Jacquot and the Waterman Read Free

was him. Jacquot. Hallway through their meal, Boni had looked at him over her wine glass and told him how tired she was, and how she just hated taking off her own stockings. And that was that. So much for not going all the way on a Sunday night.
That first night, after Chez Peire, she'd taken him to the Hotel Mercure overlooking the Quai des Beiges. And every time after that, whenever she passed through, stopping overnight, she'd call him from Charles de Gaulle, and that's where they'd end up. Hotel Mercure, fifth floor. Where the Air France crews put up. Where Jacquot quietly fell in love - and she, he believed, fell in love with him.
One of the things that Boni liked was that people knew him, recognised him. Jacquot noticed it early on, whenever someone looked at him in that particular way, placed him, remembered. How she'd tighten her arm around his, making it clear that he was hers, sharing the glow when people stopped to shake his hand, buy him a drink. Even after all that time. The celebrity. That's what appealed to her. His past. What he had done on the playing field all those years before. In his blue shirt with its gold coq insignia. The winning try. Against the English. All this time and people still remembered. The ponytail. The double takes. The smiles of recognition. Nothing to do with the police, the job he had, though Boni liked that too - its glamour, its roughness, the way Jacquot knew his city.
Then, three months after that last flight out from Paris, Boni relocated to Marseilles and moved into his place, the apartment on Moulins, top floor, under the disapproving glare of Madame Foraque. Of course they were never going to hit it off, the two women. The smell of the Widows soups, bubbling thickly on her range, the reek of her cheroots, the rolled-down socks she wore, the too-heavy mascara globbing her eyelashes and the pink pools of rouge on her cheeks. The way she peered round the glass-panelled door of the conciergerie whenever she heard a footfall in the hallway, always greeting him with a 'Jacquot, ça va? Some soup?', but never saying more than a 'Mademoiselle' to Boni, a brief little toss of her head. No, those two were never going to get on.
At first, in Marseilles, Boni worked as ground staff at the Air France office on Canebiere in the centre of town. But it wasn't long before she was back on flights. Twenty- seven years old. Chief purser now. Transatlantic routes from Marseilles to New York, Boston, Los Angeles. Back and forth. Six days round trip, door to door, four days off. Which was not the way that Jacquot liked it. The week crept by and the four days zipped past. But Boni never seemed to mind, bustling up the stairs loaded with bags from Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive, this and that, four hundred filterless Gitanes for him, a bottle of good cognac. And her smile and that warm scented hug and, in the early days, the searching hands, shedding her uniform, drawing him through the bags and the wrappings to the bedroom or the sofa, or the small balcony when it was warm enough. That was what it was all about for Boni. The leaving and the returning. The heat and the passion of it.
Then, one afternoon while she was away, Jacquot was calling at the Novotel to check some credit-card fraud that the management had reported when he saw her leave the bar with a man, watched her cross the reception area and get into the lift with him. If Jacquot had worked in an office, he'd never have seen her. But he did see her, caught her red-handed, while she was supposed to be serving lunch in first class thirty-five thousand feet somewhere above the Atlantic. That was what really hurt Jacquot. The deception, as much as the infidelity. But he'd said nothing. She was younger than him, nearly twenty years. So what? A little on the side. Who didn't? He could maybe imagine doing the same himself. In the time they'd been together, he'd come close, he'd be the first to admit. But coming close was as far as he'd got. Whereas