The risk was a drug for her. Her whole day was spent contriving moments for them to be alone together.

"When will you go to the priest?" he asked.

"When I'm ready," she replied, with something of Sophie's quirkish dignity.

She decided to be ready next day.

* * *

The old curé Savigny had never let Yvonne down. Since childhood she had brought him her cares, triumphs and confessions.

When her father struck out at her, it was old Savigny who dabbed her black eye and talked her round. When her mother drove her to dementia, old Savigny would laugh and say, She's just a silly woman sometimes. When Yvonne started going to bed with boys, he never told her to slow down. And when she lost her faith, he was sad, but she went on visiting him each Sunday evening after the Mass she no longer attended, armed with whatever she had filched from the hotel: a bottle of wine or, like this evening, Scotch.

"Bon, Yvonne! Sit down. My God, you are glistening like an apple. Dear Heaven, what have you brought me? It's for me to bring presents to the bride!"

He drank to her, leaning back in his chair, staring into the infinite with his leaky old eyes.

"In Esperance we were obliged to love each other," he declared, from somewhere in the middle of his homily to intending couples.

"I know."

"It is only yesterday that everyone was a stranger here, everyone missed his family, his country, everyone was a little afraid of the bush and the Indians."

"I know."

"So we drew together. And we loved each other. It was natural. It was necessary. And we dedicated our community to God. And our love to God. We became His children in the wilderness."

"I know," said Yvonne again, wishing she had never come.

"And today we are good townspeople. Esperance has grown up. It's good, it's beautiful, it's Christian. But it's dull. How's Thomas?"

"Thomas is great," she said, reaching for her handbag.

"But when will you bring him to me? If it is because of your mother that you do not let him come to Esperance, then it is time to submit him to the test of fire!" They laughed together. Sometimes old Savigny had these flashes of insight, and she loved him for them. "He must be some boy to catch a girl like you. Is he eager? Does he love you to distraction? Write to you three times a day?"

"Thomas is kind of forgetful."

They laughed again, while the old cure kept repeating "forgetful" and shaking his head. She unzipped her handbag and drew out two photographs in a cellophane envelope and handed one to him. Then handed him his old steel-framed spectacles from the table. Then she waited while he got the photograph into focus.

"This is Thomas? My God, he's a pretty boy, then! Why did you never tell me? Forgetful? This man? He's a force! Your mother would kneel at the feet of such a man!"

Still admiring Jonathan's photograph at arm's length, he tilted it to catch the light from the window.

"I'm dragging him off on a surprise honeymoon," she said. "He hasn't got a passport. I'm going to press one into his hand in the vestry."

The old man was already fumbling in his cardigan for a pen.

She held one ready. She turned the photographs facedown for him and watched him while he signed them one by one, at child's speed, in his capacity as a minister of religion licensed by the laws of Quebec to perform marriages. From her handbag she drew the blue passport application form: "Formule A pour les personnel de 16 ans et plus," and indicated for him the place where he must sign again, as a witness personally acquainted with the applicant.

"But how long have I known him? I've never set eyes on the rascal!"

"Just put forever," said Yvonne, and watched him write down "la vie entiere. "

Tom, she telegraphed triumphantly that night. Church needs sight of your birth certificate. Send express to Babette. Keep loving me. Yvonne.

When Jonathan brushed against her door she pretended to be asleep and didn't stir. But when he stood at her bedside she sat up and seized him more hungrily than ever. I did it, she kept whispering to him. I got it! It's going to work!

* * *

It was soon after this episode and at much the same early-evening hour that Madame Latulipe paid her call by appointment on the oversized superintendent of police at his splendid offices. She was wearing a mauve dress, perhaps for half-mourning.

"Angelique," said the superintendent, drawing up a chair. "My dear. For you, always."

Like the cure, the superintendent was an old trailman. Signed photographs on the walls portrayed him in his prime, now in furs handling a dogsled, now as lone hero in the bush pursuing his man on horseback. But these mementos did the superintendent little service. White chins now hid the once manly profile. A glossy paunch sat like a brown football over the leather belt of his uniform.

"One of your girls got herself into a spot of trouble again?" the superintendent asked with a knowing smile.

"Thank you, Louis, not so far as I know."

"Somebody been putting his hand in the till?"

"No, Louis, our accounts are quite in order, thank you."

The superintendent recognised the tone and erected his defences.

"I'm glad to hear that, Angelique. There's a lot of it about these days. Not like it used to be at all. Un p'tit drink?"

"Thank you, Louis, this is not a social visit. I wish you to make enquiries about a young man whom Andre has employed in the hotel."

"What's he done?"

"It is more a question of what Andre has done. He has employed a man with no papers. He has been naïf."

"Andre's a kindly fellow, Angelique. One of the best."

"Perhaps too kindly. The man has been with us already ten weeks, and his papers have not arrived. He has placed us in an illegal situation."

"We're not Ottawa up here, Angelique. You know that."

"He says he is a Swiss."

"Well, perhaps he is. Switzerland's a fine country."

"First he tells Andre that his passport is with the immigration authorities, then he tells him it is with the Swiss Embassy for renewal, now it is back with another authority. Where is it?"

"Well, I haven't got it, Angelique. You know Ottawa. Those fairies take three months to wipe their arses," said the superintendent, imprudently grinning at the felicity of the phrase.

Madame Latulipe coloured. Not with a becoming blush, but with a sallow patchy fury that made the superintendent nervous.

"He is not Swiss," she said.

"How do you know that now, Angelique?"

"Because I telephoned the Swiss Embassy. I said I was his mother."

"And?"

"I said I was furious at the delay, my son was not permitted to work, he was acquiring debts, he was depressed, if they cannot send his passport they must send a letter of confirmation that everything is in order."

"I'm sure you did it well, Angelique. You're a great actress, We all know that."

"They have no trace of him. They have no Jacques Beauregard who is Swiss and living in Canada; it is all a fiction. He is a seducer."

"He's a what?"

"He has seduced my daughter, Yvonne. She is infatuated by him. He is a refined impostor, and his plan is to steal my daughter, steal the hotel, steal our peace of mind, our contentment, our..."

She had a whole list of things that Jonathan was stealing. She had compiled it as she lay awake at night and added to it with each new sign of her daughter's obsession with the thief.

The only crime she had omitted to mention was the theft of her own heart.