Belle - Lesley Pearse [172]
She rarely felt lonely here either. She had little chats with other guests, though mostly they were only in Paris for a few days at most, and she had got to know people in the cafés she regularly ate or had coffee in. On top of that she had wonderful nights out with her gentlemen, seeing shows at the Moulin Rouge and other cabaret clubs, plays and operas. She had eaten in most of Paris’s finest restaurants, danced in night clubs and spent nights in luxurious hotels and splendid houses and apartments. It was going to be difficult to fit back into her old life, being told what to do and being looked on as a curiosity by everyone in Seven Dials because she’d been gone for so long.
That was why it was so important she went home with money so she could get her hat shop. She visited all the Paris milliners to see the latest fashions. She bought millinery magazines to study them, and on nights when she was alone in her room she was always sketching and working out how each design could be made. She had even considered finding a small apartment so she would have room to buy the necessary equipment and materials to make up her designs and sell them. That way she could go home with her head held high and announce she had become a milliner.
Happy as she was in Paris, there was one niggling problem, and that was Pascal. She had been wary of him at the start, because she sensed he wanted her, but she had come to think she was mistaken about that, because once he’d learned to trust her, she had very little direct contact with him.
Her instructions about who her client was, and where and what time he wanted her to meet him, came by messenger. Paris was full of young boys happy to deliver a letter for a few centimes. Then her client would hand her a sealed envelope containing her fee. It was only when she had to meet a gentleman at the Ritz that she saw Pascal, and even then they rarely went beyond a nod to each other.
But at the beginning of March he’d sent her a note asking her to meet him in a café in Montmartre. As he’d never asked to meet her anywhere before, she thought perhaps he wanted to stop their arrangement because he was afraid of his employer finding out, or that one of her clients had made a complaint about her.
Pascal was already in Le Moulin à Vent, which was close to the still to be completed Sacré-Coeur basilica on La Butte, drinking a glass of absinthe. Just the way he sat hunched over his drink suggested it was not his first, and he had such a sour expression she expected trouble.
‘Ah, Belle,’ he exclaimed as he saw her, and got somewhat unsteadily to his feet. He called the waiter and asked for another glass of absinthe for her, but Belle refused it and asked for a glass of wine. He spent some time trying to convince her absinthe was the only thing to drink in Paris, but Belle had tried it before and didn’t like it. Since then she’d noted that most of the habitual drunks never drank anything else.
‘So why did you want to meet me?’ she asked, once she’d got her glass of wine. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Must there be something wrong for me to ask you to have a drink with me?’ he said.
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘But it is unusual, so I thought you had a problem.’
‘I do,’ he said, then downed his glass in one and called rather loudly for another. ‘My problem is that you spend the night with many other men, but not me.’
Belle’s heart sank because she knew he wasn’t a man to be flirtatious. He meant it.
‘We have a business arrangement. It wouldn’t do to mix business with pleasure,’ she replied, smiling in the hope that he wouldn’t take offence.
‘I would pay you,’ he said.
Belle cringed inwardly. The truth was that she found Pascal repellent. He was so slimy. She had watched him talking to the guests at the Ritz and he all but licked their backsides. He put oil on his hair