For a couple of weeks my arrangement with Anne French worked well. She was a quick study and took to the game like a new deck and a dealer’s shoe. She wasn’t a bad cook and I even managed to put on a few extra pounds. Best of all, she made a hell of a gimlet, the kind you can taste and feel for hours afterward. This might even be why, once or twice, I got the idea she wanted me to kiss her, but I managed to resist the temptation, which is unusual for me. Temptation is not something I can easily avoid when it comes wearing Mystikum behind its rose petal ears and you can see its smaller washing still hanging on the line outside the kitchen door. It wasn’t that I didn’t find her attractive, or that I couldn’t have used a little affection—or that I didn’t like her underwear—but I’ve been bitten so many times that I’m as twice shy as the wild pigs that came into the trees at the bottom of her garden after dark and truffled around for something to eat. Shy and apt to think that someone might have a rifle pointed at my ear. Meanwhile, I continued going to La Voile d’Or for my biweekly game and my life continued along the same monotonous path as before. Life can be appreciated best when you have a regular job and a goodish salary and you can avoid thinking about anything more important than what’s happening in Egypt. At least, that’s what I told myself. But one night Spinola was drunk—too drunk to play bridge—and I was actually pleased because it gave me an excuse to call Anne to see if she wanted to take the Italian’s place at the table. I was disappointed to discover, first that she wasn’t at home and second that I was more disappointed than I told myself was appropriate, given everything I’d told myself and her about not getting involved with hotel guests. Meanwhile, the Roses drove Spinola home in their Bentley, which left me alone on the terrace with a last drink and cigarette, wondering if I should drive to Anne’s house in Villefranche and look for her in case she hadn’t heard the telephone or chosen not to answer it. It was the wrong thing to do, of course, and I was just about to do it all the same when an Englishman with a little dog spoke to me.

“I see you here a lot,” he said. “Playing bridge, twice a week. I say, aren’t you the concierge at the Grand Hôtel?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “When I’m not playing bridge.”

“It is rather addictive, isn’t it?”