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– I thought you were rich, he said.

– Why? Do you want me to hire you to find my beloved?

All that evening and late into the morning hours Patrick tried to seduce Clara Dickens and then the next day when he was exhausted she seduced him. He was reading through the old news clippings about Ambrose in the Paris library when Clara arrived. He was almost asleep over the 1919 files, his cheek awkward on his shoulder as if someone had come up to him in the silence of the reading room and broken his neck. She strolled into the library dressed in white and stood in front of the bookshelves.

– I’ll drive you back to the Arlington Hotel.

Her voice wakened him. She turned a chair around so she could straddle it and she leaned forward, her elbows against its back. In her white dress she seemed the focus of all sunlight in the library. There was laughter and then tenseness on her face. Her long arm reached forward and picked up a clipping.

– You think I am the line to him, don’t you? You think that he must have left his shadow on me.

He couldn’t talk back against her beauty. He noticed a fragment of water under her eyelid, a sun tear she was unaware of.

– Come. I’ll drive you back to the hotel.

At that hour he did not think of seduction. He was exhausted by all their conversations the previous night on her porch overlooking Broadway Street. They had been outrageous and flamboyant in each other’s company, their arguments like duets. He normally took months to approach someone, and at the slightest rejection he would turn and never go back. But he argued just so they could remain together on that porch deep in moonlight, half-laughing at the other’s ploys. She wouldn’t let him kiss her or hold her standing up – didn’t want all of their bodies touching, that possibility.

They had walked in rain beside the Grand River towards her car. A gift from Ambrose, no doubt, he thought to himself. He was so tired there was no sophistication or cunning in him that night. And she herself did not know how to deal with this sudden obsession for her. She had driven him slowly back to the Arlington Hotel and they sat in the car.

– Tomorrow the library for me, he said.

– I could come and join you.

She clicked her tongue and jerked her head to the side suggestively.

It was two in the morning. She sat half-facing him, her feet already out of their shoes, one knee pointed towards him by the gear-shift. She let him kiss her goodnight and he sat there for a moment gazing at her face patterned by streetlight.

He got out and closed the door too energetically and realized after he had taken three steps how that had sounded. He turned back.

– That wasn’t a slam.

– I know.

She was sitting there very alone, still, looking towards the seat he had left, her head down.

– Goodnight.

– Goodnight, Patrick.

Now they stepped from the news library into bright sunlight and they got into her car, Patrick carrying his cardboard box of notes. Both of them were so tired they hardly spoke during the drive back to the hotel.

His room when they got there was full of bright daylight and traffic noises came through the open window. They slept almost immediately, holding each other’s hands.

When he woke, her eyes were studying him. Only her dark neck and face were visible. He felt awkward, having slept in his clothes.

– Hello.

– Sing to me, she murmured.

– What?

– I want it formal. Can you sing?

She smiled and he moved across the bed to her softness.

After they had made love he brought his pillow as close as he could for comfortable focus and gazed at her. When he woke she was gone, there was no answer on her telephone. He came back to the bed and inhaled whatever perfume there was left on the pillow.

* * *

– Patrick, is that you?

– Yes, Clara.

– Doesn’t sound like you.

– I was asleep.

– I’m taking you somewhere. Pick up some booze. And a corkscrew. I’ve got the food. We should be away a few days.

It was a winding road they drove on towards Paris Plains, past gorges and tobacco fields.