But Max was already on his way towards one particular houseboat.
‘Ahoy, ladies!’ he called. ‘Our food supplies unfortunately fell in the water, and the catfish ate them. You couldn’t spare a lump of cheese for two lonely travellers, could you?’
Perdu was so ashamed he wished the ground would open up and swallow him. You couldn’t go around chatting up women like that! Especially when you needed help. It wasn’t … right.
‘Jordan,’ he hissed and grabbed the young man by the sleeve of his blue shirt. ‘Please, I don’t like this. We shouldn’t disturb the ladies.’
Max gave him the kind of look people had always given Jean and Vijaya when they were young. The two of them had been as happy among books as two apples on a tree, but around people, and women and girls in particular, the teenagers were shy to the point of being tongue-tied. Parties were a torment – and talking to girls equivalent to hara-kiri.
‘Look, Monsieur Perdu. We want some dinner and we’ll pay them back with our amusing company and some harmless flirting.’
With a grin, he studied Perdu’s face. ‘Remember what that is? Or is it buried in a book where it can’t bother you?’
Jean didn’t answer. It seemed inconceivable to young men that women could drive you to despair. Growing older and gaining deeper knowledge of women only made things worse. The flaws a woman could find in a man were many. She would start with the state of your shoes and work her way up to your inattentive ears – and it didn’t stop there.
The things he had heard as he sat in on the clinic he ran for parents! Women would giggle with their friends for years about a man who didn’t say hello the right way or wore the wrong trousers; they would mock his teeth and his hair and his marriage proposal.
‘I think white beans are delicious,’ said Perdu.
‘Oh, come off it. When did you last go on a date?’
‘Nineteen ninety-two.’ Or the day before yesterday, but Perdu didn’t know whether dinner with Catherine qualified as a ‘date’. Or more. Or less.
‘Nineteen ninety-two? The year I was born. That’s incredible.’ Jordan thought for a second. ‘Okay. I promise it won’t be a date. We’re going to dinner with some intelligent women. All you need is to have a couple of compliments and some topics that will appeal to women up your sleeve. That shouldn’t be too hard for a bookseller like you. Throw in the odd literary reference.’
‘All right, fine,’ said Perdu. He straddled the low fence, hurried into a nearby field and dashed back with an armful of summer flowers.
‘Here’s a different kind of reference.’
The three women in Breton jerseys were Anke, Corinna and Ida, all Germans in their mid-forties who loved books. Their French was sketchy and they were travelling the waterways ‘to forget’, as Corinna put it.
‘Really? Forget what? Not men, by any chance?’ asked Max.
‘Not all men. One particular man,’ said Ida. Her mouth, framed in her freckled face like a twenties film star’s, opened in laughter, but only for a couple of heartbeats. Under her ginger curls her eyes brimmed with both sorrow and hope.
Anke was stirring a Proven?al risotto. The aroma of mushrooms filled the small galley as the men sat out on Baloo’s afterdeck with Ida and Corinna, drinking red wine from a three-litre box and a bottle of mineral-tasting local Auxerrois.
Jean admitted that he understood German, every bookseller’s first language. So they conversed in a merry mishmash; he answered in French and asked them questions in a colourful combination of sounds that bore at least some relation to German.
It was as if he had passed through a gate of fear and had realised to his surprise that behind it lay not a gaping chasm, but other doors, bright hallways and inviting rooms. He tilted his head back and what he saw above him moved him deeply: the sky. It was unencumbered by houses, telegraph poles and lights, and scattered with dense clusters of sparkling stars of every size and intensity. The lights were so profuse that it looked as if a meteor shower had rained down on the roof of the heavens. It was a sight no Parisian could ever witness without leaving the city.