‘What page are you on now?’
‘Five hundred and forty-six.’
‘And how many pages are there?’
‘Nearly eight hundred,’ he admitted, repositioning the ashtray to hold his place while he stretched his cramped shoulders. ‘I’m doomed.’
‘You could always skip some bits, you know. You’d hardly miss a passage or two, surely, in a book that size.’
‘But that would be cheating,’ said Paul, as I sat down on the sofa opposite him. ‘Besides, I don’t do anything half way. Once I start something, I have to see it through – it’s just the way I am. I hate leaving anything unfinished.’
‘Is it really such a difficult book?’
‘Not difficult, no.’ He frowned, thinking. ‘No, complex would be a better word, I think. There are lots of layers in Joyce’s prose, and you can’t go too fast or you miss things. For instance,’ he said, turning the book towards me with his finger on the open page, ‘what would you say that means, exactly?’
I read the passage twice and shook my head. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘Neither do I. But I know I’ll work it out eventually. That’s how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.’
‘Well, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.’
‘Pardon?’
‘You’ve far more patience than I’ll ever have,’ I explained.
‘Simon wouldn’t call it patience,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘He’d just call it another one of my annoyingly obsessive personality traits. He says I’m a typical physicist, that I always have to force everything to make sense.’
‘And do you?’
‘Sure.’ He grinned at my question, unashamed. ‘Because everything does make sense, when you look at it from the right angle. All you have to do is find out what that angle is, for whatever it is you want to understand, and bang, the universe becomes a rational place.’
‘Does it really?’ I remained unconvinced, sagging back against the seat cushions as I brushed the hair back from my forehead. There was a pink geranium growing in a planter outside the window, behind Paul’s shoulder, and I frowned at it without really seeing it. ‘Well, I’ve tried every angle I can think of, and I still don’t know what to think.’
‘About what?’
Dragging my gaze from the window, I dug into my pocket and held out my hand, palm upwards. ‘This.’
Paul frowned. Leaning forward, he took the little coin and raised it to catch the slanting light from the overhead fixture. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a King John coin.’
‘Really? Where on earth did you get this?’
I was ashamed to say I’d stolen it from a donation plate, so instead I told a half truth. ‘I found it, up at the Chapelle Sainte Radegonde.’
‘Wow.’ He turned it slowly, studying the ancient image. ‘I can’t imagine many people would have one of these.’
‘My cousin has one.’
He caught on quickly did young Paul. His upward glance held total comprehension. ‘But your cousin isn’t supposed to be here yet.’
‘I know.’
‘So.’ He handed the coin back to me, watching my face with careful eyes that were older than his age. ‘So you think that this is his, then? That he’s been and gone already?’
‘I don’t know what to think. I rang up the other hotels and they’ve never heard of him. I checked round the hospitals, but he hasn’t been admitted. From all accounts, he hasn’t been within ten miles of Chinon. Not recently, at any rate.’
‘Did you try the tourist office? They keep the keys, you know, for the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde.’
I nodded. ‘They said no one had asked to see the chapelle for at least a month.’ Christian had a key, of course, but if Christian had met Harry he’d have mentioned it to me, surely. My cousin and I were alike enough to be brother and sister, one could hardly miss the resemblance. And while Neil had apparently managed to scale the walls somehow, I doubted whether Harry could have done the same. Harry, for all his energy, was no athlete. ‘It’s this coin, you see,’ I said to Paul, ‘this bloody coin, that bothers me.’ I rolled it pensively between my fingers. ‘His good luck piece, he called it – to help him with the book he was writing. He’d never have left it behind.’
‘Maybe he dropped it without knowing.’
I shook my head. ‘No, not where I found it. Someone would have had to place it there deliberately. Besides, he couldn’t have dropped it loose like this. He carried it round in a plastic case, the kind collectors use.’
‘He’d have dropped the whole thing, you mean.’
‘Yes. Of course, the obvious answer is that this isn’t Harry’s coin at all, that it belongs to someone else. But still, it’s solid silver, and terribly old, and you’d have to be mad to put it in … well, to put it where I found it.’
Paul was silent for a minute. Shaking a cigarette loose from his nearly empty packet he lit it with a thoughtful frown. ‘If you’re really worried, you could call the police.’
‘And tell them what? That I’ve found a coin that may or may not be my cousin’s?’ I smiled, knowingly. ‘They’d send me packing for wasting their valuable time.’