Chasing Cezanne by Peter Mayle Read Free Book Online Page B

among the gloom of those loose ends, a photograph he’d taken of Lucy in the office. He had caughther during a call to Camilla, and she was holding the phone away from her ear as she looked into the camera, a wide, triumphant grin lighting up her face. It had been the day she’d negotiated his last fee increase with
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, an increase that Camilla had finally accepted with very poor grace and a great deal of bluster.
    Lulu. He’d show her the photographs, see what she thought, get a second opinion. He picked up the phone.
    â€œLulu? Andre. I just got back. There’s something I want to show you.”
    â€œIs there a problem? Are you OK?”
    â€œI’m fine. How about dinner?”
    â€œIt’s Saturday night, Andre. You know? When working girls have dates and go out.”
    â€œA drink? A quick drink? It might be important.”
    A short silence. “Can you meet me where I’m having dinner?”
    Andre was there in twenty minutes. He settled himself at the half-empty bar and looked around. The last time he had walked past, a few months before, the place had been a run-down hardware store, specializing in window displays of dusty small appliances and dead flies. Now it had been transformed into another SoHo restaurant hoping to be hip—stripped-down decor, hard surfaces, and a lighting level sufficiently high for anyone remotely celebrated to be easily recognized from across the room. The hostess—an aspiring actress, judging by the greasepaint—had the offhand manner and ceremonial swaying walk common to her breed, the menu sprouted with fashionable vegetables, andthe wine list was heavily diluted with a dozen brands of mineral water. The owners seemed to have thought of everything; there was no reason why the restaurant shouldn’t be a great success for at least three months.
    It was still a little too early in the evening for the hoped-for invasion by models and their escorts, and the diners now reaching the end of their meals had the subdued look of customers who had been thoroughly intimidated by both the prices and the restaurant staff. Tunnel people, Camilla would have called them, who had come into the city from New Jersey and the suburbs for a glamorous evening. They were known to drink little and to tip sparingly, and so were treated with a coolness just this side of obvious disdain by the waiters. On the way home, they would tell each other, with a kind of perverse satisfaction, what a tough town New York was.
    Andre could see the entrance to the restaurant reflected in the mirror behind the bar, and each time the door opened he glanced up, looking for Lucy’s headful of black curls. When she finally did arrive he was caught by surprise and had to look twice, so little did she resemble the familiar office Lucy he’d been expecting. Her hair was pulled back, severe and shining, showing off the smooth long rise of her neck; her eyes and cheekbones were subtly accentuated by makeup; she was wearing earrings, two tiny gold studs in each lobe and a short dress of dark silk, cut in the skimpy fashion of the day to look as much as possible like an item of expensive underwear.
    Andre stood up and kissed her on both cheeks, breathing in her scent, conscious of the bare skin of her shouldersunder his hands, his pleasure at seeing her tinged with jealousy.
    â€œI’d have worn a tie if I’d known you were going to dress up.” He let his hands fall to his sides. “What are you going to have?”
    Lucy raised the barman’s eyebrows by ordering a rum and water, no ice, sipping it slowly as Andre described what he’d seen on Cap Ferrat. He showed her the transparencies, watching the play of light on the angles of her face as she held them up and wondering whom she was having dinner with. The restaurant was becoming busy, and the bar was now under attack from modish young men, their sidelong glances surreptitiously comparing each other’s