“What is it, chérie?”
“The window. You open it, and go out to smoke. I am left to freeze.”
“Then you may shut it, chérie.”
“Imbecile! It is too stiff.”
Mathis sighed wearily and held out his hand. “Good-bye, my friend. I shall be discreet. You may depend upon it.”
“Discreet?” demanded Madame Mathis suspiciously. “What is there to be discreet about?”
“Ah, you may ask!” He winked at Graham. “Monsieur and I have made a plot to blow up the Bank of France, seize the Chamber of Deputies, shoot the two hundred families and set up a Communist government.”
She looked round apprehensively. “You should not say such things, even for a joke.”
“A joke!” He scowled at her malevolently. “You will see if it is a joke or not when we drag these capitalist reptiles from their great houses and cut them to pieces with machine-guns.”
“Robert! If someone should hear you say such things …”
“Let them hear!”
“I only asked you to shut the window, Robert. If it had not been so stiff I would have done it myself. I …” The door closed behind them.
Graham stood for a moment looking out of the window at the distant searchlights: grey smudges moving restlessly among the clouds low down on the horizon. It was not, he reflected, unlike the skyline that he could see from his bedroom window when there were German planes about over the North Sea.
He turned and made his way back to his beer and sandwiches.