The Memory of Scent Read Online Free Page B

which I think is most clever.’
    I take a sip of this much more familiar drink and wait until he has exhausted his dramatic pause.
    ‘A painter was found dead at his easel yesterday morning. One of his models found him slumped there and alerted the police. She came rushing out and bumped into a young laundry girl who also modelled for him and the laundry girl kept shouting, “but he owes me ten francs!”’
    That seems bizarre, but also teasingly alluring as a topic of conversation over a warm cherry brandy. Henri is in his element.
    ‘And who was the painter? The very same Spaniard that the dead girl was last seen with. So, poetic justice I would have to class that.’
    My breathing is sucked into an involuntary spasm.
    ‘The police have cordoned off the area and are already asking his associates about his movements and who he spent time with? They are also trying to find the model who discovered him because she seems to have disappeared, and you know what they say about the last person to have seen a murder victim?’
    A shiver slithers down my spine. There are some very unsavoury drifters and all manner of low-lifes wandering about: thieves, addicts, pimps and often the most sordid among them gravitate towards each other. Instinctively theyseek each other out, like lambs to a teat. Could it have been poetic justice? Did he get what was coming to him? I am aware that the fingernails of my right hand have drifted towards my teeth, and I am beginning to nip at them. It is a throwback to my childhood, a self-comforting reflex and I have to make a very big effort to force my hands back on to my lap. Who was the model? I am worried about the patchouli girl. I assume an air of casual intrigue so as not to sounds ridiculous.
    ‘There is one of his models, I forget her name, that I would quite like to find. How do you think I should do it? How would you, Henri … do painters overlap on models?’
    ‘Only the good ones. The good ones are like prizes. A beautiful model had been the severing of many a friendship. Is your friend beautiful?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But you forget her name?’
    ‘Well, I wasn’t really that close to her, but I would really like to find her. I’m feeling concerned.’
    ‘Fleur, you do know that Paris is a big place?’
    ‘I heard the Spaniard tried to poach some of Auguste Renoir’s models. Maybe she was one of them.’
    I can see how this is going to unfold as Maria straightens herself on her chair. ‘Well, he didn’t try and poach me and I am one of Auguste’s favourites at the moment.’
    Henri is scowling. ‘And don’t forget that. It is only for the moment.’
    Maria matches his scowl. ‘He is a little in love with me.’
    Henri makes a ‘puh!’ sound and lifts his glass to his fleshy lips. Henri and Maria gossip for another twenty minutes or so, as I try to indicate that I am ready to leave by shifting around in my chair. Maria eventually takes the hint. I linkher arm as we step out of the Bonne Franquette and down on to the street. I am studying the way fresh dirt has caked the grooves of the cobblestones and wondering if it is possible to find a girl wearing patchouli in a city like Paris. I hear its faint buzzing and notice a wayward bee. I duck and spring and flap my arms because they terrify me, but fascinate me also. I remember my astonishment the first time I saw a bee here in Paris as I had always associated them with rural idylls and agricultural living, from everything to do with my life before. And there it was, insistently buzzing its incongruity. But why shouldn’t they live in this great city, with the chestnut-tree-lined Champs-Élysées and the Tuilleries and the orchards of Montmartre? I understand those of the countryside appliquéing their way of life onto the fabric of this new urban world. I understand how so many rooftops were seen as ideal homes for bee hives. I understand how those people, my people, would startle at the rattle and clang of steam-cars and