Laughter rippled round the table.
Pineau interrupted. ‘How long is this going to take, for heaven’s sake?’ ‘Vara’ shouted Monsieur de Romblay.
By now everyone was laughing, even Théo, though, as Suzanne knew, he had by no means reached the point of the story.
He proceeded to describe how he had set up a search party, consisting of himself, a Mexican soldier, an Indian interpreter and ‘Vara’ too, since he suspected that four denials in a row amounted to some kind of confession, or at least suggested that the Indian had something to hide and might be party to the theft.
Monsieur de Romblay lifted his glass. ‘I salute you, Monsieur Valence. You have penetrated one of the first mysteries of Indian logic. “Nothing” means everything.’
Théo tried not to look too pleased with himself. Just for a moment he resembled a head on a coin: frozen, stern, imperial.
‘And did you find the bolts?’ asked Marie Saint-Lô.
‘Yes, I did,’ Théo said. ‘I found them on a piece of wasteground behind the town. They were in the possession of four of my Indian labourers. Do you know what they were doing with them?’
Nobody could guess. In fact, they did not want to guess. They wanted to be told.
Théo smiled. ‘They were playing boule.’
The thought of four Indians playing boule with Théo’s bolts was too much for the French. Laughter exploded against the still night air.
‘Now for the best part,’ Théo said. ‘I asked them what they were doing. “There is no work,” they said, “so we play.” ‘He leaned forwards, gripping the edge of the table. ‘The theft of the bolts by the Indians had caused a stoppage at work. The effect of this stoppage was a sudden acquisition of free time. Having acquired this free time, the Indians reacted in a predictable way: they looked round for something to do. And what did they find?’ Théo opened his hands. ‘The bolts. They used the original cause of their predicament as its solution. Cause, effect, cause, effect, cause. A perfect circle.’ He had become dishevelled in his excitement, his white tie loosening, one shirt-cuff dappled with Hollandaise sauce.
‘It sounds like a Belgian joke,’ Pineau said.
Monsieur de Romblay disagreed. ‘It’s a classic tale of the region. Absolutely archetypal.’ He lifted a glass to Théo. ‘You should be a logician, Monsieur Valence, not an engineer.’
‘Perhaps the two are not so far apart,’ said Théo, with becoming modesty.
Madame de Romblay appeared to be finding it difficult to grasp the twists and turns of the logic that her husband so admired. She was staring into the night with the vacant expression of someone who has been waiting for a carriage for a long time, only to see it drive past without stopping. Nothing could have been further from her mind at that moment than a mazurka, though that was what the orchestra was playing on the deck below.
‘To the lost bolts,’ cried Florestine Bardou, ‘now happily found again!’
At least someone was benefiting from the seemingly infinite supply of champagne.
The night began to whirl. A huge moth flew over the supper table, blundered three times around a candelabra and crackled into nothing in the flames. Montoya, who had arrived late, presented the doctor with a brocade sombrero. Marie Saint-Lô flung her shoes into the harbour and danced barefoot with Captain Legrand. It was still only eleven o’clock.
Suzanne sat by the rail in the stern, a glass of champagne cooling the palm of her hand.
‘Would you care to dance?’
She looked up. It was Montoya, Félix Tortoledo de Avilés, with his mournful eyes. His plumed hat nestled beneath his arm, like a chicken just bought from the market. Théo was right: the man was a clown. But the champagne had softened her. She would grant him this one dance and be done with it.
Folding her fan, she rose to her feet and placed one gloved hand on his arm. The music swooped down and spun her through the air. Dancing seemed as natural as breathing.
‘I watched you all the way across the town,’ he said.
She remembered the lantern he had given her and smiled.
‘I watched your light ascend the hill.’ He was staring past her shoulder, his eyes distant.
Still smiling, she turned her face sideways. There were two women dancing at her elbow. One wore a scarlet tunic with silver epaulettes. The other was naked from the waist up, her breasts gleaming from the exertions of the waltz. She only saw the women for a moment. Then Montoya whirled her away across the floor. When she could look again, they were gone.
She broke away from the Captain, moved quickly to the rail. The lights of the boat were reflected on the water. She could see black dots and dashes, punctuations in the shifting gold — the heads and arms of children swimming in the harbour. Further along the deck, François Pineau, the accountant, was tossing coins over the side.
‘There’s no point throwing money to them,’ Pierre Morlaix was saying. ‘They can’t see it.’
Pineau’s top lip curled. ‘Exactly.’
‘You’re incorrigible.’ Morlaix began to laugh.
Suzanne found her glass and held it against her cheek. The coolness burned her skin.
Montoya came and stood beside her. ‘Is something the matter? Are you faint?’
‘Leave me alone,’ she said.
The two women had been so close to her; she could have reached out and touched either one — a glistening bronze shoulder, a ghostly epaulette. Her mind opened in front of her like an abyss. She could hear the safety engineer laughing.
A hot wind, rising off the water, gusted across the deck. All the candles guttered and then blew out.
‘Time to leave,’ somebody cried. Which must have been a joke, since it was not even midnight and the Captain had promised dancing until dawn.
But when she turned round, she saw Montoya step over to the doctor and shake his hand. His eyes met hers for a moment across the deck, then he was climbing backwards down the ladder. She watched his plumed hat vanish below the rail.
At the late supper Suzanne sat quietly while Pineau and Morlaix traded stories that served to illustrate the foolishness of the Mexicans, the foolishness, particularly, of the local representative of the Mexican Government.
‘He’s very young, is he not,’ Marie Saint-Lô remarked, ‘to be representing the Government?’
‘Ah well,’ the doctor said. ‘His father went to school with Porfirio Díaz.’ And, when she did not seem enlightened by the information, he added, in lower tones: ‘The President.’ He faced the gathering again. ‘Apparently he was named after Félix Díaz. The President’s brother.’
Morlaix swirled the cognac in his glass. ‘Wasn’t he the one who got shot?’
The doctor nodded. ‘I believe so.’
‘I still can’t get used to that preposterous uniform.’ A lock of Pineau’s hair hung in his eyes. His twisted upper lip was sprinkled with drops of perspiration. ‘What does he think he is? A general?’
‘He’s dashing, though.’ Florestine Bardou sounded wistful, almost unconvinced.
‘And am I not dashing?’ cried the doctor. ‘Even at fifty?’
Nobody could deny that, of course, not on his birthday, and certainly not in that new waistcoat.
Madame Bardou blushed.
But the subject could not be changed quite so easily. It was a favourite among the French, especially after dinner when the blood was high.
‘He may be dashing,’ Madame de Romblay said, ‘but he’s also mad, completely mad.’