The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair Page B

her off at arm’s length.
    â€˜Stop it. Leave me alone.’
    Brother and sister retreated. They had come to expect docile submission to their banter and teasing. Theyimagined that Matthew had become immune to it, as they themselves were immune to the boisterous give-and -take of their own mutual raillery. It startled them to confront, in so enclosed a space, his huge, hurt eyes, eyes that devoured his face, devoured the cramped bathroom, craned against its walls and ceiling, its lintels and cornices, like a pair of outsized apples by Magritte.
    â€˜All right. I don’t shave,’ he answered sulkily. ‘What of it?’
    â€˜Nothing,’ murmured Isabelle, smirkingly contrite.
    â€˜My father was the same,’ he went on. ‘He didn’t shave till he was in his twenties. It’s not uncommon.’
    â€˜Of course not. It’s just …’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Unusual for an American, no?’ said Isabelle. ‘More like a Mexican.’
    â€˜A Mexican?’
    â€˜A Mexican Hairless.’
    â€˜What’s a Mexican Hairless?’
    â€˜It’s a dog,’ said Isabelle. ‘And what’s interesting about it is that it isn’t hairless at all. It has hair where people have hair. The question is, have you?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Have you hair … there?’
    Without embarrassment, she indicated the spot on her own body.

Love is blind but not deaf
    Love is blind but not deaf.
    Matthew felt his lower lip tremble. In a moment or two it would have dissolved into a nerveless, blubbery pat of redcurrent jelly. His mouth awash with toothpaste and water, he abruptly left them.
    Walking along the corridor back to the spare room, he could hear a quarrel erupt between Théo and Isabelle, then the slamming of a door. Out of breath, still in his underclothes, rubbing his chin with a towel, Théo caught up with him.
    ‘Don’t take it so seriously,’ he said, sliding his arm about Matthew’s shoulders. ‘It’s nothing to what I get every day of my life.’
    ‘Too late. I’m leaving.’
    ‘Leaving? You haven’t had breakfast yet.’
    ‘I never eat breakfast.’
    ‘But we were going to invite you to stay on.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Our parents are off tomorrow to Trouville. For a month. And we thought you might like to move yourthings here. You don’t have to return to that room of yours, do you? You haven’t paid up in advance?’
    ‘No …’
    ‘Well, stay. Isa will be disappointed if you don’t. We talked it over last night.’
    That was a slip of the tongue. Since, on the evening before, Isabelle had risen from the table first, she and Théo shouldn’t have been able to communicate with each other until morning. But Matthew’s mind had begun to dwell on arguments less petty and more potent.
    He had been offered privileged access to a secret world, a world from which he had always been excluded , a planet far from the solar system of average, upright citizens who, like mediaeval astronomers, tend to confuse that solar system with the universe itself. It was a world of which he had known nothing a mere twenty-four hours earlier. Its inhabitants he had frequented only when it had taken their fancy, like Caliphs or angels, to roam incognito through the ordinary world of average, upright citizens.
    This planet, orbiting as it did around the place de l’Odéon, already boasted entangled legs, unmade beds, a communal bathroom that was warm, moist, dewy-windowed and redolent of suspect odours, as well as other mysteries which remained as yet unveiled but might be made accessible in their turn.
    To take up residence in the flat, for however brief a spell, would be a mistake: that he surely knew. Not to take up residence would be no less of a mistake. The thing was to make the right mistake, not the wrong one.
    When Isabelle came to grace his forehead with a prim, sisterly kiss and apologise, with what certainly sounded like sincerity, for her