On Leave
“the landlady shouted.
Lachaume swung around on his heels in the narrow corridor and walked back with a frozen smile on his face to the dark cubbyhole that was used as reception. The pudgy-fingered old woman clumsily shuffled through the muddle of paper on the desk. You could hear something sizzling in the pan in the kitchen next door; something was close to catching fire, but the letter still hadn’t been found.
Lachaume was revolted by those scrabbling plump hands and by the ring that wobbled o...n top. It was one of those ghastly modern things that look like miniature cakes; he’d seen them on the fingers of shopkeepers’ wives in Algiers. The whole room stank of greasy tiffin. It was not an unfamiliar smell.
“Take the letter up to my room,” he said. “Bon appétit, madame!”
But as he went up Rue Saint-Jacques against the flow of noisy students sauntering down it arm-in-arm, the sight of the shapes of young women in the half-light of streetlamps reflected in the shiny wet macadam made his heart thump.MoreLess
Lachaume swung around on his heels in the narrow corridor and walked back with a frozen smile on his face to the dark cubbyhole that was used as reception. The pudgy-fingered old woman clumsily shuffled through the muddle of paper on the desk. You could hear something sizzling in the pan in the kitchen next door; something was close to catching fire, but the letter still hadn’t been found.
Lachaume was revolted by those scrabbling plump hands and by the ring that wobbled o...n top. It was one of those ghastly modern things that look like miniature cakes; he’d seen them on the fingers of shopkeepers’ wives in Algiers. The whole room stank of greasy tiffin. It was not an unfamiliar smell.
“Take the letter up to my room,” he said. “Bon appétit, madame!”
But as he went up Rue Saint-Jacques against the flow of noisy students sauntering down it arm-in-arm, the sight of the shapes of young women in the half-light of streetlamps reflected in the shiny wet macadam made his heart thump.MoreLess
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